Elizabeth Diller


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

Life

Elizabeth Diller was born in 1954 in Łódź, Poland, to Jewish parents. The family emigrated to the United States when in 1960 when she was six years old.
Diller earned her B.Arch in 1979 from the Cooper Union School of Architecture. She met Ricardo Scofidio during her studies; he was her teacher then her tutor. After earning her degree, 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.

Awards and Honors

Diller is considered among the most influential designers of cultural spaces and in 1999 received the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship in architecture. In 2002, Diller designed the Blur Building for the Swiss Expo with this money.
In 2000 she was awarded the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant Design.
The studio that Diller co-founded was awarded the Wall Street Journal Magazine's 2017 Architecture Innovator of the Year Award. It also received the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award.
In 2018 she was named to the Time Magazine most-influential list for the second time, and was the only architect on that list.
In 2019, Diller became the winner of the Jane Drew Prize, and the eighth winner of the annual Women in Architecture award.

Works