Lausanne architect Bernard Tschumi received the Grand Prix from the French Academy of Fine Arts on Wednesday for his entire career. An exhibition entitled “Poétiques” is also dedicated to him at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris until January 26, 2025.
The Grand Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts, awarded on Wednesday to Franco-Swiss Bernard Tschumi, comes with a check for 35,000 euros (32,500 francs). In Paris, we owe the redevelopment of La Villette to the 80-year-old Lausanne architect. Bernard Tschumi, fascinated, while he was still a student, by the city of Chicago, built places of culture in Athens, Rouen, in China and schools in Renens, Paris and Miami.
Among the multitude of his achievements in Switzerland and around the world, we note the new Acropolis museum in Athens or the Blue Tower residential tower in New York. In Lausanne, he is the author of the “Bridges-Ville” project developed at the end of the 1980s. In the end, only the pedestrian bridge over the Flon will be built out of the four initially imagined.
He also designed the Vacheron Constantin headquarters building in Geneva, the Carnal Hall, cultural center of the Institut du Rosey, in Rolle (VD) and even rehabilitated the former IRIL factory to accommodate ECAL, the cantonal school d’art de Lausanne, in Renens (VD).
>> Watch this extract from the show Viva (1993) about Bernard Tschumi’s projects for Flon in Lausanne:
A life between Paris and New York
Bernard Tschumi is the son of Jean Tschumi, founder of the School of Architecture in Lausanne. We owe to the latter buildings of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the headquarters of Nestlé in Vevey and the headquarters of Vaudoise Assurance in Lausanne, we read on the EPFL website.
-For Bernard Tschumi, who lives between Paris and New York and teaches at Columbia University, “Switzerland has very good architects. But architects who self-censor, there are chapels. Including the one we call the modern architecture, which has become an ideological framework which does not encourage creation as much as in other countries which do not have this architectural culture (…) There is a Swiss sensitivity which is very positive. But at the conceptual level. we could expect more invention…”, he said in a recent interview published in 24 Heures and La Tribune de Genève.
Concept and context, movement and event, architecture and notation are among the notions which characterize the written, drawn and built work of Bernard Tschumi. The French Academy of Fine Arts is dedicating the “Poétiques” exhibition to him until January 26, 2025, which retraces the main projects of the architect’s career.
The Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts was previously awarded to Alvaro Siza, Henri Ciriani and Christian de Portzamparc.
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