About Bernard Tshumi:
Born in Lausanne, Bernard Tshumi (1944) is unanimously considered one of the key interpreters of deconstructionism.
Born into the art (his father was Jean Tschumi, 1904-1962), he graduated from EHT in Zurich in 1969, has dual nationality (Swiss and French) and lives and works in Paris and New York.
In the seventies he taught at the Architectural Association of London, then at Princeton and Cooper Union; from 1988 to 2003 he was Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University in New York.
In addition to teaching, the first part of his career focused on criticism and issues in architecture, coming up with a multidisciplinary approach (borrowing from music and film) “in which certain members of the French structuralist movement, such as Focault, Bataille and Derrida, played an important role” (Jetzer).
This is the time of his important essays Manifestoes (1978), The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) and Architecture and Disjunction (1994).
Applying these eclectic, innovative positions, Tschumi won the 1983 competition for a general plan for Parc du XX Siècle at Villette in Paris, completed in 1998.
Tschumi then addressed various urban planning issues, working on masterplans and competitions with his studio. The many projects he has worked on in the past fifteen years include the National Contemporary Art Centre in Lille (1998); Alfred Lerner Hall at Columbia University in New York (1999); the Faculty of Architecture at Marne-la-Vallée (2001) and the University of Florida in Miami (2003); the general headquarters of Vacheron Constantin in Geneva (2005); the Limoges Concert Hall (2007); the Blue Tower in New York (2004-06); and the Museum of the Acropolis in Athens (2009).
