Elliptic City - Swiss Pavilion at the 10th Biennale in Venice

The Swiss Federal Commission for Arts invited Bernard Tschumi, an architect living in New York and Paris with French and Swiss citizenship, to represent their country at the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice. In his contribution titled “Elliptic City: Independent Financial Center of the Americas”, Tschumi demonstrates with a specific project, planned for one of the Caribbean islands, how his architectural designs come into being. The architect captured the real and mythical conditions he encountered on this island. Quite unexpectedly, nature and financial economy merge in his project. Instead of a strict urban plan, Bernard Tschumi presented a flexible concept suitable for various activities, from a shopping center to a hotel and from a tourist facility to a shopping zone. The exhibition in the Swiss pavilion is conceived as a richly illustrated story. It shows the unusual interaction between local efforts for environmental protection and global strategies of the international banking world. Visitors will see a series of brightly illuminated images, a large model, and listen to a musical performance. All three parts simultaneously speak to both the local and global language of contemporary architecture.
Bernard Tschumi was initially known for his theoretical works. He conceived exhibitions that were published in 1981 in the book The Manhattan Transcripts. In 1994, he published a series of his essays under the title Architecture and Disjunction. In 1983, he won the prestigious competition for the Parc de la Villette in northeastern Paris. The project covers an area of 50 hectares and the costs rose to 900 million dollars. Tschumi landscaped the park with unconventional buildings, promenades, and bridges. He is currently building a new Acropolis Museum in Athens, a sports center for the University of Cincinnati, a concert hall with 6000 seats in Limoges, a museum near Dijon, and a residential tower in New York City. From 1988 to 2003, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Columbia University in New York. His latest book Event Cities 3 was published last year.
The work of Bernard Tschumi has been featured in many exhibitions such as at MoMA in New York, at the Venice Biennale, NAI in Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and various galleries in New York. On the occasion of the “Elliptic City” exhibition, BAK (Swiss Federal Office of Culture) in collaboration with the New York publishing house The Monacelli Press published an English catalog titled Tschumi on Architecture. Conversations with Enrique Walker. In addition, three separate booklets were published containing complete translations of the texts in German, French, and Italian. Enrique Walker, who conducted interviews with Bernard Tschumi and wrote other texts in the publication, works as an architect in New York and teaches at Columbia University. The graphic design of the publication was done by Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans from the studio COMA, based in New York and Amsterdam.