Bernard Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi (born 25 January 1944 in Lausanne, Switzerland) is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism.

Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French-Swiss national who works and lives in New York City and Paris.

The experience of the May 1968 uprisings and the activities of the Situationist International oriented Tschumi's approach to design studios and seminars he taught at the Architectural Association in London during the early 1970s.

Within that pedagogical context he combined film and literary theory with architecture, expanding on the work of such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, in order to reexamine architecture's responsibility in reinforcing unquestioned cultural narratives.

A big influence on this work were the theories and structural diagramming by the Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein produced for his own films.

Tschumi adapted Eisenstein's diagrammatic methodology in his investigations to exploit the interstitial condition between the elements of which a system is made of: space, event, and movement (or activity).

Best exemplified in his own words as, "the football player skates across the battlefield."

In this simple statement he was highlighting the dislocation of orientation and any possibility of a singular reading; a common resultant of the post-structuralist project.

This approach unfolded along two lines in his architectural practice: first, by exposing the conventionally defined connections between architectural sequences and the spaces, programs, and movement which produce and reiterate these sequences; and second, by inventing new associations between space and the events that 'take place' within it through processes of defamiliarization, de-structuring, superimposition, and cross programming.

He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969.

Tschumi studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland where he received an architecture degree in 1969.

After school and prior to winning the Parc de La Villette competition, he built his reputation as a theorist through his writings and drawings.

For example, Superstudio, one such branch of theoretically oriented architectural postmodernists, began to produce ironic, unrealizable projects such as the 1969 Continuous Monument project, which functioned as counter design and critique of the existing architecture culture, suggesting the end of architecture's capacity to effect change on an urban or cultural scale.

Tschumi positioned his work to suggest alternatives to this endgame.

Since the 1970s, Tschumi has argued that there is no fixed relationship between architectural form and the events that take place within it.

The ethical and political imperatives that inform his work emphasize the establishment of a proactive architecture which non-hierarchically engages balances of power through programmatic and spatial devices.

In Tschumi's theory, architecture's role is not to express an extant social structure, but to function as a tool for questioning that structure and revising it.

Tschumi's work in the later 1970s was refined through courses he taught at the Architectural Association and projects such as The Screenplays (1977) and The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) and evolved from montage techniques taken from film and techniques of the nouveau roman.

His use of event montage as a technique for the organization of program (systems of space, event, and movement, as well as visual and formal techniques) challenged the work other contemporary architects were conducting which focused on montage techniques as purely formal strategies.

Tschumi's work responded as well to prevalent strands of contemporary architectural theory that had reached a point of closure, either through a misunderstanding of post-structuralist thought, or the failure of the liberal/leftist dream of successful political and cultural revolution.

In 1978 he published an essay entitled The Pleasure of Architecture in which he used sexual intercourse as a characterizing analogy for architecture.

He claimed that architecture by nature is fundamentally useless, setting it apart from "building".

He demands a glorification of architectural uselessness in which the chaos of sensuality and the order of purity combine to form structures that evoke the space in which they are built.

He distinguishes between the forming of knowledge and the knowledge of form, contending that architecture is too often dismissed as the latter when it can often be used as the former.

Tschumi used this essay as a precursor to a later eponymous series of writings detailing the so-called limits of architecture.

Tschumi's winning entry for the 1982 Parc de la Villette Competition in Paris became his first major public work and made possible an implementation of the design research and theory which had been rehearsed in The Manhattan Transcripts and The Screenplays.

Landscaping, spatial and programmatic sequences in the park were used to produce sites of alternative social practice that challenged the expected use values usually reinforced by a large urban park in Paris.

Tschumi's first notable project was the Parc de la Villette, a competition project he won in 1983.

Other projects include the new Acropolis Museum, Rouen Concert Hall, and bridge in La Roche-sur-Yon.

Over his almost forty-year career, his built accomplishments number over sixty, including theoretical projects.

He established his practice in 1983 in Paris with the Parc de La Villette competition commission.

Tschumi has continued this design agenda in a variety of design competitions and built projects since 1983.

Tschumi has taught in the UK and the USA; at Portsmouth University in Portsmouth and the Architectural Association in London, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, Princeton University, the Cooper Union in New York and Columbia University where he was Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from 1988 to 2003.

Tschumi is a permanent US resident.

From 1988 to 2003 he was the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

He's held teaching positions at Princeton University, Cooper Union, and the Architectural Association in London.

In 1988, he opened Bernard Tschumi Architects (BTA), headquartered in New York City.

In 1996, he received the French Grand Prix National d'Architecture.

In 2002, Bernard Tschumi urbanistes Architectes (BtuA) was established in Paris.

Throughout his career, Bernard Tschumi's work has reevaluated architecture's role in the practice of personal and political freedom.