"Mediocre tools lead to mediocre thinking"

Architect Bernard Tschumi has donated the archives of his Bridge City project - developed for the City of Lausanne in 1988 - to EPFL. We spoke with Tschumi about the important lessons these documents contain, while he was at EPFL for a talk on 11 October. The Bridge City project archives - comprising five models, twelve rolls of plans and dozens of drawings, photographs and files - have just been transferred from New York to their new home at EPFL's Modern Architecture Archives (ACM). New York-based architect Bernard Tschumi donated the archives to ACM, where they will join those of his father Jean Tschumi, founder of the Lausanne School of Architecture and the architect behind Swiss insurer Vaudoise's headquarters in Lausanne, the World Health Organization's buildings in Geneva and Nestlé's headquarters in Vevey. The Bridge City designs were commissioned by the City of Lausanne in 1988 and were developed jointly by Bernard Tschumi and fellow architect Luca Merlini. Their concept won the City's request for proposals to redevelop the Flon district, which was then an abandoned industrial zone. Their idea was to build four inhabited bridges between Chauderon Bridge and where Place de l'Europe is currently, in order to link the two sides of the Flon river valley.