1. Markus Breitschmid is an American architectural theoretician, architect, and the author of several books on contemporary architecture and philosophical aesthetics.
22 Facts About Markus Breitschmid
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Markus Breitschmid's writings have been translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.
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Markus Breitschmid's work has been exhibited at the Galerie d'Architecture in Paris and the Royal Institute of British Architects in London.
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Markus Breitschmid was born in Lucerne, Switzerland on April 20,1966.
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Markus Breitschmid holds a military as well as a civil education.
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Markus Breitschmid completed his training as a Mechanized Artillery Officer in the rank of a First Lieutenant in the Swiss Armed Forces in 1988.
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Markus Breitschmid received his architectural education in Switzerland, the United States, and Germany.
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Markus Breitschmid has been a professor of architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University since 2004.
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Markus Breitschmid has held a visiting professorship at the Universidad de Piura, located in Piura and Lima, Peru from 2020 to 2022.
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In 2016, Markus Breitschmid was appointed to the diploma commission of the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio.
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Markus Breitschmid has been a visiting lecturer and critic at many universities, museums, and professional associations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
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Markus Breitschmid was awarded the American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Gold Medal in 1994 as a top graduate student.
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Markus Breitschmid received a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advances Studies of the Fine Arts in Chicago in 2007.
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Markus Breitschmid's writing concerns the aesthetic mentality of modernism and contemporary architecture.
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Between 2006 and 2020, Markus Breitschmid wrote numerous books, essays, interviews, and other texts on the work of architect Valerio Olgiati.
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Markus Breitschmid entered the arena of the international discourse on architecture by means of his doctoral dissertation Der Baugedanke bei Friedrich Nietzsche at the Technische Universitat Berlin in 1999; it was published as a German-language book titled Der bauende Geist.
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Markus Breitschmid has repeatedly pointed out during lectures that his work on Nietzsche's ideas on building served as the foundation of his book on Non-Referential Architecture.
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Since 2013, Markus Breitschmid has propagated Non-Referential Architecture as a response to a contemporary societal current that increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, political and otherwise.
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In 2014, Markus Breitschmid published a rebuttal titled "Architecture is Derived from Architecture" in the Swiss journal Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, thereby responding to an architectural claim made by others that attempts to imbue meaning into architecture from the extra-architectural.
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Markus Breitschmid wrote the book Non-Referential Architecture, a treatise on contemporary architecture, during a sabbatical in Ithaca, New York, and in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2016 and 2017.
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Contrary to the misconception that the book calls for the abolishment of references in architecture, Markus Breitschmid argues that non-referentiality does not mean that architects would not use references anymore but rather that architectural references have lost their semantic meaning.
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Markus Breitschmid collaborated with architect Valerio Olgiati from 2006 to 2022.