Ricardo Scofidio, architect behind New York City's High Line park, dies at 89

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NEW YORK (AP) — Ricardo Scofidio, an architect who transformed an abandoned railway into New York City's popular High Line park and was among the first in his profession to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” has died. He was 89 and had worked on museums, college buildings and other projects around the world.

Scofidio died in New York Thursday with his wife and architecture partner, Elizabeth Diller, by his side, said their firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Named, along with Diller, as among Time magazine's “100 Most Influential People” in 2009, Scofidio strove “to make space on his own terms,” the firm said.

Known for bringing an avant-garde art sensibility to architecture, the firm has created adventurous designs in prominent places, from The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles to a massive artificial cloud above a Swiss lake for a 2002 art expo.

“One of the things that is important to us is taking that leap of faith and believing in yourself that you are going to get there,” Scofidio told interviewer Charlie Rose in 2009.

Other projects either built or underway include a park in Moscow, a film and movie museum in Rio de Janeiro; a health-sciences building at the University of Sydney; a subsidized apartment complex near Nagoya, Japan; an oceanfront mansion on New York's Long Island; and a redesign of New York City’s Lincoln Center performing arts-complex.

But Scofidio is perhaps best known for leading the design of the High Line, the park in a former elevated cargo rail track on Manhattan's far West Side.

For decades, it was a rusting, off-limits curiosity — and to some, an eyesore — in a faded warehouse district. The tracks were overgrown with a ribbon of weeds and wildflowers that few New Yorkers got to see, but were compelling to some who did.

After the city decided to turn the old railway into a park, Scofidio and his partners made a point of preserving a sense of surprise and naturalness, crafting walkways interspersed with greenery rather than a simpler, manicured path.

“We wanted to hold on to the magic of this landscape,” Scofidio told The Associated Press in 2008. “There is that edge of vulnerability between this society that we have perfected and these small blades of grass that are able to split open sidewalks and grow in the cracks.”

The first section of the High Line opened in 2009, helping catalyze a development and tourist boom in its neighborhood.

Born in New York to a jazz musician father and a mother who also played music, Scofidio initially gravitated toward music but later turned to art and then architecture, he told The New Yorker in 2007.

He and Diller, who had been one of his students at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, became a personal and professional pair in 1979. Charles Renfro was named a third partner in their studio a quarter-century later.

Diller and Scofidio, who went by Ric, won a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1999. They were the first architects so recognized, though New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable had won the honor previously.

Just last month, Scofidio was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a prestigious honor society for luminaries in architecture, art, literature and music.