Three's a crowd: drawing, building and photography in the recent work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro

This is a short tale of two competing institutions and two of their most celebrated figures. On one side is Cooper Union – that hulking Manhattan brownstone, an island on the intersection of Lafayette Street and the Bowery where Ricardo Scofidio (1935) silently honed his art of drawing like an angel. On the other is Princeton University, where his partner (and partner), Elizabeth Diller (1954) is often resident. Princeton sits in the heart of the New Jersey woods, literally and metaphorically, and despite its baronial coniferous presence, is most notable in architectural circles for its rhetorical rather than physical manufacture. Diller + Scofidio's is a marriage whose vicissitudes are etched all over their work.