Thus, in early projects like The withDrawing Room (1987),
The concern with the internal, autonomous working of architecture is not abandoned so much as folded into various discourses of context and exteriority, recalibrated according to what is sayable or thinkable in the ideolects of psychoanalysis, feminism, and other theoretical systems that seek to analyze the hidden structures of domestic life. Specific architectural forms, techniques, and operations, previously presumed to be purely self-reflexive, are now valued not for themselves, but rather for their ability to scan the domestic system they had tried to detach themselves from, map its ideological functions, and produce concepts whose ultimate horizon of effect lies outside of architecture “proper," in a more general sociocultural field. At this point in their work, then, "scanning" meant disclosing the extrinsic, ideological structures that contaminate and complicate the intrinsic, supposedly pure forms and techniques of architecture. (130)
A work that "disables, divides, and bisects" the walls and furniture of a century-old wood-frame house in San Francisco in order to expose “the home's’ organizational strategies: property rights, rules of etiquette, the marriage contract, and the public codes of a private residence,"22 The withDrawing Room exemplifies Diller + Scofidio's constructive deployment of formalist procedures developed by Hejduk, Eisenman, and others as techniques specifically designed to address the problem of architecture's constitutive and constraining interiority. In Diller + Scofidio's hands, these formal techniques become instruments for a fundamental recontextualization of architecture in terms of the larger social codes and conventions—here (and often in the early work) conventions of domesticity-that inform the concrete embodiment of the architectural sign.
If this first phase of activity yielded a loosening of the scope of architectural embodiment, Diller + Scofidio's more recent work moves ever farther from the orthographic-geometric architectural apparatus of the 70s formalists. Indeed, beginning with their 1991 (unrealized) project Slow House, Diller + Scofidio have dedicated themselves to a more abstract recontextualization of architecture in terms of the sensory registers correlated with architectural embodiment. By deploying a strategy of direct defunctionalization of vision that has evolved from splitting to blurring, Diller + Scofidio now seek to interrupt the circuit connecting architectural interiority with the “nobility of vision"(to return to Jonas’ term) and thus to effectuate an expansion, indeed an inversion, of that interiority by way of a shift in sensory registers from the visual to the proprioceptive, the aural, and the tactile. Accordingly, whereas the work of the 80s aimed to lay bare the “objective" conditions for the real experience of architecture, the work of the '90s aims to expose the “subjective"—or better, the “protosubjective"—conditions for the real experience of space.
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