A sassy songbird, with the delightful handle The Portiere, writes in today to move the Miseducatorium ball down the field. And down we will follow it. TP brings our attention to a savaging of Diller + Scofidio's 2003 Whitney show that ran in the Village Voice. Long a Gutter favorite—even in those dark days before there was a Gutter. Revel again in the awesomeness of it all:

Diller and Scofidio aren't especially bad architects in a jazzy, pseudo-intellectual, quasi-Rem Koolhaas kind of way. The winners of a MacArthur Award, they've built two buildings. One, a so-so housing project, is in Japan. The other, the Blur Building, a media pavilion fabricated for Swiss Expo 2002, is less a building than a fun house. Its main feature is that it sprays mists of water on visitors. Their plans for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art look OK, and their model for Eyebeam's new Chelsea site resembles an azure escalator and ought to be quite the tourist attraction (if it's ever built). Their best project is their Philippe Stark-meets-'60s-airport-lounge re-design of the Brasserie restaurant, which suggests their true calling may be interior decoration.

All this is fine by me. D + S spice things up and toss in brainy bits of theory. Architecture and design critics eat it up, as do wealthy clients. Things could be worse. What couldn't, and what's particularly annoying about Elizabeth Diller, who is 48, and the former student of her now husband, Ricardo Scofidio, 67, is their imitation art. Start with the inflated exhibition title. Notice the pretentious absence of capital letters and the chic plus sign between the two lowercase names (diller plus scofidio equals what? Fluff?), the fatuous all-capitalized "SCANNING," and the presumptuous use of the word "aberrant" to describe work that is remarkably run-of-the-mill.

And it only gets better from there. Like this post. Our tipster also notes, damningly, that the firm's project at San Francisco's Moscone Center—a roving video screen—bears an uncanny resemblance to certain works by the heretofore-unknown-to-The-Gutter artist Jeff Shaw, as even a cursory review of work on his site will confirm. Oh, the sorrow. Oh, the pity.

· Gutter Mailbag: Lick the Alphabet Edition [The Gutter]
· Gutterland Police Blotter: Wait a Minnaert! [The Gutter]
· Gutterland Police Blotter: The Miseducatorium of Elizabeth Diller [The Gutter]

Posted in Our Fallen World