Elizabeth Diller, also known as Liz Diller,^[1] is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979.^[2] She is also an architecture professor at Princeton University.^[3]

Life

Elizabeth Diller was born in 1958 in Łódź, Poland, to Jewish parents. The family emigrated to the United States in 1960 when she was two years old.^[4]

Diller earned her B.Arch in 1979 from the Cooper Union School of Architecture.^[1] She met Ricardo Scofidio during her studies; he was her teacher then her tutor. After earning her degree and working as an assistant professor, they later married in the 1980s. Since the 2000s, she has become well-known for her work with conceptual architecture, museums and other cultural institutions.^[4][5]

Awards and honors

Diller is considered among the most influential designers of cultural spaces^[6] and in 1999 received the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship in architecture.^[7] In 2002, Diller designed the Blur Building for the Swiss Expo with this money.^[8]

In 2000 she was awarded the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant Design.^[9]

The studio that Diller co-founded was awarded WSJ. magazine's 2017 Architecture Innovator of the Year Award. It also received the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award.^[10]

In 2018 she was named to the Time magazine most-influential list for the second time, and was the only architect on that list.^[11][3]

In 2019, Diller became the winner of the Jane Drew Prize, and the eighth winner of the annual Women in Architecture award. She was also awarded the Second Royal Academy Architecture Prize.^{[12][13][14][15]}

In 2022 she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts in the category "Architecture".^[16]

Works

• According to Architectural Digest, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, since 2002, have created many projects including the Blur in Switzerland; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the High Line on the west side of Manhattan; a series of renovations to New York City's Museum of Modern Art;^[17] The Shed in New York City's Hudson Yards;^[18] a series of renovations to Lincoln Center; a film museum in Berkeley, California; buildings at Brown University and Stanford University; and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.^[4]
• They have been continuously working on several projects: Vagelos Center at Columbia Medical School; a new business-school building for Columbia University; the London Centre for Music at the Barbican;^[19] and a cinema museum in Rio de Janeiro.^[4]
• She has written books including: Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account in 2012, and has been interviewed in other works such as Bodybuilding: Architecture and Performance in 2019.