Tschumi studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland where he received an architecture degree in 1969. After school and prior to winning the Parc de La Villette competition, he built his reputation as a theorist through his writings and drawings. From 1988 to 2003 he was the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Additionally, academic teaching positions have been held at Princeton University, Cooper Union, and the Architectural Association in London. In 1996, he received the French Grand Prix National d’Architecture. He established his practice in 1983 in Paris with the Parc de La Villette competition commission. In 1988, he opened Bernard Tschumi Architects (BTA), headquartered in New York City. In 2002, Bernard Tschumi urbanistes Architectes (BtuA) was established in Paris.

In 1978 he published an essay entitled The Pleasure of Architecture in which he used sexual intercourse as a characterizing analogy for architecture. He claimed that architecture by nature is fundamentally useless, setting it apart from “building”. He demands a glorification of architectural uselessness in which the chaos of sensuality and the order of purity combine to form structures that evoke the space in which they are built. He distinguishes between the forming of knowledge and the knowledge of form, contending that architecture is too often dismissed as the latter when it can often be used as the former. Tschumi used this essay as a precursor to a later eponymous series of writings detailing the so-called limits of architecture.

Tschumi’s first notable project was the Parc de la Villette, a competition project he won in 1983. Other projects include the new Acropolis Museum, Rouen Concert Hall, and bridge in La Roche-sur-Yon. Over his almost forty-year career, his built accomplishments number over sixty, including theoretical projects.

The capacity of an overlap of programs to effect a reevaluation of architecture on an urban scale had also been tested in the 1988 Kansai Airport competition, Lausanne Bridge city, and 1989 Bibliothèque de France competition. In the Bibliothèque de France, a major aspect of the proposed scheme was a large public running track and sports facility on the roof of the complex, intersecting with upper floors of the library program so that neither the sports program nor the intellectual program could exist without an impact on the other.

Tschumi has continued this design agenda in a variety of design competitions and built projects since 1983. The 1986 Tokyo National Theater and Opera House project continued the research that Tschumi began in The Manhattan Transcripts, importing notational techniques from experimental dance and musical scores, and using the design process itself to challenge habitual ways of thinking about space, in contrast to earlier static, two dimensional representational techniques which delineated the outline of a building but not the intensity of life within it. At a local scale in his 1990 Video Pavilion at Groningen, transparent walls and tilted floors produce an intense dislocation of the subject in relation to norms like wall, interior and exterior, and horizon. At the urban scale in such projects as the 1992 Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in Tourcoing, France, and the 1995 architecture school at Marne la Vallee, France (both completed 1999), larger spaces challenge normative program sequence and accepted use. The Le Fresnoy complex accomplishes this by its use of the space between the roofs of existing buildings and an added, huge umbrella roof above them which creates an interstitial zone of program on ramps and catwalks. This zone is what Tschumi calls the in-between, a negation of pure form or style that had been practiced in the 1989 ZKM Karlsruhe competition project, where a large atrium space punctuated by encapsulated circulation and smaller program episodes developed a more local network of interstitial space.

“It is very contextual and powerfully respectful of the urban fabric of Athens while doing a dance around the ruins.” Comments of the AIA Honor Award Jury writing in 2011.