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