The 2024 Eleanore Pettersen Lecture will feature Cooper Union alumna Elizabeth Diller, who is a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print. She will speak about a variety of DS+R projects.

Diller and co-founding partner, Ric Scofidio, who is also a Cooper alumnus, have been distinguished with Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship awarded in the field of architecture. Their work explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.

DS+R have also worked with global cultural institutions to expand access to the arts including the renovation and expansion of MoMA, which brings the museum’s vast collection closer to the public, and the multi-arts institution, The Shed. The studio has also researched, curated and designed a number of interactive installations covering a wide range of subjects, including: the Costume Institute’s Charles James: Beyond Fashion and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and The Catholic Imagination, which have recorded two of the highest attendances for any exhibition in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; The Art of Scent, a sensory exhibition on the olfactory arts at the Museum of Arts and Design; and Exit, an immersive data-driven installation investigating global human migration patterns.