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From advertising to architecture: the making of a conceptualist
Bernard Tschumi’s career began unusually: he earned his architecture degree from ETH Zurich in 1969, but instead of immediately entering architectural design, he first spent time in the advertising industry. This experience was perhaps more important than he himself realized. In advertising, what matters most is not the product itself but the concept it provokes in the consumer’s mind. A bottle of water and a sneaker can be assigned exactly the same emotional value in an advertisement. The product is secondary; the concept is primary. Bringing this advertising-industry-specific way of thinking into architecture, Tschumi advanced an argument that was (and remains) profoundly provocative: architecture’s meaning resides not in its materials, structure, or form but in the events it provokes — what people do in it, feel in it, encounter in it. This argument is the core of Tschumi’s entire architectural philosophy.
During the 1970s, Tschumi taught at architecture schools in the United States and the United Kingdom while developing his theory. He turned his architecture lectures into performances — not traditional slide presentations but complex multimedia events incorporating film clips, music, text projections, and live actions. His book "The Manhattan Transcripts" (1981) is one of the strangest books in architectural theory history: this book contains no architectural drawings, only a series of images superimposing photographs, architectural notations, and movement symbols (arrows, trajectories, speed lines). Tschumi’s argument: traditional architectural representation (plans, elevations, sections) cannot capture the most important thing in architecture — human movement through space. A staircase may look exactly the same in plan, but if you record the manner in which people walk through it, every staircase becomes a unique event.
1983 was the watershed in Tschumi’s career. He won the international competition for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, beating 472 entries from around the world. Tschumi’s scheme was fundamentally different from all others: it was not a building or a set of landscapes but a system. He defined three independent layers: the point layer (a series of red Folly pavilions at 120-meter intervals), the line layer (straight and curved paths), and the surface layer (large green open spaces and hall buildings). These three layers were superimposed across the 135-acre site with no predetermined relationship to one another. Where they collide, unpredictable things happen. The scheme was fiercely controversial at the time: some considered it not architecture at all but a gesture of refusing to design. Yet the Parc de la Villette took fifteen years to build and, once completed, became the third most popular public space in Paris (after the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower) and one of the most studied cases in contemporary landscape urbanism.
