Movement In Time
Bernard Tschumi has always been interested in concept and experience. In fact, long before his first completed project, the contemporary of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas was already widely known for his theoretical drawings and written texts, like The Manhattan Transcripts developed in the late ‘70s. In it, he transcribed aspects normally removed from conventional architectural representation, such as the complex relationship between spaces and their use. Central to Tschumi’s belief is that there can be no architecture without events, actions or activity. This remains central to his work, where architecture must originate from ideas and concepts before becoming form, and cannot be dissociated from the events and movements of the living beings that inhabit it.
Over the course of his 40-year career, award-winning Swiss-french architect Bernard Tschumi has proven that architecture isn’t simply about structures and forms, but the events and actions happening within it
Similarly, the buildings he designs respond to and intensify the activities that occur within them, and the combination of spaces, movements and events change and creatively extend the structures that contain them. “I would like people in general, and not only architects, to understand that architecture is not only what it looks like, but also what happens in it,” he says.
HUMAN CENTRED APPROACH
Winning the international competition in 1983 to build the Parc de la Villette, Tschumi’s idea for the new unprecedented social and cultural park was based on activity instead of nature, where its many buildings, gardens, bridges and fields served as the staging ground for concerts, exhibitions, sporting events and more. “I never looked at it as a path to success,” he says. “I was really more interested in the making of architecture. I like to quote Orson Welles the filmmaker, who once said, ‘I don’t enjoy cinema, I enjoy making cinema.’ Most of my work has been involved with questioning what architecture really is.” Tschumi’s first commission introduced the notion of deconstruction to architecture. Constructed on the site of the Parisian slaughterhouses and a national wholesale meat market, the large-scale Parc de la Villette in the northeastern edge of Paris (housing one of the largest concentration of cultural venues in the capital, including the Cité des Sciences et de l’industrie, Europe’s largest science museum, a music museum, equestrian centre, three major concert venues, performance halls, theatres, the prestigious Paris Conservatory, themed gardens and children’s playgrounds) was a major project of the French government and a testing ground for a new philosophy and approach to architecture. Thirty five iconic bright red follies — giant twisting, intersecting structures that are at once industrial and sculptural and act as architectural representations of deconstruction — give organisation to the park, helping people navigate throughout the space. Attracting eight million visitors per year today, it is a phenomenal success and has become a neighbourhood in and of itself – a welcome respite from the mediaeval streets of Paris.
BECOMING TSCHUMI
Tschumi describes the most challenging undertakings of his career, “Most projects are quite challenging, but one that I would single out is, of course, the Parc de la Villette. It was my first
and I knew absolutely nothing about building codes, construction phases, the role of consultants, etc. I had to learn everything in an incredibly short period of time.” His latest project, the renovation and redesign of the Paris Zoo, which reopened last April after being closed for five years, emphasised the natural habitat to better advance the zoo’s pedagogical and ecological agenda.
MIXING CULTURES
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1944, Tschumi is the son of the wellknown architect, Jean Tschumi. The US permanent resident with both French and Swiss citizenship notes, “My father was born in Switzerland, but studied architecture in Paris. My mother was French and introduced me to literature and film. My father used to take me to construction sites on Sunday afternoons, but I first got really interested in literature and philosophy before I decided to become an architect while visiting Chicago at age 17.” As such, he often references other disciplines in his work, such as literature, film, art and philosophy. A graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, he established his firm in Paris in 1983 with the commission for the Parc de la Villette, then opened his headquarters, Bernard Tschumi Architects, in New York in 1988. A leading thinker in contemporary architecture, and as the former dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University (1988 to 2003), he introduced the Paperless Studio – the first platform for education in digital architecture – and continues to teach there. Tschumi expresses his hopes for the future of architecture, “I’m very optimistic about the future of architecture because I think nobody else can really think like architects do: combining the most abstract and the most material, being able to deal with extremely complex constraints while having to arrive at a precise and articulate response. Architecture has a long way to go and will always carry excitement for future generations.”
“ARCHITECTURE HAS A LONG WAY TO GO AND WILL ALWAYS CARRY EXCITEMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.”