Elizabeth Diller’s TED Talks

John Hill

22. February 2021

Zaryadye Park in Moscow by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. (Photo: Iwan Baan)

"A stealthy reimagining of urban public space" is the new TED Talk by architect Elizabeth Diller, partner at New York's Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The ten-minute video, which discusses a few projects in New York and Moscow, is Diller's third TED Talk since 2007.

The new talk eschews the familiar TED Talk audience format for a socially distant talk recorded in the office of DS+R last year. Appropriately, given the coronavirus pandemic, Diller focuses on public space, primarily the High Line in Manhattan and Zaryadye Park in Moscow. The former, the firm's most popular project, had such an immense impact on its immediate neighborhood, that Diller asks: "What is the responsibility of the architect in shaping the aftermath of urban change that they've unwittingly produced?" Her response was The Mile-Long Opera: a biography of 7 o'clock, a performance staged on the High Line in October 2018.

The video of Diller's latest talk is below, followed by her March 2012 Ted Talk, "A new museum wing ... in a giant bubble," on the firm's unexecuted transformation of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and her first talk, recorded in December 2007, "The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture."