The Illusionists.(Ricardo Scofidio)(Brief biography)

If you're going seventy-five miles per hour on the New York State Thruway, and a 1963 vanilla Porsche swings out beside you, cuts across three lanes, and darts into the distance, there is a good chance that the driver is Ricardo Scofidio, the Manhattan-based architect, trying to clear his crowded mind with speed. Such a driver should be catnip for the highway patrol, but Scofidio, who is seventy-two, has honed a politely defiant relationship with authority figures, which helps things go his way. Once, while driving through New Jersey, he spotted a police cruiser in front of a car dealership, and he knew that he'd set off the radar gun. So he swerved into the lot and pulled up next to the startled cop. "You got me," he announced. The policeman gave him a warning and sent him on his way.

In 2002, he took a similar tack with several Swiss building-department officials who were scrutinizing his designs for a temporary structure that was to sit in the middle of Lake Neuchatel. Called the Blur Building, it had no walls and no interior--only a walkway and hundreds of nozzles spewing water vapor into the air, creating an artificial cloud. The regulators insisted that it have a sprinkler system, too. Scofidio flew to Switzerland and patiently demonstrated, with water-flow diagrams, that the building essentially was its own ultra-powerful sprinkler. Rather than argue that a firefighting system wasn't necessary, he pointed out that he'd already provided one. The regulators were appeased. "I figured the only way I could win this was to out-bureaucratize the bureaucrats," he told me.

Scofidio's sideways approach to officialdom meshes well with the more direct manner of his wife and collaborator, Elizabeth Diller, who prefers to overwhelm people with reason. When they are together, Diller becomes the designated explainer, persuader, and theorist. He silently nods, occasionally tries to raise an objection, then sits back with a resigned smile, waiting for his turn to speak.

Diller and Scofidio's relationship began as a form of resistance. He was a professor at Cooper Union, married with four children; she was his most brilliant student. Neither felt committed to architecture. He was thinking about abandoning it, and she worried that it was too commercial a vocation. Nevertheless, design was what they talked about most. Tod Williams, an architect who taught with Scofidio, and who also married his creative partner, Billie Tsien, recalled, "Ric felt invigorated by Liz. In architecture, the collaborations are so intense that having someone you share a deep connection with is incredibly important. Ric's more intuitive, and she's much more intellectual. He thinks a lot about physical things, and she brings a way of talking about life."

In 1979, the year Diller graduated, she and Scofidio moved in together, started working side by side, and, without quite meaning to, founded a studio. (They also married, although they can't remember exactly when.) Charles Renfro, who joined the firm in 2000 and three years later became a partner, said of them, "For years, they refused to tell people they were married. They'd say, 'We're business partners first, life partners second.' "

They don't, at first, seem perfectly matched. Scofidio is a tall, laconic man with a slight stoop and a distracted air. His finger has a tendency to alight on the pewter-colored soul patch on his chin, as if he were surprised to find it there. He sometimes gives the impression that he is looking over people's heads at something amusing on the horizon. We spent many hours together, over several weeks, before I could be sure that he would recognize me the next time we met. Diller has short, tousled hair and a gaze that combines burning concentration with deep fatigue. It sometimes seems as though her entire life had been an extended creative confrontation. Her parents wanted her to become a doctor; when she immersed herself in art instead, they hoped she would at least channel her passions into a reputable profession--like architecture. "My response was totally defiant," Diller recalled. "I wanted to go a hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction." Yet the intellectual rigor of architecture seduced her. It was years before she admitted to her parents that she had, in fact, received a degree in the field. "I never gave them the satisfaction," she said. At fifty-three, she still had a note of triumph in her voice. With her firm, she has turned orneriness into a professional strategy. "We aren't a service organization," Diller recently grumbled to Scofidio, as they went over a client's list of demands. "We're not just there to solve problems. We make problems."

The couple's first freestanding building in the United States is the recently opened Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston. Known informally as the I.C.A., it is the city's first new museum in almost a century, and a sleekly modern reproach to Boston's conventional repertoire of red-brick facades and marble pediments. For one thing, the museum doesn't actually have a facade: its main entrance has been hidden in a corner, and a grand staircase, doubling as outdoor bleachers, has been placed in the back, facing Boston Harbor. The main architectural drama occurs in the air, where the top floor hovers over the edge of the harbor walkway, like a jewel casket held aloft by an unseen hand. As with all rebellious gestures, the I.C.A. derives its meaning from the very conventions it rejects. If nineteenth-century galleries--such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art or Boston's Museum of Fine Arts--invited visitors to elevate themselves by ascending their temple fronts, the I.C.A. dangles its treasures coyly out of reach. It's a come-on, an architectural version of Diller and Scofidio's 1993 Times Square video installation, "Soft Sell," in which a female mouth, viewed in closeup, murmured metaphysical invitations to passersby: "Hey, you, wanna buy a ticket to paradise?"