The Library is Open 14

The Library is Open 14 invites Dean Emeritus Bernard Tschumi for a conversation on his latest book, Event Cities 5 (MIT Press, 2024).

Event-Cities 5 is the fifth and final volume in the MIT Press series documenting recent built and unbuilt projects by renowned architect Bernard Tschumi. It expands on the preoccupations that have shaped Tschumi’s theory and practice. In this volume, Tschumi embarks on what he calls a “poetics” that addresses both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in architectural projects. How do chance, intuition, and analogy, among other elements, intersect with the logical play of concept, context, and program to generate innovative and informed design?

Highlights of this volume include circular building projects, works with suspended gardens and floating rectangular masses, superposed structures created via surrealist tactics, an immense educational research complex in France that hovers between building and urban design, a museum in China made from intersecting conic shapes, and a project for a cultural center in Italy that is structured as an investigation into courtyards and facades. The book features nearly 30 projects developed over the last fifteen years and highlights Tschumi’s longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity, but in questioning architecture itself.

Bernard Tschumi is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP. He served as Dean from 1988 to 2003. In addition to Columbia, he has taught architecture at a range of institutions including the Architectural Association in London, Princeton University, and The Cooper Union in New York.

First known as a theorist, Tschumi drew attention to his innovative architectural practice in 1983 when he won the prestigious competition for the Parc de La Villette, a 125-acre cultural park based on activities as much as nature. The intertwining concepts of “event” and “movement” in architecture are supported by Tschumi’s belief that architecture is the most important innovation of our time. Tschumi often references other disciplines in his work, such as literature and film, proving that architecture must participate in culture’s polemics and question its foundations.

His firm Bernard Tschumi Architects is known for groundbreaking designs that include the new Acropolis Museum; Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts; the Vacheron-Constantin Headquarters; the Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center at the University of Cincinnati; two concert halls in Rouen and Limoges, and architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée, France and Miami, Florida, as well as the Alésia Archaeological Center and Museum among other projects. Major urban design projects under Tschumi’s leadership include master plans in Beijing, Shenzhen, New York, Montreal, Chartres, Lausanne, and Santo Domingo. Recently completed are the Hague Passage and Hotel in the Netherlands, a Philharmonic Hall for Institut Le Rosey, an expansion of the headquarters for Vacheron Constantin, a renovation and redesign of the Paris Zoo, and the Binhai Science Museum in Tianjin, China. The 75,000 m2 (800,000 sf) Biology-Pharmacy-Chemistry Center for the University of Paris-Saclay opened in 2022, while a Center for Sciences and Entrepreneurship is currently under construction near Geneva, to open in 2025.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP. Hosted in a central location in Avery Hall, the LiO series honors GSAPP’s historical connection to Avery Library, the world’s largest Architecture library.