“Snow White” star Rachel Zegler tests her Disney movie knowledge in this fun trivia game with USA TODAY
“I’d have to say April 25 because it’s not too hot, not too cold. All you need is a light jacket.”
Twenty-five years ago, this now-famous line made moviegoers chuckle as Heather Burns’ character described her “perfect date” during the Miss United States pageant in the 2000 action-comedy “Miss Congeniality.” Now, the line is a part of its own annual meme − “Miss Congeniality Day.”
Never seen the movie or need a refresher? Here’s what to know about Miss Congeniality Day.
Why is April 25 the ‘perfect date’?
In the movie, Miss United State MC Stan Fields (William Shatner) asks Heather Burns’ character, Cheryl Frasier what her idea of a perfect date is.
In response, Burns delivers the famous line: “That’s a tough one. I’d have to say April 25 because it’s not too hot, not too cold. All you need is a light jacket.”
Frasier’s misunderstanding of the question is one of the most iconic lines in the movie.
More entertainment news: What time does ‘Andor’ Season 2 come out? Release date, cast, schedule
Watch the moment
Never seen “Miss Congeniality”? No need to fret. Here’s the line in all of its glory.
What is ‘Miss Congeniality’?
Released in 2000, “Miss Congeniality” is an action-comedy movie starring Sandra Bullock, who plays FBI detective Gracie. Though she lacks refinement and femininity, Gracie is chosen to attend Miss United States to track down a terrorist who has threatened to bomb the pageant. The movie was directed by Donald Petrie, known for movies like “Richie Rich,” “Little Italy” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”
Benjamin Bratt, Michael Caine, Candice Bergen, Ernie Hudson, and John DiResta also make up the movie’s cast.
How to watch ‘Miss Congeniality’
“Miss Congeniality” can be streamed on YouTube, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video.
Contributing: Haadiza Ogwude, Cincinnati Enquirer
Greta Cross is a national trending reporter at USA TODAY. Story idea? Email her at [email protected].
Bill Maher brushes off liberal critics ahead of Trump meeting
Comedian Bill Maher is planning a White House meeting with Donald Trump, facilitated by Kid Rock, despite years of political criticism.
Straight Arrow News
For Bill Maher, Larry David’s hot take on his meeting with President Donald Trump was just plain cold.
During an April 24 interview on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” the comedian and TV host, 69, got candid about his response to David’s satirical essay in The New York Times, which appeared to skewer Maher’s recent meeting with the president at the White House.
The April 21 article is a fictional piece written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed that the Nazi leader was so personable, despite having been a “vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning.”
“This wasn’t my favorite moment of our friendship. I think the minute you play the ‘Hitler’ card, you’ve lost the argument,” Maher told host Piers Morgan.
Maher, a longtime critic of Trump, met with the commander in chief on March 31 and gave a full recap of their encounter during an episode of his talk show, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Maher said that while he maintains his criticisms of the president, Trump defied his expectations with his gracious and measured demeanor.
David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the essay, but the language he used closely mirrored the way the “Real Time” host spoke about his dinner with Trump.
Bill Maher’s monologue on Trump meeting: Read the full transcript
Bill Maher on why Larry David essay was ‘insulting’
In his interview with Morgan, Maher criticized the inappropriateness of David’s Hitler comparison.
“First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews,” Maher said. “Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil. And we’re just going to have to leave it like that.”
He added: “I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”
Larry David skewers Bill Maher with satirical Hitler essay
Maher also shared he hasn’t spoken with David, 77, since the publication of his essay. USA TODAY has reached out to representatives of David for comment.
“I don’t want to make this constantly personal with me and Larry. We might be friends again,” Maher concluded. “I can take a shot, and I also can absolutely take it when people disagree with me. … If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David, too.”
Contributing: Brendan Morrow and KiMi Robinson, USA TODAY
When Mexican musician Natalia Lafourcade turned 40, her alter ego was born.
Lafourcade, now 41, was reflecting on four decades of life and “wanted to have the right things to say to my friends, family and loved ones” at her birthday celebration, she says. “I was trying to think about what I was going to say that night, and I was taking my time to write something, and that week, ‘Cancionera’ came as an inspiration and as a message – I guess to myself, but also to the world.”
“Cancionera,” or songstress, is the title track off her 14-track album of the same name. In the sultry and spiritual song, Lafourcade calls out to the “grounding but also very ethereal” songstress inside her. “Always, always sing your truth/ Be woman, the beautiful muse …” she sings in Spanish.
It “has to do with your liberty and freedom and your own persona, your soul, your mind and the way you’re doing things in life,” Lafourcade says.
Lafourcade, who began songwriting from an early age, launched her first solo album in 2002. In her nearly 20-year career, she has released about a dozen albums, won four Grammys and is the most decorated female artist at the Latin Grammys with 17 wins.
Her follow-up to 2022’s “De Todas las Flores,” which earned her a Grammy award for best Latin rock/alternative album, returns to her haunting, ethereal and Latin folklore sounds, honoring the traditional San Jarocho sounds of her native Veracruz, Mexico.
More: Maná talks new tour and how Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination felt ‘like a dream’
As Lafourcade shares “Cancionera” with the world, she also kicked off the Cancionera Tour − the singer’s biggest North American trek since 2018 − on April 23 in Xalapa, Mexico, followed by several sold out stops in Mexico through May, and more than a dozen U.S. cities.
“I feel like I have two children coming into the world: the album and the tour,” says Lafourcade. “It’s been a dream for me.”
The making of ‘Cancionera’ was ‘really something special’
“Cancionera,” as Lafourcade’s artistic mirror, also brought some levity at a transitional moment in her life. It allowed her to explore the duality of light and shadow, tradition and transgression, and pushed her beyond the conventional.
“The way we created the album allowed me to play a lot with my personality, but also with the alter ego of this character and the different energies that I felt La Cancionera was bringing to the table,” Lafourcade says.
‘This is the path to death’: Anitta reveals why she ditched her ‘nonstop’ work ethic
With this project, the singer-songwriter marks a transformative phase of her career − one that continues to honor the intimacy of her voice and the guitar.
“‘Cancionera’ makes you create,” she says. “She’s very much like, ‘Let’s play, let’s create, and let’s not think too much about it.’ That was the way we were making the music … the energy of creating that way was really something special.”
More: Paquita la del Barrio’s best heartbreak anthems, from ‘Rata De Dos Patas’ to ‘Taco Placero’
Lafourcade brought a team of musicians together, recorded the entire album in one session on analog tape, and mixed it live with the help of producer Adán Jodorowsky, who also worked on “De Todas las Flores.”
“We didn’t know in the moment if it was going to be OK, but it was really great to see how every song was taking its own form and personality,” she says of the process.
Natalia Lafourcade: Music is her master, the stage is her home
At only 4 feet, 11 inches, the stage doesn’t overpower Lafourcade − she takes charge during live performances, becoming a force and giving life to the emotions her lyricism evokes. Lafourcade loves the stage because she gets to lose control, but still trusts that something beautiful will come together, she says.
Whether singing a cappella or accompanied by her guitar to hundreds or thousands of people − at a small venue or an awards show − Lafourcade’s performances feel visceral, intense and intimate all at once.
“For me, the stage feels like my house. I feel very comfortable onstage, it’s not like I get nervous or weird,” says Lafourcade. “It just feels like a safe space to create in a constant collaboration with these energies.”
“You can feel the room being fed with people’s emotions, with the emotions I’m bringing, but also with what my fans bring,” Lafourcade says. “The love that comes with everything creates a very particular energy, and I love to use all that to tell a story.”
‘You deserve safety’: Ángela Aguilar dedicates Billboard Breakthrough Award to immigrants
And a storyteller she is, through and through. Through her music, Lafourcade paints stories of heartbreak, loss, womanhood, grief and the celebration of life.
In “Hasta La Raiz” (“To the Root”), one of her most popular songs, she sings of her Mexican roots and the deep connection she feels to her hometown. In “Muerte” (“Death”), Lafourcade shows gratitude for permanent endings, which in turn teach her the importance of living life to the fullest. She also dedicated “Que Te Vaya Bonito Nicolás” (“I Wish You the Best, Nicolás”) to her late nephew, who died in 2021 after a tragic accident.
“Music is one of my biggest masters and it makes me transform all the time,” she says. “For some reason, many times I feel that when I’m comfortable in a song, music is shaking my face and saying, ‘Move on, go to another place and try something different and do things differently.’”
She continues: “Every single time, music is confronting me in that way and I love that. It makes me realize I have the ability to change as many times as I want. Music really loves when we can move out of a certain path so her energy can move through us.”
For Lafourcade, going on tour and releasing “Cancionera” feels full circle. She’s ready to share with her fans music she’s been working on since she was 15 years old, when she was still finding her footing in this industry.
“I wanted to do this tour in my 40s to begin this decade, and so far, it’s felt like a reconfiguration.”
“There is no such thing as an innocent map,” observes Philippe Rekacewicz in his catalogue essay that accompanies Diagrams, a new exhibition at the Prada Foundation in Venice.
A renowned cartographer, the Paris-born Rekacewicz is well aware of his medium’s capacity to transform narratives for good and ill. His own work includes maps that illustrate the deaths of migrants as they bid for new lives in Europe. “A map,” Rekacewicz continues, “is above all a social and political act — and therefore inherently subjective.”
Curated by international architect Rem Koolhaas and his studio AMO/OMA, the Prada show aims to consider diagrams in all their political complexities. Alongside maps, the exhibition’s myriad items include early 20th-century infographics by African-American sociologist WEB Du Bois highlighting racial inequalities; a 17th-century Chinese woodcut of the human circulatory system; and a 2008 map by AMO/OMA themselves showing the top 10 study destinations for students from China and the US.
If this sounds a perilously broad field, it’s deliberately so. “We weren’t trying to map the whole journey,” explains OMA associate architect Giulio Margheri. “We were looking for patterns.” The show, Margheri says, has been themed around “urgencies” including the body, the built environment, inequality, migration, representation of the world, resources, war, truth and values.
Rather than deliver an omniscient chronological narrative, Margheri says the aim was to “deliver moments and episodes”. These are “made more powerful by the association between each other,” he continues. “It was exciting to see how topics were talking to each other across time.”
For example, in the section devoted to the human body, the Chinese woodcuts are juxtaposed with contemporary images. “The information we have about the body changes,” observes Margheri, adding that in earlier times observation and dissection were the only forms of investigation as opposed, say, to modern-day radiography. But, by and large, the body itself remains unchanged, making the similarities between such images as illuminating as the differences.
Primarily, diagrams are platforms for information. “Some look boring,” admits Margheri. “But the minute you study them, you get another layer of understanding.” This is certainly true of an 1869 print charting Hannibal’s journey from Spain through southern France and across the Alps into Italy by French civil engineer and infographic pioneer Charles Joseph Minard. Consisting of a beige band wobbling through almost featureless white space — save for place names, hair-thin pen strokes delineating rivers, and a few hatched lines signifying the Mediterranean — it reveals nothing at first glance of the Carthaginian general’s death-defying rollercoaster as he, his army and his elephants fought off murderous Gallic tribes and confronted rockslides and precipitous descents. But when considered in the light of those challenges, it becomes gripping.
Minard, who died in 1870, hit his stride in the 19th century, during what Diagrams’ curators describe as the golden age of infographics. His diagram of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia maps the retreat through Poland according to his army’s staggering death toll and the sub-zero temperatures. As the men die, Minard’s graphic beige band narrows, delivering a visual chill to chime with that eastern European weather.
Other pictures are equally revealing for what they conceal. Consider the diagram entitled “Universal Commercial History”, a visual analysis drawn up by the Scottish engineer William Playfair in 1805 which traces the rise and fall of global wealth since 1500 BC against what he terms “Remarkable Events Relative to Commerce”. Playfair, who is said to have invented the pie chart, includes moments such as “Rome founded”, “Mahomet’s Flight”, and “America discovered”. He never mentions slavery.
With such a broad-brush approach, lacunae are inevitable. It is a shame that the work of Viennese social scientist Otto Neurath — who, along with his wife Marie and colleague Gerd Arntz, invented the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) — is not on show. Based on pictograms, Neurath’s Isotypes are an important forerunner to the digital vernacular (from emojis to icons) so familiar to us today. Nor does the exhibition include maps of the devastation of Gaza since October 2023, such as those made by investigative research agency Forensic Architecture, which are proving among the most critical diagrams of our time.
It is important to note OMA’s own connection to the lagoon city. In 2009, it began its redevelopment of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Dating back to the 13th century, though rebuilt in the early 1500s, the spectacular building had served as a public post office until it was acquired by Benetton and transformed into a luxury shopping centre. Later leased to the LVMH group, it became home to the latter’s Hong Kong-based retailer DFS. But late last year, the Fondaco abruptly announced its closure due to €100mn in losses.
The Fondaco’s plush interior, complete with gilded surfaces and red escalators, is a glossy yet troubling fusion of a 21st-century hypercapitalist skin stretched over a centuries-old skeleton. It would have been fascinating to see the diagrams for that renovation.
Yet the dynamics behind the Fondaco’s demise, speaking as it does to glitches within tiny Venice’s paradoxically global marketplace, do tie into one of the most fascinating diagrams in the Prada show.
Entitled “The World Model” (1972), the monochrome flow-style chart connects subjects such as industrial capitalism, mortality, pollution and food production. Published as part of a report entitled TheLimits to Growth for the Club of Rome, it illustrates the unsustainability of unchecked economic and population growth. For that provocative image and many others, this show is surely worth a visit.
May 10-November 24, fondazioneprada.org
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Actor Lar Park Lincoln, best known for her roles in the “Friday the 13th” horror franchise and the soap opera “Knots Landing” has died at the age of 63.
The Dallas-based audition coach and entrepreneur died April 22 after a 45-year career in Hollywood performing and mentoring other actors, Lincoln’s company Actors Audition Studios confirmed on Facebook.
The TV star’s death came after having previously battled breast cancer, according to The Hollywood Reporter, though a cause of death was not confirmed. Her late husband of 14 years, Michael, died in late 2015 after battling cancer, the outlet reported.
Her brothers Jack Jr. and Pat also died before her, as well as her parents Jack and Marjorie Dale, Actors Audition Studios said. A mother of two, Lincoln is survived by her daughter Piper and her son Trevor as well her sister Karen, brother Michael, four grandchildren and countless others.
The family is requesting privacy and is referring all donations be made to either the SAG-AFTRA Foundation or The Entertainment Community Fund.
Lincoln best known for role as Linda Fairgate
Throughout her illustrious in Hollywood, Lincoln performed in various film and television projects.
However, she is arguably most recognized for her reoccurring role as Linda Fairgate in “Knots Landing.” The soap opera aired between 1979 and 1993 and starred Michelle Phillips, Michele Lee, Joan Van Ark, Donna Mills, Ted Shackelford, Kevin Dobson and more.
She is also widely recognized for portraying telekinetic Tina Shepard in 1988’s “Friday the 13th: The New Blood.”
In 2008, she published a memoir titled “Get Started Not Scammed,” where she shared insight across the acting, modeling and pageant industries.
More than a decade later she founded Actors Audition Studios in Dallas, where she offered a unique audition and on-camera training program venturing away from traditional coaching methods, according its website.
Drag performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Jiggly Caliente is stepping away from the stage after suffering a medical ordeal.
The Filipino American TV personality, whose real name is Bianca Castro, was forced to have her right leg amputated following a “severe” infection, Caliente’s family shared in an April 24 statement on her official Instagram page.
“The family of Bianca Castro, known to many as the beloved drag performer Jiggly Caliente, is heartbroken to share that over the last month Bianca has experienced a serious health setback,” the statement read. “Due to a severe infection, she was hospitalized and, as a result, has undergone the loss of most of her right leg.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Caliente’s representatives for comment.
Caliente, 44, is most well known in the RuPaul universe for her appearance on “Drag Race” Season 4, where she came in eighth place. The drag queen, whose stage name takes inspiration from the Pokémon character Jigglypuff, also starred in the sixth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” in 2021.
In recent years, Caliente has lent her drag expertise to the next generation of Filipino queens. She served as a judge on the first three seasons of “Drag Race Philippines,” an international spinoff that showcases drag artists from the Southeast Asian country.
As a result of her leg injury and “extensive” recovery process, Caliente will not be appearing on the show’s next season or participating in public engagements “for the foreseeable future,” Caliente’s family confirmed on Instagram.
“At this time, we kindly ask for privacy for Bianca and her family as they navigate this difficult journey together,” the statement concluded. “While Jiggly concentrates on healing, we invite her friends, fans, and community to uplift her with messages of hope and love on her social media channels.
Bianca’s family and drag house are deeply grateful for the continued outpouring of support, strength, and prayers.”
‘Real power comes from within’: RuPaul Charles opens up about addiction, self-worth
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ alumni show support for Jiggly Caliente
Several members of Caliente’s “Drag Race” family took to the comments section to share their well-wishes for the drag queen, including “RuPaul’s Drag Race” co-host Michelle Visage.
“We love you so much my sweet jiggles and we are praying with all we’ve got,” Visage wrote.
“Jiggly I love you so much,” Bob the Drag Queen wrote. “You always keep it so real. A true diva. Heal up sis.”
The Vivienne: ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’ star’s cause of death revealed
“There’s nothing I can say to ease your pain, your anxiety, your hurt, your sorrow. But I just had to message regardless and say I’m sorry this has happened to you,” Nina Bo’nina Brown wrote. “Hopefully overtime, time will heal your physical and mental wounds.”
Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal discuss father-daughter relationship
“The Last of Us” stars Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal reveal they didn’t enjoy their character’s estrangement in season 2.
Pedro Pascal is calling out J.K. Rowling for her “disgusting” anti-trans viewpoints.
The “Last of Us” star, 50, slammed the “Harry Potter” author, 59, after an Instagram video posted April 17 argued that she was “reveling” in the U.K. Supreme Court’s ruling against trans women.
Pedro commented on the video, writing that the words “awful” and “disgusting” are the “right” way to describe the British author’s views, adding that Rowling engaged in “heinous LOSER behavior.”
USA TODAY reached out to reps for Pascal. Rowling’s rep declined to comment.
J.K. Rowling celebrated UK Supreme Ciyrt ruling with a cigar. Backlash was swift.
The pair are on opposite ends of the global conversation about gender and trans rights: Pascal, the brother of trans actress Lux, is a pro-trans advocate while Rowling has long espoused anti-trans views.
J.K. Rowling courted backlash for cigar picture after U.K. anti-trans ruling
The U.K.’s highest court ruled on April 16 that the definition of a woman under equality legislation referred to “biological sex” and that trans women with gender recognition certificates are not protected from discrimination as a woman under Britain’s Equality Act.
In several posts on X, Rowling celebrated “terfs” and referred to the ruling as “TERF VE Day,” a play on V-E Day, the formal end of World War II and Nazi occupation in Europe. Since 2019, Rowling has been labeled a “terf,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, for her anti-trans beliefs that conflate sex with gender and suggest that changing one’s biological sex threatens her own gender identity.
“I love it when a plan comes together,” Rowling posted to X alongside “#SupremeCourt” and “#WomensRights” while beachside with a drink and a cigar. Rowling reportedly donated £70,000 (about $93,000) to For Women Scotland, the campaign group that argued the case, according to U.K. news outlet The Times.
While the court said trans people would not be disadvantaged by the decision, critics worry it could lead to discrimination, especially regarding employment issues.
Pedro Pascal wore a ‘protect the dolls’ shirt to raise awareness for trans rights
Pascal has become a walking billboard for trans rights, pleasing fans and advocates alike. At the London premiere of his new film “Thunderbolts” on April 22, Pascal wore a white “support the dolls” shirt with black lettering.
The shirt is used to express support for trans women, who are sometimes referred to as dolls. Fashion designer Conner Ives created the shirt and wore it at London Fashion Week in February. He told The New York Times that he woke up the morning after his fashion week show with a flood of emails asking where to buy it.
Pedro Pascal wears ‘protect the dolls’ shirt at ‘Thunderbolts’ red carpet: See photo
According to Ives’ website, proceeds from the sale of the shirt are being donated to Trans Lifeline, a nonprofit that offers support to trans people in crisis. Weeks before Ives debuted the shirt, President Donald Trump announced the federal government would recognize only two sexes, male and female.
In his personal life, Pascal has shown public support for his little sister. In an Esquire interview from 2023, Pascal said his sister has “always been one of the most powerful people and personalities I’ve ever known,” adding that “my protective side is lethal, but I need her more than she needs me.”
Contributing: Brendan Morrow, Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY
Elizabeth Diller’s office is in a corner of a huge, open-plan loft in a former warehouse building in Chelsea. I meet her on a Friday afternoon, when the office is Friday-quiet and the sun is sparkling on the Hudson. The building, which occupies an entire city block, once had freight trains running into it.
It’s a nice reminder that Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio she co-founded with her husband Ricardo Scofidio in 1981 (Charles Renfro became partner in 2004), is best known for the High Line. The transformation of a disused freight rail line into what has become an astonishingly successful elevated linear park radically remade the landscape of Manhattan’s west side a couple of blocks away.
I’m apologetic about conducting the interview now. Only a few weeks before, Scofidio died. Diller’s colleagues had assured me that she was happy to be distracted by talking about her work.
It is tinged with sadness, but this year brings the practice back into the global spotlight. On May 31 the V&A East Storehouse will open on the edge of London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Sited in part of the huge former Olympics Media Centre it is an ingenious reuse of an existing structure and represents a remarkable opening up of the museum’s massive collection. At the Venice Biennale meanwhile there is a bookshop and an installation that makes coffee out of canal water.
We came out of the institutional critique but then we realised that it was people like us who were now running the institutions
All these projects appear closer in intellectual ambition — rethinking institutions, technology and public space — to Diller and Scofidio’s early work than they do to the big architecture their studio has become known for. A classic example of the latter is the Shed, situated a few blocks away from their office — a transformable blockbuster which acts as the cultural component for the Hudson Yards development. Nearby is Pier 57, turned into a massive tech-campus on the water for Google. Just beyond that is their 88-storey 15 Hudson Yards, one of the city’s best recent skyscrapers.
The list continues across the globe, from Los Angeles, where they are working on a new phase of the Broad art museum, to Adelaide, where the Tarrkarri Centre for First Nations Cultures is emerging from Kaurna land. There is also the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Qatar, the first contemporary purpose-built mosque for women in the world. It is a remarkable building with a perforated concrete carpet of a roof floating over it; bright, light, fluid and open.
Yet when Diller and Scofidio broke onto the scene they were known for challenging the orthodoxies of the big builders, the late modernists and the postmodernists. They were doing something more nimble, working in galleries and on paper, in academia and in text. “There was a kind of resistance,” Diller tells me, “that came with the 1970s.” (She still sports the same radical chic almost-quiff and black-framed glasses she did half a century ago.)
“I lived down in the East Village and New York was quite depressed then, post-industrial but pre-anything. It was the time when artists could find huge lofts. The space allowed you to do experimental work, down and dirty and very liberating.”
If she seems the archetypal New Yorker, Diller was actually born in Poland in 1958 and moved with her family to the US in 1960. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Architecture where she met Scofidio — who was one of her tutors. Their first work together, says Diller, was Traffic in 1981. It was a 24-hour installation of thousands of orange traffic cones in the traffic island of Columbus Circle, a striking piece of visual protest about the sheer waste of public space incurred by traffic engineering.
Their first major architectural moment came two decades later and was hardly a building at all. Blur Building, built for the Swiss National Exposition in 2002, was a skeletal structure set on Lake Neuchâtel which was enveloped in a cloud of vapour so that the pavilion vanished.
“Expos were all about showing off technology,” Diller says, “so we made a decidedly lo-fi project, a critique. It was controlled by an early AI system, learning from its own information. We made a space where there was nothing to see.”
It was inspired, Diller tells me, by the writings of French philosopher Hubert Damisch. But it was also fun, something children could enjoy as much as adults. And it was pure experience. The architects resisted the temptation to resurrect it somewhere else — it now exists as a memory.
Their 1989 show at MoMA still haunts the architectural imagination. Para-Site was a sinister installation of cameras and strange mechanisms which surveilled the audience. “It was critical,” she says, “about the way people look at the museum and the way the museum looks at them.” Three decades later they would redesign MoMA itself.
Another piece, Soft Sell (1993), consisted of footage of a vivid red-lipsticked mouth projected on to an abandoned porn theatre in Manhattan. “We were happy,” Diller tells me. “We were the first architects ever to receive a MacArthur grant [in 1999] and that validated that what we were doing was architecture. It was critical, social, political. We were teaching too and the idea of doing professional architecture never really entered my mind.
“We came out of the institutional critique but then we realised that it was people like us who were now running the institutions. We went from cutting up walls to building them. The thing is, now we realise that we really want those institutions. That is what civil society is.”
Diller shows me the practice’s new book, its first monograph. It has a curious format: two books bound together. One part is titled simply “Architecture”, the other “Not Architecture” — split between the buildings and the writings, art and conceptual projects. It’s a labour of love, and the perfect encapsulation of the move from institutional critique to institution building.
Now her practice is building like mad. It has no established single style, looking at each project as a new experience. “If societies and cities change,” Diller asks me, rhetorically, “how does architecture keep up? It’s slow, heavy and expensive. How do you produce architecture that doesn’t default to the generic?”
She points to the Lincoln Center, on which her practice has been working for decades, slowly upgrading the public and performance spaces, as a defining project. But also, more surprisingly, to 9/11. “New York had gone through this trauma but there was something new in the air, a sense of citizenship. With the High Line we felt like architecture could do something for the city.” But the High Line also became a conduit for hyper-gentrification, an accelerator for development on either side, which has ended up looking like a kind of architectural menagerie. Diller rolls her eyes a little, well aware.
In Venice the practice will be involved on three separate sites. With the V&A it will explore the architecture of storage, in an installation that will focus on the storage life of a toothbrush as a way of exploring global supply chains, containerisation, warehousing and retail practice.
The firm will also be designing a new temporary bookshop of the Biennale, a delicate, temporary tensile structure and another intervention, an intriguing-sounding installation which will filter and transform Venice canal water into espresso. “I’ll be drinking the first cup,” she shoots before I can ask any more questions.
