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Event-Cities 5: Poetics

By Bernard Tschumi
Book Launch and conversation with Hernán Díaz Alonso

Kappe Library
February 28, 2025 at 6:00pm

Event-Cities 5 is the fifth and final volume in the MIT Press series documenting recent built and unbuilt projects by renowned architect Bernard Tschumi. This volume expands on the theoretical preoccupations that have shaped Tschumi's work in practice and pedagogy. In this volume, Tschumi embarks on what he calls a “poetics” that addresses both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in architectural projects. How do chance, intuition, and analogy, among other elements, intersect with the logical play of concept, context, and program to generate innovative and informed design?

Highlights of this volume include circular building projects, works with suspended gardens and floating rectangular masses, superposed structures created via surrealist tactics, an immense educational research complex in France that hovers between building and urban design, a museum in China made from intersecting conic shapes, and a project for a cultural center in Italy that is structured as an investigation into courtyards and facades. The book features nearly 30 projects developed over the last fifteen years and highlights Tschumi's longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity, but in questioning architecture itself.

Bernard Tschumi is an architect based in New York and Paris. First known as a theorist, he exhibited and published The Manhattan Transcripts and wrote a series of theoretical essays collected in Architecture and Disjunction. Major built works include the Parc de la Villette in Paris; the Acropolis Museum in Athens; Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, France; concert halls in Rouen and Limoges, France; architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée, France and Miami, Florida; Binhai Science Museum in Tianjin, China; and a large educational-research complex for Paris-Saclay University. Tschumi is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he served as Dean from 1988 to 2003. He is the author of many publications including Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color and the Event-Cities series. His drawings and models are in the collections of major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which each presented a major retrospective of his work in 1994 and 2014.