Two things came to mind when I saw the new 195,000-square-foot home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, in a historic warehouse building. First, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), despite its success with ground-up commissions like The Broad in downtown Los Angeles, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center in Manhattan, and the Hamptons house known as Blue Dream, may be at its most creative when repurposing existing structures. Examples include the High Line, the V&A East Storehouse, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In each case, DS+R’s architects—backstopped by the irreplaceable Ricardo Scofidio—went out of their way to make visible the most distinctive aspects of the original building, even when doing so made their job as renovators harder. DS+R would rather celebrate a problem than conceal it.
Source: Diller Scofidio + Renfro opens new home for architecture at MIT