In the decades since New York City-based designers Elizbeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio founded their interdisciplinary practice in 1979, the husband-and-wife team has developed an approach that blurs the boundaries between architecture and the visual and performing arts.

In the late 1990s, Diller + Scofidio became increasingly interested in the voyeuristic capabilities of computer technology, a phenomenon they call the "rhetoric of surveillance." The collaborative has explored such themes in Soft Sell, a Times Square video installation in which a pair of lips offers a series of come-ons, and in Facsimile, a giant roving video screen affixed to a façade of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Diller + Scofidio's conceptual explorations have not precluded a desire to design buildings; in recent years, the firm (which became Diller Scofidio + Renfro in 2005) has engaged in several large urban building projects, including the design of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the renovation of Lincoln Center in New York City, and the revitalization of the High Line, an elevated linear park along Manhattan's Westside.