Paris, part 2 architecture guide: 22 buildings more [II]

Bernard Tschumi was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on January 25, 1944. He holds dual nationality, inherited from his French mother and his father, the renowned Swiss architect Jean Tschumi. He studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. His early years were spent moving between Zurich and Paris, where he experienced the May 1968 protests firsthand.

After completing his studies that same year, he began teaching at the Architectural Association in London, then led by Albin Boyarsky, a pivotal figure in shaping the critical approach to architectural education and practice that Tschumi would later implement. This period placed him in an environment where he interacted with a generation of outstanding architects.

He later taught at prestigious institutions such as Princeton University and The Cooper Union in New York. Between 1988 and 2003, he served as dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, leaving an indelible mark on the education of architects and the intellectual discourse of the discipline. He continues to teach at Columbia today.

His theoretical work, writings, and both conceptual and built projects have been fundamental in redefining the relationship between architecture and theory. He explores the interplay between space, movement, and events as dynamic forces that shape spatial relationships and urban experiences.

Tschumi is widely recognized for his influential books, including The Manhattan Transcripts—a project developed through four exhibitions between New York and London—first published in 1978 and reissued in 1994 following an exhibition at MoMA. Another key publication, Architecture and Disjunction, further develops his interest in an architecture that transcends mere form and function, engaging instead with spatial dynamics, narrative structures, and urban events, ultimately redefining the concept of place.

His early theoretical ideas were materialized in one of his most iconic projects: Parc de la Villette in Paris. After winning the competition in 1982, the project evolved over the following years with the construction of multiple folies, culminating in 1998. Here, Tschumi developed his concept of spatial relationships within an architectural landscape that activates the interaction between individuals, space, and the city.

Tschumi is the founder and director of Bernard Tschumi Architects, with offices in New York and Paris. Beyond his work at La Villette, his most notable projects include the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Le Fresnoy Contemporary Arts Center in France, and the Vacheron-Constantin headquarters in Geneva. His architecture consistently explores spatial fragmentation and sensory experience, challenging conventional notions of architectural composition.

His work has been recognized with prestigious accolades, including the Grand Prix National d’Architecture in France (1996), multiple awards from the American Institute of Architects, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an international member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in England and the Collège International de Philosophie in France. Additionally, he has been honored as an Officer of both the Légion d’Honneur and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Tschumi’s work has been exhibited in major museums and biennials worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

His legacy continues to shape architectural practice and thought on a global scale.

Bjarke Ingels (born in Copenhagen, in 1974) studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the School of Architecture of Barcelona, ​​obtaining his degree as an architect in 1998. He is the founder of the BIG architecture studio - (Bjarke Ingels Group), a studio founded in 2005, after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 with his former partner Julien de Smedt, whom he met while working at the prestigious OMA studio in Rotterdam.

Bjarke has designed and completed award-winning buildings worldwide, and currently, his studio is based with venues in Copenhagen and New York. His projects include The Mountain, a residential complex in Copenhagen, and the innovative Danish Maritime Museum in Elsinore.

With the PLOT study, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2004, and with BIG he has received numerous awards such as the ULI Award for Excellence in 2009. Other prizes are the Culture Prize of the Crown Prince of Denmark in 2011; Along with his architectural practice, Bjarke has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen.

In 2018, Bjarke received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Dannebrog granted by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II. He is a frequent public speaker and continues to give lectures at places such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street or the World Economic Forum. In 2018, Bjarke was appointed Chief Architectural Advisor by WeWork to advise and develop the design vision and language of the company for buildings, campuses and neighborhoods around the world.

Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) was an inventor, an innovator who blended materials with extreme attention to detail. If one idea could sum up Pierre Chareau's oeuvre, it would be, as he said himself, “creating with passionate contemplation to best satisfy the needs of our reason and our higher emotions, merged into an admirable beauty of living.”  French architect and designer, credited for building his first house in France, made of steel and glass, the Maison de Verre. Chareau was born in Le Havre, France and went to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, by the time he was 17. His designs are characterized by their complex nature. He was a member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne.

Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland on October 6th, 1887. He is best known as Le Corbusier, one of the most important architects of the XX Century that together with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright rise up as the fathers of Modern Architecture. In his long career, he worked in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Argentina, India and Japan.

Jeanneret was admitted to the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1902. He knew Charles l’Éplattenier, his first teacher, and he became interested in architecture. He built his first house, Villa Fallet, in 1906, and one year later he set out on his first great journey to Italy. From 1908-1909 he worked in Perret Bother’s Studio, where he focussed on the employment of the concrete, and from 1910-1911 he coincided with Mies van der Rohe in this studio in Berlin.

In 1917, Charles Édouard Jeanneret set up finally in Paris. The next year he met the painter Amedée Ozenfant and he displayed his first paintings and wrote his first book, Après le Cubismo. In 1919 he founded the magazine l´Esprit nouveau, where he published unnumbered articles, signing with the pseudonym Le Corbusier for the first time.

He opened his own Studio in 1922, in the number 35 of the rue de Sèvres. In this decade when his laboratory epoch started he carried out a great number of activities as a painter, essayist, and writer. But also as an architect, he planned some of the most recognizable icons of modern architecture and developed the principles of the free plan. Some of these works are the Villa Roche-Jeanneret, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, and the Siedlungweissenhof’s houses built in Stuttgart in 1927. It should be pointed out that at the same time; he set out the “five points” of the architecture.

Le Corbusier projected “The contemporary three million population city” in 1922 and in 1925 put forward the Voisin plan of Paris, which is one of his most important urban proposals. Three years later, in 1928, through his initiative, the CIAM was created and in 1929 he published his first edition of the Oeuvre Complète.

In the 30s, he collaborated with the magazine Plans and Prélude, where he became enthusiastic about urbanism and he started, in 1930, to elaborate the drawings of the “Radiant City” as a result of the “Green City” planned for Moscu, his project would be summarized in the “Radiant Villa”, which was enclosed with the projects for Amberes, Stockholm, and Paris. By 1931 he presented Argel, a proposal that composed the Obus Plan. And in 1933 the 4th CIAM passed and there he edited the Athens Document.

Le Corbusier, in 1943, developed the “Three Human Establishments Doctrine” and founded the Constructors Assembly for Architectural Renovation (ASCORAL). He made the project the Unite d´habitation of Marsella in 1952, which was the first one of a series of similar buildings. At the same time, the works of Chandigarh in India began, where he planned the main governmental buildings. Nevertheless, in the same decade, he worked in France too, in the Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp, in the convent of La Tourette in Éveux, Jaoul’s houses in Neuilly and the Unites d´habitation of Rézé-lès-Nantes, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy.

He wrote and published his worldwide known study of the Modulor in 1948 followed by a second part in 1953. Meanwhile the next Le Corbusier’s books had a more autobiographic nature, among them the Le poème de l'angle droit (1955), l'Atelier de la recherche patiente (1960) and Mise aupoint (1966) stand out.

Le Corbusier, at the end of his life, created many projects that would not be built, for example, a calculus center for Olivetti in Rho, Milan; a congress in Strasbourg, the France embassy in Brasilia and a new hospital in Venice.

He died drowned on the 27th of August of 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

LAN (Local Architecture Network) was created by Benoît Jallon and Umberto Napolitano in 2002. LAN has received several awards: the Nouveaux Albums de la Jeune Architecture (NAJA) prize awarded by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication (2004); the International Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum and the European Urban Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies, the Archi-Bau Award, the Special Prize at the 12th World Triennale of Architecture, Sofia (2009); the AR Mipim Future Projects Award and the Europe 40 Under 40 Award (2010). In 2011 the office was awarded at the LEAF Awards with the Best Sustainable Development in Keeping with its Environment prize and at the SAIE Selection Awards.

Benoit Jallon. 18th May 1972 Grenoble (Fr). Fascinated by the body’s structure and its logical organisation, layers and strata, Benoit Jallon first turned to medical studies. However, his need for involvement and creativity soon led him to begin studying architecture. He graduated from the Villette School of Architecture in 2001 with a special mention from the jury. Curiosity and a thirst for knowledge have led him to travel widely, particularly in Italy.

Umberto Napolitano. 27th November 1975 Naples (It). Umberto Napolitano began his architectural studies in Italy and completed them in France at the Villette School of Architecture where he graduated in 2001 with a special mention from the jury. He rapidly developed a critical approach to the separation between theory and practice. In parallel with his architectural education, he also worked with a number of architects. His involvement in Franco-American workshops has given his work an international flavour and allowed him to absorb other cultures and skills.

Rem Koolhaas wwas born in Rotterdam on 17 November 1944. He began his career as a journalist working for the Haagse Post and also as a set designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association School in London, and after winning the Harkness scholarship he moved to the USA. There he spent some time at the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) in New York, a centre directed by Peter Eisenman. He later moved to Cornell University where he studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers.

In these early years of collaboration between Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis, the name of the group while they were developing their first ideas and conceptual projects was more experimental: Office for Metropolitan Architecture – The Laboratory of Dr. Caligari. A time that served to consolidate initial ideas that would later lead to the formal founding of OMA in 1975 with his three colleagues.

In 1978 he wrote Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory.

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder of the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This program has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe Prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people on the planet.

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. 

OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux (2024), LANTERN in Detroit (2024), Mangalem 21 in Tirana (2023), Aviva Studios – Factory International in Manchester (2023), Apollolaan 171 in Amsterdam (2023), Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo (2023), Toranomon Hills Station Tower in Tokyo (2023), Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. 

AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

Moreau Kusunoki Architectes. Architecture studio founded in Paris in 2011 by Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki. Kusunoki, who earned her degree from the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo, began her career in Shigeru Ban's studio. Moreau, who trained at the École Nationale d’Architecture de Belleville in Paris, worked in SANAA and Kengo Kuma studios. 

In 2008, Moreau and Kusunoki left Tokyo together so that Moreau could open Kengo Kuma’s office in France. Notable projects undertaken by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes include the Théâtre de Beauvaisis in Beauvais, the House of Cultures and Memories in Cayenne, the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Bourget-du-Lac, and the plaza for the Paris District Court (designed by Renzo Piano) at the Porte de Clichy.

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937 to a family of builders. He graduated from Milan Polytechnic in 1964 and began to work with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters. In 1971, he founded the Piano & Rogers studio and, together with Richard Rogers, won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. From the early 1970s to the 1990s, Piano collaborated with engineer Peter Rice, founding Atelier Piano & Rice in 1977. In 1981, he established the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with offices today in Genoa, Paris and New York. Renzo Piano has been awarded the highest honors in architecture, including; the Pritzker Prize; RIBA Royal Gold Medal; Medaille d’Or, UIA; Erasmus Prize; and most recently, the Gold Medal of the AIA.

Rudy Ricciotti  was born in Kouba ( Argelia), of Italian origin on August 22, 1952 and he moved to France at the age of three. Rudy Ricciotti spent part of his youth in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône. He studied engineering in Switzerland in 1975 and he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Marseille in 1980.

Rudy Ricciotti represents a generation of architects that combine creative energy and true building culture. Author of large buildings in France, including the National Choreographic Centre of Aix-en-Provence, also gained international renown as the Gate of Peace in Seoul or Nikolaisaal of Potsdam in Germany, the Festival Palace in Venice, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Liège Philharmonic or Gstaad for a Festival created by Yehudi Menuhin.

In 2005, he won the competition for the construction of the library of Rouen. On November 7, 2007, He won the competition organized by the City of Paris for the construction of the new stage of John Bouin2. He was also appointed in 2002 to a flagship project of the second city of France: le Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) in Marseille, as part of the European Capital of Culture 2013 of the city of Marseille.

He is President Al Dante editions since 2007. Al Dante publishes books (poetry, experimental prose and poetry, theoretical essays, catalogs and artist publications, anthologies, magazines), and CD (sound poetry, music), DVDs, newspapers, participates and organizes events (lectures, presentations , symposia, exhibitions ...). He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui.

Rudy Ricciotti is a recipient of: Grand Prix National d’Architecture, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite.