After nearly 40 years of distinguished service, Bernard Tschumi has stepped down from active teaching at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to devote time to individual writing and architecture projects. Following the School’s nomination, the Trustees of Columbia University have approved Tschumi’s appointment as Professor Emeritus. He led the School as Dean from 1988 to 2003.

The distinction of Professor Emeritus recognizes Tschumi’s extraordinary contributions to architecture and his enduring role in making the School the pinnacle of critical research and experimental architectural pedagogy. GSAPP will celebrate this distinction with the Bernard Tschumi Symposium in Fall 2027, bringing together architects, artists, and cultural practitioners to engage the ideas and questions that Tschumi set in motion across more than four decades of architectural practice, writing, and teaching.

Dean Andrés Jaque reflects: “Bernard Tschumi reinvented architecture by vastly expanding what architecture could be made to do. Since the inception (INCEPTION OF WHAT?) in 1983 of one of the most critical practices of the last decades, Bernard pays attention to how architecture intensifies the social and political rather than predefining their outcomes. He did the same with GSAPP, multiplying the School’s potential as a place of pedagogical experimentation, sustained by the contagious belief that architecture can make daily life richer, stranger, and exponentially more complex. He made GSAPP intellectually fearless without making it solemn. Many of the questions we pursue carry Bernard’s fingerprints, and his intelligence is in GSAPP’s bones.”

Few architects have transformed contemporary architecture as profoundly as Tschumi. From The Manhattan Transcripts (1981), which brought cinematic techniques of sequence, movement, and event into architectural representation, to Architecture and Disjunction (1994) (THIS SHOULD HAVE A DESCRIPTION) , Tschumi challenged fixed relationships between space and program. Architecture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color (2012) and the five-volume Event-Cities series (1994–2024) later traced how these ideas moved from theory into built architecture and urbanism.

Tschumi’s writing and research developed in close proximity to his work at GSAPP, and these propositions have materialized at every scale around the world. Projects include the landmark Parc de la Villette in Paris, Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Vacheron Constantin Headquarters in Geneva, the Lindner Athletic Center in Cincinnati, the Binhai Science Museum in Tianjin, architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée and Miami, and concert halls in Rouen, Limoges, and Rolle, Switzerland. Closer to home, Tschumi designed the Alfred Lerner Hall at Columbia University. Tschumi’s most recent work includes the Henri Moissan Center for Biology, Pharmacy and Chemistry at the University of Paris-Saclay and Philo Center for Science and Entrepreneurship at Institut Le Rosey, which opened last year.

This singular trajectory has been recognized with France’s Grand Prix National d’Architecture, numerous awards from the American Institute of Architects, and, most recently, the 2024 Grand Prix d’Architecture of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally, including major exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. His extensive archive of drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, and project materials is part of the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

As Dean of Columbia GSAPP from 1988 to 2003, Tschumi transformed the School into a laboratory where ideas could be tested, contested, and multiplied. He fostered an international architectural culture, drawing on the individual “unit culture” he knew from teaching at the Architectural Association in London and bringing a generation of then-emerging architects and thinkers to teach studios while building a faculty that included Stan Allen, Michael Bell, Laurie Hawkinson, Steven Holl, and Mark Wigley, among others.

Tschumi also positioned GSAPP at the forefront of transformations in architectural practice. The Paperless Studios, pioneered at the School in 1994, were the earliest experiments to integrate emerging digital and visualization technologies into architectural design and pedagogy. The computer was approached as a means to fundamentally rethink how architecture could be conceived, represented, and made. He expanded GSAPP’s intellectual infrastructure through the post-professional M.S. Advanced Architectural Design and the PhD program in Architecture. Together, they created new spaces for advanced design experimentation, transdisciplinary scholarship, and architectural research.

At the same time, Tschumi used publishing and exhibitions as spaces for architecture to enter public debate beyond Avery Hall. He established Abstract, the annual presentation of student work, D, or Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, and developed the series Columbia Books on Architecture (which would later become the Columbia Books on Architecture and the City imprint) to further circulate the School’s intellectual production. Crucial Columbia publications under Tschumi’s tenure include INDEX Architecture, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century, and two seminal critical anthologies–Architecture Culture 1943-1968, edited by Joan Ockman and Edward Eigen, and Architecture Theory since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays. Tschumi also launched the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, New York City’s first exhibition space devoted exclusively to architecture.

Tschumi’s appointment as Professor Emeritus recognizes his enduring contributions to Columbia University and his indelible relationship with GSAPP.