Alexander Tzonis


Alexander Tzonis is a Greek-born architect, author, and researcher.
He has made contributions to architectural theory, history and design cognition, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches in a synthesis. Since 1975, he has been collaborating in most projects with Liane Lefaivre. In 1985, he founded and directed Design Knowledge Systems, a multidisciplinary research institute for the study of architectural theory and the development of design thinking tools at TU Delft. Tzonis is known for his work on the classical canon, history of the emergence and development of modern architectural thinking, creative design by analogy, and introducing the idea of critical regionalism.

Biography

Alexander Tzonis was born in Athens where he attended The Athens College. His grandfather, Alexandros Tzonis, architect, graduated from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul in 1901 and practiced in Thessaloniki during the Interwar period. His parents studied in Athens, Graz, and Vienna and were research associates at the Vivarium, Vienna under Hans Leo Przibram and at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, Berlin under Max Hartmann. Between 1941 and 1945 his father, Konstantinos Tzonis, was professor of biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his mother, Hariklia Xanthopoulos, the first female chemical engineer in Greece, were both active in politics and in the Greek Resistance.

Education

Tzonis studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. Between 1955 and 1956, he was instructed privately in painting by Spyros Papaloukas. His architecture archive is deposited in the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki and by Dimitris Pikionis, by then retired from active teaching at the Athens Polytechnic. During his studies in the Polytechnic, Tzonis worked in parallel as a stage designer in the theatre and cinema, and assisted the painter and stage designer Yannis Tsarouchis.
In 1961, he moved to the United States as a Fulbright and Ford Fellow, where he pursued his studies at Yale University, briefly at the Drama School, and soon after in the School of Art and Architecture under Paul Rudolph, Shadrach Woods, Robert Venturi, and Serge Chermayeff.

Career

In 1965, with sponsorship from the Twentieth Century Fund, he was appointed a fellow at Yale, where he carried out research on Planning and Design Methodology in collaboration with Chermayeff with whom he went on to co-author The Shape of Community.
In 1968 he was appointed at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University by Jerzy Soltan and Josep Lluis Sert as assistant professor and in 1975 he became associate professor. He taught and did advanced research in analytical design methods in association with Walter Isard and Ovadia Salama, receiving outside advice from Anatol Rapaport and Seymour Papert. In collaboration with Ovadia Salama, he introduced the newly developed method ELECTRE for multi-criteria evaluation of design projects.
In 1972, he was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to spend a year in France where he taught, researched, and wrote, joined by Liane Lefaivre, and working closely with the young generation of French architecture critics and historians.
Returning to Harvard, he set up a multi-disciplinary collaborative research project to develop a discourse method for analyzing French architectural theory texts, funded by the French Government. The research participants included Michael Freeman, Etienne de Cointet, Ovadia Salama, Liane Lefaivre and his undergraduate student Robert Berwick,.
Reacting to the socio-environmental urban crisis of the 1960s and the inability of mainstream architecture to cope with it, he wrote Towards a Non-oppressive Environment, Cambridge that dealt with the historical roots and the underlying conflicts of the crisis. It was soon translated in six languages. Following its publication, Tzonis introduced at Harvard the critical-historical study of modern design thinking and initiated the teaching of History of Design Methodology, for the first time internationally.
In 1981, while the Graduate School of Design was undergoing major changes with Gerald McCue succeeding Maurice D. Kilbridge as Dean of the School, Tzonis moved to the Netherlands as Crown Professor of design methodology at the Delft University of Technology TUD) where he founded and directed Design Knowledge Systems, a multi-disciplinary research institute on Architectural Cognition. Among the collaborators were Joop Dorman,, along with Donald Schön and William Porter both from MIT, Daniel Shefer from the Technion, and Liane Lefaivre, o-professor at , Vienna.

Contributions

Creative design by analogy

Key to his approach was that Analytical computation, far from obstructing design creativity, enhances it; and that design innovation “leaps” are mostly achieved through spatial-functional analogies, recruiting and recombining design components and design rules from a thesaurus of precedents, including concrete objects or abstract theories from very distant domains. The way to observe how this recruiting works is to look at design thinking through the framework of morphology, operation, and performance. Design analysis and analogy, which are usually seen as rivals, are, actually, complementary allies in creative design. Design by Analogy was one of the major research themes of Design Knowledge Systems. The theory of design creativity by analogy was further explored and discussed by Tzonis and Lefaivre in cases of designers, in history and contemporary, on: Leonardo da Vinci, Le Corbusier, and co-authored with Lefaivre, Aldo van Eyck and on Santiago Calatrava.

The canon of classical architecture and emergence of modern architecture

Tzonis and Lefaivre investigated and discussed the canon of classical architecture as a cultural-historical and cognitive phenomenon. The idea was presented in Classical Architecture,. James S. Ackerman wrote about the book that it ‘reveals the principles that link the great masters of the tradition from Vitruvius to Mies’. While differing in many fundamental ideas of Tzonis and Lefaivre, John Summerson called it ‘a … must … for anybody who proposes to take classical architecture seriously’, and David Watkin that it ‘should be read by all students … as well as by those who still believe that the classical orders are outdated and irrelevant’. Pursuing the same lines of investigation into the 1990s, Tzonis focused on the cognitive underpinnings of the classical design rule system as well as its historical origins, publishing in 2004 Classical Greek Architecture, the Construction of the Modern, co-authored with P Giannisi..

Critical regionalism

Tzonis and Lefaivre coined the term ‘Critical Regionalism’ employing the concept of regionalism whose origins go as far back as Vitruvius, to deal with a current problem: the need to define a role for buildings and cities in a planet that seems to be united only by technological media and ‘globalization’, and divided by confrontation and competition. In this role, designers whether solving problems or exploring possibilities, should think critically – in the Kantian sense. They should overcome biases favoring imported or local choices through questioning and reflection, considering the specifics of the actual situation, the region. While welcoming what the open world can offer give a hand to interaction and exchange, they should value the uniqueness of the ‘region’, the quality of social ties, the physical and cultural resources.
This idea of regionalism that goes back to Mumford’s pre-WWII criticism of the Beaux Arts, the International Style, and the post-WWII ‘modernist’ planning, differs fundamentally from the uses of regionalism of the past that employed the region as a defensive or offensive concept, a political or marketing construct promoting chauvinist movements, but also folklore commercialism.
This new approach to regionalism was first presented in 1981, in ‘The Grid and the Pathway,’ an essay published in Architecture in Greece, and the same year in another essay - written in collaboration with Anthony Alofsin, a student assistant of Tzonis at that time - included in Fur eine andere Architektur. The Swiss sociologist, writer and artist Lucius Burckhardt, the leading editor of the book, invited Tzonis and Lefaivre to contribute an essay which prompted a chain of studies and numerous debates and symposia – among them the International Working Seminar on Critical Regionalism organized by Marvin Malecha and Spyros Amourgis hosted by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona - and inspired projects around the world.

Academic general editor

Parallel to his teaching, research and writing, Tzonis worked as academic general editor with Penguin Books during the first part of the 1970s initiating the multidisciplinary series Man Made Environment. During the second part of 1970s, after a failed attempt to edit a multi-volume Harvard Encyclopedia of Architecture, with Gavin Borden as publisher, he undertook as general editor the multi-volume Garland Architectural Archives, one of the largest architectural publishing projects with over seventy volumes.

Visiting Professorships and Affiliations

Tzonis has been visiting professor at the National University Singapore,, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Technion, Israël Institute of Technology,, Columbia University,, Institut d'Architecture et d'Urbanisme, Strasbourg,, the Université de Montréal. In 2002 he was invited to teach a course at College de France on ‘Architecture and Spatial Intelligence’.
Tzonis has also published "Ten Lithographs Designed By Manfred Ibel and Alexander Tzonis On Ten Poems By Constantine Cavafy" The poems were translated for this publication by Stephen Spender and Nicos Stangos. The portfolio was printed by the Carl Purington Rollins / Printing-Office of the Yale University Press New Haven, Connecticut, 1966.

Symposia

Tzonis conceived and organized several major international symposia. Among them: