Bernard Tschumi (born 1944) is an architect, writer and teacher associated with deconstructivism, a French and Swiss citizen who works in New York and Paris. Born in Lausanne, the son of the Swiss architect Jean Tschumi, he studied in Paris and at ETH Zurich, graduating in 1969, and made his name first as a theorist. Projects such as The Manhattan Transcripts (1981) borrowed montage from film to argue that there is no fixed relationship between an architectural form and the events that take place in it. From 1988 to 2003 he was dean of Columbia University's architecture school, and in 1996 he received France's Grand Prix national de l'architecture.
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His winning entry in the competition for the 55-hectare parc de la Villette in Paris (1987) became his first major public work. Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing (1997), a national studio for contemporary arts, sets a huge umbrella roof over older buildings, creating a zone of ramps and catwalks between them. The Acropolis Museum in Athens (2009) stands over an archaeological site, with glass floors showing the excavations, and its glass-walled top-floor hall repeats the column spacing of the Parthenon itself.
