Lecture date: 2007-11-12
Bernard Tschumi studied architecture at the ETH in Zurich. From 1970 to 1979 he was a unit master at the AA, with design work characterised by the appropriation of filmic montage in the organisation of architectural programme. His published work from the time, notably The Screenplays (1977) and Manhattan Transcripts (1981) evolved from this teaching research. He was visiting professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York (1980 to 1983) and Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (1988 to 2003). Since then he has continued to argue, from his offices in New York and Paris, that there is no architectural space without event and that his role as an architect is to design conditions for the reinvention of living rather than to repeat established aesthetic and symbolic tropes.