The new Dia Foundation, designed by Roger Duffy of SOM, incorporates a new building between Dia's existing headquarters and the Pace building it owns next door.

Clad in the same redbrick, the three structures, seen here at night, are meant to look unified while also expressing their unique character and history.

"Not to be critical of others, but a focus on art and a way to display art are hard things to find in the world," Roger Duffy said during a recent tour of the Dia Foundation's three buildings on West 22nd Street. "When I meet many artists, I ask them what their favorite museums are, and there aren’t many. There’s a lot of investment going on, but not much else."

It is Mr. Duffy's job to ensure Dia does not waste its investment on West 22nd Street (again), and his goal is to create a space for displaying art in Dia's three buildings there, and little else. "How could you create a vessel that displays the art, really foregrounds the art?" Mr. Duffy said of his mission.

A principal at SOM, Mr. Duffy is well suited to this task, and not least because he has befriended many of the artists who have shown at Dia and incorporated their work into his. That sort of collaboration will be instrumental in the success of Dia’s new Manhattan home. But it is also Mr. Duffy’s commitment to creating unique spaces, driven by the site and the client’s wishes, rather than preconceived notions or a signature style. “We don’t do standalone objects,” Mr. Duffy said.

Philippe Vergne, Dia’s director, values this approach, and he said he struggled to find it anywhere else among the hundred or so architects he interviewed for the job. “We never talk about design, we talk about solutions, massing, volumes,” he said. “It’s all very abstract, very conceptual. He puts the experience above all else. Best of all, it’s a collective effort. He listens more than he talks.”

The Dia project is still in its infancy, even if it is three years old—Mr. Vergne first announced plans for Dia’s triumphant return to 22nd Street just a year after Lehman collapsed. Since then, he said he has been putting Dia’s finances together and assembling his site. Last June, the foundation purchased the old Amato Marble Works, a simple redbrick box located between Dia’s headquarters at 535 West 22nd Street and the Pace space it owns next door, for $11.5 million.

The plan is now to connect the three plots into a cohesive whole, a project Mr. Vergne insists will become a reality. “It is not lost on me that an announcement was made three years ago, and two years ago,” Mr. Vergne said, “but the whole time we have been working on putting together the pieces, the land, getting our finances in order, finding our architect. And there is also the recession going on at the same time.”

“I made the announcement, so I am fully confident this will happen,” he added, though he would not give a budget for the project. “That is still being formulated.”

So too is the design, though an outline is beginning to emerge. Among the ideas Mr. Vergne and Mr. Duffy have cultivated is that they want this to be an institution that fits in with the neighborhood and yet stands apart from it at the same time as a distinctive place for art. “We want something that is different from Chelsea, which is very formulaic and strict, these massive white spaces,” Mr. Duffy said. “They’re investing in the art of architecture, but I’m not sure they’re foregrounding the art. They’re interesting buildings, but what’s the priority?”

Mr. Duffy’s priority is creating “a procession” through the art. The Marble Building will be replaced with a new three-story structure connecting to the Pace building, which previously served as a gallery for Dia until it sold its building across the street in 2004, and the five-story headquarters buildings. The ground floor of each building will contain a gallery, each with its own feel. Even the new building will be designed to retain the bones of its predecessor, the marble works. “The Pace building is wood, the marble works is steel, and 535 is concrete,” Mr. Duffy explained. “They all have their essential character, and we’re looking to retrain that character as much as possible while creating a unified space.”

This unity will be visible on the outside, where the three buildings will be faced in the same redbrick, but given their varying sizes and compositions, the uniqueness of the pieces will still stand out from the unification of the whole. The second story of the headquarters building will likely contain gallery space while the one in the new building will have a combination of flex space, for installations or performances, as well as a mezzanine with a library. A large wrap-around window will suffuse the rooms with natural light.

There will be another gallery above that, on the third floor, while the third floor of the headquarters building will continue to serve as the Dia Foundation's administration offices. The floors above that could continue to provide space for outside galleries and local businesses, as they do now, or provide some other use.

A major challenge within this project is that it is meant to serve living artists, working on projects lasting up to a year. “Beacon is for the collection, the history of Dia, and Chelsea will be for the living artists, the new work,” Mr. Vergne said.

“How do you design for the unknown?” Mr. Duffy said.. “That is what we are trying to figure out.” A big part of that will be creating as many varied and flexible spaces as possible within the separate structures of the three buildings. Other possible design solutions to accommodate a multiplicity of exhibitions are still being explored.

And yet Dia will not totally reject its past. Favorites like Dan Graham’s old Rooftop Urban Park, which was once housed on the roof of the former space across the streett 548 West 22nd Street, will now be installed on the roof of the new building, beside an outdoor cafe. Mr. Duffy enthused about the views from there, which cleared the neighboring buildings and Chelsea Piers, offering clear sight lines to the Hudson.

"The Whitney, the High Line, the galleries—why not be a part of this community?" Mr. Vergne said.

This is not only a return for Dia to New York, but also to an earlier incarnation, when it was taking old buildings and transforming them with art. For Mr. Duffy, who had a near-messianic experience at the old Dia space the first time he visited in 1988, it is a welcome return.

"It’ll be great to have Dia back," Mr. Duffy said. "For me, it’s all about the artistic experience and we’re simply a vehicle for doing that."

Mr. Duffy outside the future home of a Dia art center on West 22nd Street. (Matt Chaban)

When he was 11, Roger Duffy had his first encounter with art. It was 1966 and he was thumbing through one of those big Time-Life picture books about America at his home in Oakmont, a town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh famous for its golf course of the same name. He came across a picture of a drawing by Diego Rivera hanging in the guest room at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s wooded retreat 60 miles away. Mr. Duffy asked his father what it was, and Duffy père responded laconically, “It’s art.”

Even today, as one of the most canny combiners of art and architecture, Mr. Duffy, in his reserved way, said he saw no great significance in this awakening. He had come to realize the power of a piece of art, as well as that of its surroundings, even though he did not know it at the time. “I thought of art as magic, and I still do,” he said. “But the two of them together, in that moment, I never really thought of that, now that you mention it. I was just focused on the picture in the picture.”

It would take a few decades for his appreciation of art to develop, and years more for him to incorporate it into his work as a partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, but his focus never really wavered. “He may not have known it, but I think this sensitive genius was always there inside him, just waiting to come out,” said Robert Whitman, the renowned multimedia artist and friend and collaborator of Mr. Duffy.

Were it not for Mr. Duffy, there is almost no chance Skidmore, Owings & Merrill would find itself in Chelsea, stitching together a row of old industrial buildings on West 22nd Street into the new Manhattan outpost of the Dia Art Foundation. Easily the most famous skyscraper architects in the world (Lever House, Sears Tower, Burj Khalifa), SOM is not exactly known for its quixotic art projects. But with Mr. Duffy, who has spent the past three decades befriending and subsequently employing nearly every artist to have ever shown at Dia, it is impossible to imagine anyone else undertaking this project.

Slideshow: A Dozen Duffy Designs >>

Mr. Duffy stands out in a firm of more than 1,000 architects, despite his quiet demeanor and monkish aspect. He is just as comfortable talking about phenomenology as he is zoning envelopes and interior finishes, and it is an experiential bent that he labors to incorporate into his work. “He is incredibly zen,” said Dia director Phillipe Vergne. He has an impressive recall of the art shows he has seen, particularly those at Dia, every single one of which he seems to remember.

The first date he and his wife of 23 years ever went on was the 1989 Robert Ryman show at the foundation’s old space at 548 West 22nd Street, which was sold off last decade amid Dia’s money troubles. It is a building Mr. Duffy speaks about with the same reverence most architects save for LeCorbusier’s Ronchamp or Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

Akin to the artists he admires, Mr. Duffy has rejected the formalism of his peers and forebearers, an unusual move for someone who works at a firm where the vernacular, varied and considerable as it may be, is still clean glass boxes.

Instead, he invests himself in the mission of his clients, the sites they have selected and, as he puts it, “their aspirations.” He has also developed an unusual way of looking at his projects, in part by using others to help him look at them. “I think these artists in particular spend a lot of time thinking about perception, be it visual perception or aural perception or other things, and they were delving into the fact that most of our thinking is done by the unconscious side of our brains,” he said. “They can bring something to the work that no one else can.”

David Childs, SOM’s long-time director, said he has rarely seen such a commitment to collaboration.

“A lot of architects draw a line around what they do, and maybe everyone else can hang some art on the wall, or a light fixture,” Mr. Childs said. “Roger has always been interested in bringing in groups of people with different perspectives than he has, different ways of thinking, and really letting them help drive the design process.”

An early conceptual design for the future Dia, joining two existing buildings with a new one in between. (Dia)

Growing up in Oakmont, Mr. Duffy said his was an intelligent home, if not an intellectual one—Time-Life territory. His father sold vinyl siding “in the coal towns of Western P.A.,” though he eventually became mayor and a state assemblyman. His mother was a court minute clerk at the county courthouse, “the person who swears you in before you testify.”

His first real brush with architecture came during his senior year in high school, when he would go to retrieve his sister each weekend from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was in her freshman year. Two women across the hall would let Mr. Duffy wait in their room from time to time. “They were both architecture students, and they were always sketching, which looked like fun, so I figured why not,” he said of his decision to study the subject when he started at CMU the following year.

When he graduated in 1979, the country was in recession, but Pittsburgh was especially bad off following the collapse of the steel industry. “There was absolutely no work, so I headed toward the nearest town, which was Washington,” Mr. Duffy said. He had read about SOM’s work and was impressed enough that it was the only place he applied. After a week of showing up at Mr. Childs’ door, Mr. Duffy’s eventual mentor relented and found him a job as a junior designer. He recalls being struck by Mr. Duffy’s desire to train first in the technical department.

When Mr. Childs moved to New York in 1985 to run the firm, he brought Mr. Duffy and a handful of other architects with him. It was there that Mr. Duffy had his artistic epiphany, on that date with his wife. Until then, he had not given art much thought, but he remembers being dumbstruck by
Ryman’s work, as well as the little things, like Dan Flavin’s transformation of the stairwell with a fluorescent light piece from 1966. “It was so special, and really made me realize the potential of space,” he said. “I wanted to do something like that with my work.”

It wasn’t until he was named a partner, in 1997, that he began to experiment with incorporating artists into his creative process. “I had a responsibility to do something special,” he said. “And why the hell not?”

Mr. Duffy's Greenwich Academy, designed with James Turrell. (SOM)

In seeking to expand his palette beyond the typical boundaries of architecture, Mr. Duffy has often collaborated with the minimalist artists he has gotten to know—even using commissions as an excuse to get closer to his idols. His first realized project as a principal was a lobby renovation at 350 Madison Avenue, completed in 2002. He tried to convince the late artist Fred Sandback, who drew in space using lengths of colored yarn, to work with him. Ultimately, Sandback, who died in 2003, turned the project down.

Not all artists feared being involved in commercial work, but not all of Mr. Duffy’s projects were so commercial, either. Next came a long-running partnership with James Turrell, famous for his sky-spaces, on a trio of private schools. The first, only now being built, was in Kuwait. Then came a new upper school for Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Conn., completed in 2004. The pair created a long glass structure, with a greenroof on top, set into the hillside of the bucolic campus. Mr. Turrell crafted a dramatic entrance of prismatic lights.

Three years after that was an even more ambitious project: a new science building for the Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Mass. Mr. Duffy sought out astronomers, geologists and other scientists to join Mr. Turrell, the artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Dia’s former director Michael Govan in helping him conceive the design. What they came up with was a series of curving, curling brick walls. Inside, different installations track the movement of the sun and the strata of the earth beneath the school.

These days, Mr. Duffy is finishing a collaboration with conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner for an art and design-focused high school on East 57th Street that is set to open in the fall. Another one is being planned in Elizabeth, N.J., and he is working with a number of artists on a new building for the New School at the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue.

“What good is just sticking a picture on the wall at the end?” Mr. Duffy said of his intense commitment to artistic collaboration.

He has designed his share of conventional projects, among them a cafeteria for Condé Nast (no, not that Condé cafeteria, but another at 750 Third Avenue for the Fairchild division), the Skyscraper Museum in a Battery Park City storefront and the Toren condo tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Still, all involve unusual collaborations, if not with artists. A fashion designer is helping with a new airport terminal in Mumbai.

It was through his work with the Dia artists that Mr. Duffy first got involved with the foundation. Michael Govan knew him from the shows he frequented, but it was after some difficulties in finishing the foundation’s building in Beacon, in 2003, that one of the artists suggested SOM, and specifically Mr. Duffy, could help. Another friendship was born.

Mr. Vergne recalled interviewing upwards of a hundred architects for the job, but in conversations, people kept telling him to seek out Mr. Duffy. “When I met Roger, he took me completely off guard,” Mr. Vergne said. “He gave me none of the answers I was used to from architects.”

The artists are equally excited. “In the words of a friend of mine, when they heard about Roger getting the job, they said, ‘Thank god they didn’t pick a starchitect,” Mr. Whitman said. “I call them ego-architects. All they do is get in the way. But not Roger. All he cares about is the art.”

Slideshow: A Dozen Duffy Designs >>

mchaban@observer.com | @MC_NYC

Walter De Maria, "The New York Earth Room," 1977. (Photo: John Cliett. Copyright Dia Art Foundation)

The New York Earth Room, the long-running installation in a SoHo loft by artist Walter De Maria cared for by the Dia Art Foundation, will be closing for its annual summer break on June 10—that's tomorrow.

The installation, which is composed of 250 cubic yards of earth, takes up 3,600 square feet of floor space and weighs 280,000 pounds, opened to the public in its current home on Wooster Street in Soho in 1980, the third version of Mr. De Maria's work. The first opened in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and the second in 1974 at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. The first two no longer exist.

What happens to the earth when the doors close? Not much beyond its normal care to make sure the work can live on, the oversight of which is handled by Bill Dilworth, The New York Earth Room's longtime caretaker. "They turn the earth and till it," said Melissa Parsoff, director of communications at Dia. It's also known to get pretty humid in there since there's no air-conditioning so consider yourself saved from untold bad hair days this summer.

Nonetheless, if you plan on checking it out tomorrow, The New York Earth Room will be open from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. (though it closes for a staff break from 3 to 3:30 p.m.). If you miss out, no worries. It opens again on Sept. 12.

Philippe Vergne. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

After years of speculations about its plans to establish a new museum space in Chelsea, the Dia Art Foundation revealed some of what it has in the works to Carol Vogel at The New York Times.

According to Ms. Vogel, the nonprofit institution, which focuses on Minimal, Post-Minimal and Conceptual artists, and their artistic progeny, plans to build a 22,000-square-foot building on West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.  (Until 2004, Dia ran galleries in Chelsea. Its location at 548th West 22nd Street, which it later sold, has become a popular space for art fairs like the Independent and the inaugural NADA New York.)

Here's the paper's description of the proposed project, which is being designed by Roger Duffy, who is a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and will include about 15,000 square feet of gallery space and about 3,600 square feet of rooftop space for showing art:

Plans call for creating a single building with a masonry-and-glass facade along the north side of West 22nd Street. It will consist of the one-story structure at what is now No. 545; a three-story building that will be erected on the site of the marble works at No. 541 [which Dia recently acquired], and the ground floor of No. 535. (The other five floors of that building will be used for administrative offices or leased to commercial galleries.)

Dia Foundation Director Philippe Vergne declined to tell the paper the budget for the building, or the amount of money that has been raised toward its construction. What's the timetable? Here's Ms. Vogel: "Construction is expected to start in the spring of 2014, and if all goes as planned, the building will open in late 2016 or early 2017."

By 2017, 13 years will have elapsed since Dia closed its original Chelsea spaces.

At Dia’s annual benefit lunch up in Beacon, N.Y., Mr. Weiner took the stage to speak about his late friend, the car-parts sculptor John Chamberlain, who was being honored. “Art is made because you aren’t satisfied with the configuration of things in front of you, so you try out a different configuration.” Eloquence is rare at museum benefits!

A few days later, Mr. Brant, who has helped the Whitney with key acquisitions, accepted one of three of the museum’s annual American Art awards during a dinner in the Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea. He looked characteristically suave, but was unexpectedly soft-spoken and humble, and he said the award filled him with “great emotion that I can’t express.” He thanked his mother and father for showing him that “the world had more things to offer than war and sports,” he thanked his friends, and then he thanked his wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, for reminding him “art and beauty are a form of everything we do.” Finally, in a curiously earnest moment one doesn’t often see at these things, he told her, and the whole room, that he loved her.

Artist Talk: "Kara Walker on Andy Warhol," at Dia Art Foundation
As part of its "Artists on Artists" series, the Dia Art Foundation invites Kara Walker to speak on the subject of Andy Warhol. Ms. Walker is known for her frank and often disturbing silhouettes that explore power dynamics along lines of race, gender and sexuality. Ms. Walker's major survey exhibition, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," which Dia director Philippe Vergne helped curate, premiered at the the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in February 2007, after which it was presented at the Whitney and many museums worldwide. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Dia Art Foundation, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor, New York, 6:30 p.m., $6

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28

Opening: Yang Fudong, at Marian Goodman Gallery
For his third exhibition with Marian Goodman, Yang Fudong will present three new works that explore the artist's themes of historical fantasies, theatricality and the conflation of fiction and reality. --Michael H. Miller
Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Screening: Dirty Looks at Judson Memorial Church
Camp may be dead, but we're not getting over it anytime soon. Dirty Looks, a monthly screening series of queer experimental film and video, will be showing early work by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto on Wednesday in the Judson Memorial Church. The California-based brothers' colorful videos from the 1980s play with soap opera, melodrama and advertising to examine the manipulative style of pop TV.
Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, 8:30-10:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 29

Opening: Nari Ward, "Liberty and Orders," at Lehmann Maupin
Aiming to "cover" himself, artist Nari Ward undertook the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Now, in his second solo show at Lehmann Maupin, the artist explores the issues of law and authority that were raised during his naturalization. Some of his works seek to imbue documents with emotional resonance, like Casings, which transforms an NYPD stop-and-frisk report to relate it more directly to the body. —R.J.
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Panel: "Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art," at CUNY's James Gallery
Times critic Ken Johnson--who just wrote a book about psychedelics and art, titled Are You Experienced?--joins the painter Carroll Dunham (a reliable mind-bender) and anthropologist and historian of science Nicolas Langlitz in conversation on "the enduring influence that the use of hallucinogens and the psychedelic experience has had on American culture." Miciah Hussey, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, moderates. (Mr. Dunham's 2010–11 painting Bathers 4 (posture) is pictured.) --Andrew Russeth
The James Gallery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, 6:30 p.m.

Opening: Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith "Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows," at Team Gallery
This collaborative exhibition consists of footage from Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith's public access shows, which were 29 minutes long and aired at 2:30 a.m. on Channel 34 between 1994 and 1997. To give you a sense of the attitude here, each episode began with the artists destroying the footage from the week before. --M.H.M.
Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Mira Schor at Marvelli Gallery
Mira Schor, a much-loved painter and writer who is well-known for her defense of both the painting medium and intuitive expression, will be showing recent work at the Marvelli Gallery. The press release for "Voice and Speech" declares that painting is, for Schor, "a primary meeting ground between 'voice' and 'speech,'" which makes sense; Schor champions the unique potential of both visual and verbal language. --W.K.
Marvelli Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY, MARCH 31

Symposium: Independent Art Spaces, and Book Launch: Art Spaces Directory, at the New Museum
As part of its current triennial, the New Museum has joined with ArtAsiaPacific to compile a directory of more than 400 international art spaces. To mark the book's publication, co-editors Eungie Joo and Ethan Swan will host panels with figures guiding the development of those spaces today. The first discussion brings together Participant Inc. founder Lia Gangitano, Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár and others to consider the "unique challenges" of these venues, while the second ventures into the non-physical realm, considering spaces sans real estate. --A.R.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, 12 p.m.

Courtesy Dia.

The Dia Art Foundation will join forces with two Salt Lake City organizations, the Great Salt Lake Institute (GSLI) and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), to help preserve Robert Smithson's iconic work, Spiral Jetty.

The news comes after a strange controversy over the summer when the Salt Lake City Tribune reported that Dia had lost its 20-year lease on the land where the giant rock sculpture, built in 1970 on the bed of Great Salt Lake, is located. Dia later refuted the Tribune story.

The lease has been renewed and a collaboration has been established between Dia, GSLI and UMFA to address stewardship issues with the work. Essentially, GSLI's role is to keep Dia informed of possible environmental issues that could impact Spiral Jetty. Dia first became acquainted with GSLI in 2008, when a Canadian oil company wanted to drill in Great Salt Lake near the sculpture; they were able to educate Dia on the possible effect such an intervention would have on Smithson's work. In addition to staying on top of potential biological impacts, GSLI will serve as an advocate for the sculpture's cultural importance along with UMFA, the official museum of the state of Utah (with several Smithson works in its collection).

"It is one of the most important artworks in the world," said Gretchen Dietrich, UMFA's executive director, "and is truly a state treasure."

“Dia’s collaboration with GSLI and UMFA is an ideal situation, as it became clear to us that in order to be the best steward of the Spiral Jetty, Dia needed to build deep and meaningful partnerships in the community," said Philippe Vergne, Dia's director, in an e-mail message to Gallerist. "We benefit from their onsite expertise, and they benefit from Dia’s profound knowledge of Robert Smithson, our national and international reach, and our experience in managing and maintaining site specific sculptures. Both GSLI and UMFA have demonstrated a sincere commitment to the Spiral Jetty and we look forward to working with them and with our partners at the Department of Natural Resources.”