Diller and Scofidio

http://www.dsrny.com/
Matrix style website, got me rather excited!  But actually when you come to use it, its a bit annoying, I think its trying to be too clever and automatic, if you move your mouse to click on the thing you want, it just sends you off somewhere else.  Goes to show, the pretty, shiny things aren't always the most useful.

The first project on this website that caught my eye was 'The Blur Building'.  ''The Blur Building was built for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. It is an architecture of atmosphere...A smart weather system reads the shifting climactic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and processes the data in a central computer that regulates water pressure.''  


Please see my 'Seriously Un Cool - Blue Building' page for my thought on this.

''Their influence stems as much, if not more, from their contributions to the theory and criticism of architecture as from their built works.''  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diller_Scofidio_%2B_Renfro

As I worked my way through the website the more I realised that they were focusing heavily on promoting buildings that haven't been built and I could help thinking that a lot of them were just concepts for a reason i.e. they wouldn't work in the real world.  For example, re-building the city of  Venice in Las Vegas; a bit tacky if you ask me.  Whenever I flick through an architecture or interior design firms catalogue of work, I am always disappointed to see buildings that are conceptual and haven't been built, as there is usually a reason for this, either that the building didn't win the competition it was going for, or the firm doesn't have enough in its portfolio, so they use the scheme as a filler.

I also thought that a lot of the work was quite tacky and badly illustrated.  Some of the CGI work looks to me like first year undergrad work.  Not to put down first year work, some of work I have seen is amazing.  The point I am trying to make is that I think that a large scale firm should realise that there is a heavy reliance on good CGIs (many schemes require them for planning), they have to be good, especially if they are used to advertise the business.