6/16/2019 Bernard Tschumi's Architecture Is Not Just About Space And Form But Also The Events Happening

The Events Happening Inside

19,639 views | Sep 7, 2015, 12:11pm

Bernard Tschumi's Architecture Is

Not Just About Space And Form But
Also The Events Happening Inside
Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle Contributor

Over the course of his 40-year career, the award-winning Swiss-French architect
Bernard Tschumi, an integral part of the architectural landscape of France, has
proven that architecture isn’t simply about space and form, but also about event,
action and what happens in space. 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
1970s, in which he transcribed aspects normally removed from conventional
architectural representation, like the complex relationship between spaces and
their use. He believed that there was no architecture without events, actions or
activity. This has remained 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. His buildings
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. He relates, “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.”

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A folly at the Parc de la Villette in Paris (Photo JM Monthiers)

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. I started by integrating the
idea of movement and events in the definition of architecture. Many of my early
projects were first shown in art galleries. I then decided to test these ideas in a
real competition, my first. Unexpectedly, I won. And as they say, ‘The rest is
history.’”

Not just another architectural work, 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
center, three major concert venues, performance halls, theaters, 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

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approach to architecture. 35 iconic bright red follies – giant twisting, intersecting

structures that are at once industrial and sculptural and act as architectural
representations of deconstruction – give organization 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 neighborhood in and of itself – a
welcome respite from the medieval streets of Paris.

Limoges Concert Hall in Limoges, France (Photo Christian Richters)

Tschumi describes the most challenging undertakings 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. The other project was the new Acropolis Museum.
By then I was far more experienced and knew exactly what had to be done both in
conceptual and material terms. It’s probably the project where I spent the most
time on the construction site, developing mock-ups and prototypes for almost
every piece of the building.”

A recent project, the renovation and redesign of the Paris Zoo, which reopened
last April after being closed for five years, emphasized the natural habitat to
better advance the zoo’s pedagogical and ecological agenda. Using techniques of
immersion, visibility and camouflage to address the comfort of the animals and to
create a strong sensual and emotional visitor experience, the design team’s
priority was to create specific mediums to hide, complement or blend the
buildings into a natural setting and went beyond the mere decoration and
mimicry of nature. Tschumi discloses that the biggest challenge was “trying to
design simultaneously for people and for animals, using the same concepts and
the same materials”.

Zoo de Vincennes in the suburbs of Paris (Photo courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects)

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1944, Tschumi is the son of the well-known

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

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his work, such as literature, film, art and philosophy, proving that architecture
must participate in culture’s polemics and question its foundations. “People
certainly wouldn’t think I’m a typical architect, nor would I want to be,” he
admits. “Early sources of inspiration were filmmaking and literary studies. I was
very interested in the art scene and that is one of the reasons I came to New
York.”

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, working for institutional, private and civic clients on everything from
small facilities to large-scale master plans in Beijing, Shenzhen, New York,
Montreal, Chartres, Lausanne and Santo Domingo. A leading thinker in
contemporary architecture, as the dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at
Columbia University from 1988 to 2003, he introduced the Paperless Studio – the
first platform for education in digital architecture – and continues to teach there.
His office in New York has approximately 20 people, and in Paris he has a 10-
person team. He describes how he splits his time between the two cities, “I often
fantasize that it’s one single office simply with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle.
These days, I alternate two weeks in New York and one week in Europe
throughout the year, crossing the Atlantic 25 or 30 times a year.”

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Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi (Photo Martin Mai)

Having exhibited widely in solo shows at museums and art galleries in the US and
Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice
Architecture Biennale and recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris – his first

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major European retrospective – Tschumi has received numerous awards like the
rank of Officer in both the French Légion d’Honneur and the Ordre des Arts et
des Lettres and is also an international fellow of the Royal Institute of British
Architects in England. He describes his work method, “I wish I could say that the
working process is different every time. It’s almost true but, in reality, I generally
start in a very objective and analytical manner, studying all the constraints until I
clearly know what I’m facing. But very often during this objective phase, intuition
may strike. I feel intuition is a shortcut of reason. It just allows you to go faster.”

With the Hague Passage and Hotel in the Netherlands, the Anima cultural center
in Italy, a philharmonic hall for Le Rosey and an expansion of the Vacheron
Constantin headquarters – both near Geneva – recently completed, 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.”

Acropolis Museum in Athens (Photo Iwan Baan)

Key Designs

1) Parc de la Villette in Paris (1998) – Designed and built over a period of 15

years, the 125-acre cultural park composed of over 25 buildings, promenades,
covered walkways, bridges, landscaped gardens and red enameled steel follies
that support different cultural and leisure activities is based on “culture” rather
than “nature”.

2) Zoo de Vincennes in the suburbs of Paris (2014) – Situated in the historical

Parc de Vincennes, the reconstruction of the 15-ha zoo – housing animals from
French-speaking territories divided into five different biozones – focused on
preserving its important conservationist heritage while creating a new mode of
animal presentation and educational experience.

Vacheron Constantin Headquarters in Geneva (Photo courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects)

3) Acropolis Museum in Athens (2009) – Housing the most dramatic

sculptures of Greek antiquity, the building is located at the foot of the Acropolis.
The circulation route takes the visitor through different historical archaeological
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periods via a three-dimensional loop that extends from the archaeological

excavations, visible through a glass floor, to the Parthenon Frieze in a gallery with
city views, and back down through the Roman period.

4) Vacheron Constantin Headquarters in Geneva (2005) – The exterior of the

manufacturing and administrative headquarters of Switzerland’s oldest
watchmaking company showcases a continuous monolithic metal cladding that
lends the building a visual and functional coherence, which contrasts with a glass
atrium containing circulation elements – walkways, stairs and an elevator – also
made from glass.

Alésia Archeological Center and Museum in Alésia, France (Photo Christian Richters)

5) Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Art in Tourcoing, France

(1997) – A center for crossover artists, such as a video artist who is also a
musician or a musician who is a painter, the site holds buildings from a 1920’s
leisure complex, supplemented by newly-designed ones, including exhibition
spaces, sound studios, production facilities, a library, cinema, restaurant and
apartments for faculty and students.

6) Limoges Concert Hall in Limoges, France (2007) – In a wooded area on the

outskirts of a small city in central France, the 8,000-seat concert hall features a
double envelope with circulation in between – an outer skin made of wood arcs
and translucent rigid polycarbonate sheets and an inner acoustical envelope of
locally-grown Douglas fir – which is advantageous for both acoustical and
thermal reasons.

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Blue in New York City (Photo courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects)

7) Alésia Archeological Center and Museum in Alésia, France (2012) – Located

on an archaeological site in central France that commemorates the battle between
Julius Caesar and the Gauls in 52 B.C., the scheme consists of a museum built of
stone recreating battlements and earthworks at the top of the hill above the town
and an interpretive center made of wood in the fields below, both blending into
the landscape and representative of the confrontation between the Romans and
the Gauls.

8) Blue in New York City (2007) – The 17-storey residential tower with 32
apartments in the Lower East Side succeeds in creating an original architectural
statement while responding to the constraints of the city’s zoning code and the
developer’s commercial requirements. Its blue pixelated envelope is distinctive
yet blends into the sky, and the upper-floor units have stunning views of Lower
Manhattan from river to river.

Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle Contributor

I’ve been a luxury lifestyle writer and editor for 14 years, meaning I’ve met with today’s
movers and shakers and gone behind the scenes to observe master craftsmen at w...
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