In Conversation with Bernard Tschumi
Christopher Ball (MAUD ’23) and Elyjana Roach (MAUD ’22) interview renowned architect and urban designer Bernard Tschumi about his recent work, reflections on his long career, and his approach to large-scale projects.
French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi is perhaps best known for designing the Parc de la Villette in Paris as well as seminal theoretical texts and drawings including the Manhattan Transcripts. Since then, his firm has received numerous honors and completed projects across scales, contexts, typologies, and programs, from singular buildings to urban master plans. Dean Emeritus and Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, Tschumi’s recent work includes the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the architectural redesign of the Paris Zoo, the Binhai Science Center Museum in Tianjin, China, and the Biology-Pharmacy-Chemistry Complex for the University of Paris-Saclay. Twenty years after an exhibition at MoMA in 1994, Tschumi’s body of work was shown in a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2014.
Edited May 2023
© Andrew Boyle courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects
Elyjana Roach (ER):
For those that might not be aware, what types of projects have you been working on recently?
Bernard Tschumi (BT):
We generally try to concentrate on as few and as large projects as we can. We just completed the largest project we've ever done—nearly a million square feet of chemistry, biology and pharmacy labs and classrooms for the University of Paris-Saclay, just outside of Paris. That project was completed last summer. Meanwhile, almost perfectly in sync, this past October we started construction on a large educational science center in Switzerland with 60 classrooms, labs, a start-up incubator, and more. In between we amuse ourselves by doing competitions that, if we win, then create another big project. We also started to work on the last volume of Event Cities, a book series with four volumes already published. I want to wrap it up with number five—640 pages with around 25 projects.
Elyjana Roach (ER):
Did you decide early on in your career to focus on very large projects? Was that a strategic decision or did you evolve into that?
BT:
As people know, our first job was a huge project, the Parc de la Villette, won in a competition. It started a pattern that never really stopped—of entering competitions where we were in over our heads or that were much too big for us. We succeeded in winning enough, however, to build a substantial number of large projects with an office that has never had more than 25 people. So, whether this was a tactic or a strategy, it became one.
Parc de la Villette, 1982-1998. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects.
Chris Ball (CB):
Parc de la Villette was a major competition as part of President Francois Mitterrand’s vision for France’s future back in the 1980s. How have competitions changed since then?
BT:
Things have changed a lot. It was very unusual for a whole generation—my generation—to be able to get their first projects out of very large competitions. It was a time when whole countries and public clients would organize open competitions in which anybody could participate. Often, they were anonymous competitions with major importance. For La Villette, the jury included Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, Vittorio Gregotti, Roberto Burle Marx, Françoise Choay, Joseph Rykwert, and Lucius Burckhardt, among others. A number of people got their first big jobs through those large competitions—OMA won a couple like that, too. Think also of the Library of Alexandria by Snøhetta a bit later, sort of coming out of the blue.
In other words, these were mostly not firms, but rather individuals who were testing the waters. Suddenly they found themselves heading projects with very little experience or staff. You had to be very creative. It was an unusual period, because today this kind of competition is very, very rare. That's the big difference.
CB:
What was the process of building your practice after winning La Villette like? Building at such a scale and ambition of course carries challenges in implementation. How did you navigate that with La Villette to make sure your design intent was carried out?
BT:
A lot of hard work navigating a lot of conflictual circumstances. The requirement was to do a master plan. At the same time, the organizers were very generous in saying that the winner could build some of the structuring elements. When we won—and I had pretty much one employee and a kitchen table at the time—they said, “Oh, that's great. You are going to build one folly on the north-south axis and another on the east-west.” It would take hours to discuss all the battles with established local architects who each wanted a slice of the pie. Landscape architects were offered a garden and would say, “A garden, me? I want half the park!” So, there were lots of challenges.
By then I had an office of about six people, mostly straight out of school, and we were designing away, learning as we were going—I knew nothing about large practices, about planning, rules, and regulations. I hired people because they were intelligent and talented. This was completely acrobatic but an excellent decision on my part. We did good work that was eventually recognized. The politicians and colleagues fighting among one another finally canceled each other out, and we got it done, little by little. It took 15 years to build La Villette. And the interesting thing became transforming the project into something else. It was an ideal moment, since nobody knew what a park was or what it could be.
CB:
What lessons did you learn from your built large projects, such as La Villette or Paris-Saclay versus those that remained unbuilt, such as Kansai Airport, the Independent Financial Center of the Americas master plan in the Dominican Republic, or the Abu Dhabi Media Zone masterplan?
BT:
They are all amazingly different projects. Some were easy and smooth, but nothing happened: that was the Dominican Republic project. It was great project commissioned by an ambitious client who wanted to develop a large economic center between Latin America and North America. We worked for three or four years and were well paid. But then the client changed focus, and eventually decided to invest in renovating the historical center of the city of Santo Domingo.
Elliptic City (International Financial Centre of the Americas), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2005. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects.
Kansai Airport is a totally different story but comparable to La Villette. There were 15 invited competitors, and we were quite inexperienced—it was only five years after winning La Villette—but we won the second prize behind Renzo Piano. Why? We looked at the program and thought, it's so large, why can’t an airport be like a city? So we transformed the brief, making it have a lot of meeting places, convention centers, hotels, and so on. Today, airports are somewhat like that, but they weren’t at the time. Amusingly enough, the project appealed enormously to the client. But it was clear that we didn’t know much about airports. One jury member, the engineer Peter Rice, laughed and said, “Don't you think it was a little bit over your head?”
Kansai International Airport, Kansai, Japan, 1988. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects.
The Abu Dhabi Media Zone masterplan is like the Dominican Republic project in that it came out of the ambition to create a media center for the region stretching from the Emirates through North Africa. It wasn’t a competition. The client interviewed half a dozen firms, and between Thom Mayne/Morphosis and us, we got the job. But then that enormous ambition shifted for political reasons that had nothing to do with architecture: first the authorities changed the location, then they demanded multiple options, and eventually the project fizzled out, after we had worked on it for a year and a half.
Media Zone Master Plan, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2008. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects.
Paris-Saclay was a challenge before we started. Almost 20 years ago, we had won a large competition to be chief architects for a World's Fair on a site located just outside of Paris. We had worked on it until bulldozers were practically digging the foundations when the Prime Minister canceled the World’s Fair. However, a person within the client body was impressed with us, leading to a design-build commission to redesign the Paris Zoo. The Zoo went well, so our partner, Bouygues, one of the largest construction companies in the world, invited us to a couple other competitions. We lost one, but we won the almost million-square-foot Biology-Pharmacy-Chemistry Center.
The firm’s most recent project, the Biology-Pharmacy-Chemistry Center for the University of Paris-Saclay, 2015-2022. Image by Christian Richters, courtesy Bernard Tschumi urbanites Architects.
Still, Saclay was a horror because the competition phase itself lasted three years during which we were almost not paid. We were required to be “partners in risk-taking” in a public-private partnership (PPP), and my offices almost went bankrupt. I still have a sour taste in my mouth from the process. MVRDV did the competition, but the two finalists were Herzog & de Meuron with their 400 people, and us, with a dozen people in our New York office and half a dozen in our Paris office. It was a really perverse process.
A general lesson from our large-scale projects is the importance and role of a conceptual strategy: to develop a framework that can adapt to and withstand changing variables while still maintaining its integrity, such as the grid of folies at La Villette or its superimposition of points, lines, and surfaces. For some urban schemes, like the Dominican Republic master plan, the Chartres Business Park in France, or Mediapolis in Singapore, we designed a game for the client with a board, pieces, and rules. There is never a single solution to a given problem.
ER:
A lot of your work has come out of this incredible ambition to do something that is perhaps “over your head.” Where does this ambition come from? How have you learned to continually push forward visionary ideas, even when many such projects don’t go forward as planned?
BT:
It happens almost by itself: First of all, as architects, you should enjoy doing projects. There’s the pleasure of trying to develop something that is a fantastic vision. I derive great pleasure if the project is good, even if I don't win or build it—I'm a little disappointed then, but I'm still happy. There is nothing worse than winning a competition with a bad project. Then you're in trouble. But losing a competition with a good project is sort of okay.
I know it's not what Philip Johnson used to tell everyone: “The first rule of architecture is to get the job!” Maybe, but while you're doing those projects, you're doing two things. You're building up a body of work, which is important. No architect builds everything they design. Second, you’re learning by doing. Architecture—or urban design—is one of the few trades where you really learn by doing.
CB:
The thread that ties these diverse projects together then is the enjoyment that comes from learning while doing a new type of project, or designing for a different program, or working in a different context?
BT:
Absolutely. The variety and the differences between the projects is partly intentional. In other words, with one exception I've always refused to do any other park competitions after La Villette. Quite simply—we had done one, we had done it well, and I didn't think we could do anything better. The only one that I accepted as an experiment was the Downsview Park in Toronto, where I gave myself the exercise to do exactly the reverse of La Villette. For every decision we took at La Villette—for example, discontinuity—at Downsview it meant continuity, etc. Again, for the pleasure of doing it.
Downsview Park competition entry, Toronto, Canada, 2000. Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects.
CB:
Speaking of Downsview Park, I recently took a landscape architecture class in which they studied your scheme as an important case study in the landscape urbanist theoretical context. It is interesting that your projects are studied not only in architecture, but also urban design and even landscape architecture. How would you situate yourself between those disciplines?
BT:
One should be very careful with labels. It reminds me of how it used to be—and still is, in many ways—at the Museum of Modern Art, where you have a painting department, a sculpture department, an architecture department, and a photography department, and so on. What do you do with somebody like Cindy Sherman, who uses photography, but may not really care much about photography in the traditional sense? I'd be careful with the frozen boundaries between disciplines. I tend to think it should stay more fluid. There is still a lot of fluidity in terms of urbanism, or any large urban public project. Let’s not ruin it!
CB:
What role does pedagogy serve in your practice? In your time as Dean and as Professor at Columbia GSAPP, has teaching ever circled back to inform your work in the office?
BT:
Of course, constantly. Even if you don't win a competition, you learn something from it. It's a conversation, and that conversation happens regardless of whether things get built or not. In the realm of an office, a project can take years to complete, while when you do something at school, it takes a few weeks. You can thus explore ideas, take chances, and explore hypotheses.
I've always liked the idea of making a hypothesis and then trying to demonstrate it. When you are in the office context, you tend to put forward relatively safe hypotheses. Perhaps because you want to build it, you don't take major chances. But when you’re at school with a group of students, you can ask something unusual in terms of issues and ideas that may bounce back to your practice, or the other way around. For me, it's all the same world—it’s exploratory, an investigation. The BTA office is a little bit like a section of the studio.
ER:
I’ve found it can be rare [in school] to experience that. The most fruitful studios I’ve taken have entailed conversations with practicing designers that are also in the middle of their own investigations.
Concepts of large scale organization (city scale). Image courtesy Bernard Tschumi.
CB:
Back to urban design: in today’s era of climate change, inequality, and pandemics, how can we as urban designers balance visionary futures with very tangible societal needs?
BT:
That's the big question. It’s the one thing that I'm really working on. The issue of climate change is fundamental and must be resolved but doing that is not enough in itself. You have to combine it with a project—a progetto in Italian, a projection or vision forward. Otherwise, you stay where you are. Worse than that, you go back to a 17th-century naturalist vision! The issue of developing a new society is interrelated with questions of climate change and societal crises. These questions cannot be separated from one another.