Bernard Tschumi retrospective opens on April 30 at Centre Pompidou, Paris

Book a trip to the Centre Pompidou in Paris this summer. The Centre is hosting the first major European retrospective of iconic French-Swiss architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi from April 30 to July 28, 2014.

Exploring Tschumi's influential work from 1975 to the present, the exhibition will feature a thematic arrangement of archival documents, films, and around 350 of his never-before-seen sketches, drawings, collages, and models -- all displayed in an installation he designed himself.

And of course, the retrospective will give insight into some of Tschumi's most famous theoretical and architectural projects like the Parc de la Villette in Paris, The Manhattan Transcripts to the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Art in Tourcoing, France, and many more throughout the world.

Keep reading for more details.

"The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou — based on Tschumi’s work as an architect, educator, and writer — explores the making of architecture as a series of arguments, ideas, influences, and responses to the contemporary definition of architecture today. The works are presented in a series of vertical panels arranged into thematic zones and a grid of tables covering the period from the 1975 to present. On view will be a number of original sketches and collages never exhibited before."

"The entrance to the exhibition addresses the biography of Tschumi, who was born of French-Swiss parentage. Outlined are his childhood, divided between Paris and Lausanne; his education at the ETH in Zurich; and his early travels, in addition to a timeline of Tschumi’s career to the present day.

Visitors entering into the main gallery will see drawings from Tschumi’s early theoretical projects — the Screenplays, Advertisements for Architecture, and The Manhattan Transcripts, including the 32-ft “The Street,” which is read sequentially, as the viewer walks along its length."

"Visitors are then presented with Tschumi’s major architectural projects, organized around two primary ideas and five themes. These primary ideas are concept and notation: there is no architecture without an idea or concept, just as there is no architecture without a method of notation to express its content. Architecture is not a study of form, but rather a form of knowledge.

Presented as a sequence, the five themes in the exhibition each propose a fundamental area in the definition of architecture. The themes are: Space and Event; Program and Superposition; Vectors and Envelopes; Context and Content; and Concept-forms."

"Tschumi illustrates these themes through a series of well-known and lesser-known projects, from the historic Parc de Ia Villette in Paris to later projects such as the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Vacheron Constantin Headquarters in Geneva, as well as the new architecture for the redesign for the Paris Zoological Park, which will open to the public shortly before the exhibition."

"In total, the show includes 45 projects located in Europe, the United States, China and the Middle East. Alongside the projects are a series of tables that extend and amplify the main narrative of the exhibition through topics related to architectural thought and production. The topics include: material strategies; rendering techniques before and after the digital age; planning “games”; iterations and repetition; books; and sources from other disciplines that influenced Tschumi’s thought, such as cinema, literature, fine art, and philosophy."

"The exhibition is the most complete display of Tschumi’s work to date, 20 years after a show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1994, and the first large exhibition of its kind organized in Europe. The exhibition is organized around his many public roles: Tschumi as a theorist, builder, and a cultural presence."

"Tschumi’s work has been widely exhibited, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, the Pompidou Center in Paris, as well as art galleries in the United States and Europe."

"An illustrated catalogue with over 600 color and black-and-white reproductions and essays by exhibition curators Frédéric Migayrou and Aurélien Lemonier accompanies the exhibition. The essays examine the development of Tschumi’s work since the1970s, the dialogue of his work with the history of architecture, and his influence on architecture and educational and cultural environments and institutions. The catalogue also contains an extensive interview with the architect."

All photos courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects.