Son of a Jazz Man

Ricardo Merrill Scofidio was born on April 16, 1935, in New York City to Earle and June (Matthews) Scofidio. He had a brother, Basilio. His father, a jazz musician who played the alto saxophone and the clarinet, was Black, “but he insisted to his dying day that he was Italian,” Mr. Scofidio told Arthur Lubow for an article in The New York Times Magazine in 2003. His mother “was light-skinned,” he said, “but she was actually half Black.”

He added, “I was continually told as a child to be invisible.”

He attended the Cooper Union School of Architecture and then Columbia University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1960. He began teaching at the Cooper Union in 1965.

In 1955, he married Allana Jeanne De Serio, with whom he had four children. They divorced in 1979. In addition to his sons Ian and Gino, he is survived by his wife; two other sons, Marco and Dana; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He lived in Manhattan.

By the late 1970s, Mr. Scofidio was unhappy with his marriage and his career. Attempting to practice architecture, he said in 2003, he spent “more time flying around meeting clients” than designing.

“It was a great frustration,” he added. “I realized at that point I had to change my life.”

Change it he did, after Ms. Diller enrolled in his architecture studio. Romantic entanglement was postponed, because “she was a student, and I respected that,” he said. But after she took a semester off to think, they moved in together. “It meant abandoning everything and starting over,” he said. “It was like shedding skin.”

In its early years, Diller + Scofidio was best known for designing theater and dance backdrops and installation art. In 1993, the couple installed a screen in Times Square on which a woman’s mouth, viewed in extreme close-up, murmured come-ons to passers-by: “Hey, you, wanna buy a ticket to paradise? Wanna buy a new lifestyle?”