Drawings, international competition for National Theatre and Opera House, Tokyo, Japan 日本東京國立劇場國際建築比賽參賽作品繪圖

In 1986, a high-profile design competition was launched in Tokyo for a new national theatre and opera house. Arriving at the height of a Japanese building boom that was attracting attention around the world, the competition drew some of architecture’s leading minds, including Bernard Tschumi. While it placed second and was never built, Tschumi’s proposal represents an important consolidation of the ideas that shaped his early career—coming three years after his groundbreaking Parc de la Villette, on the outskirts of Paris—and influenced the deconstructivist direction that architecture began to take in the late 1980s.

Showing Tschumi’s interests in architectural sequences—how spaces might unfold like a film or musical score—the proposal pulls apart the typical functions of a performance venue and organises them into ‘programmatic strips’, including a ‘glass avenue’ with box office, restaurant, shop, and other spaces beneath a curving glass canopy. Borrowing from musical and dance notation, Tschumi’s drawings abstractly indicate activities such as performances and back-of-house operations, expressing his ideas about the dynamic relationship between buildings and the events that take place inside them.

This series consists of a concept sketch of the building and interior and exterior perspective drawings, produced as part of the competition entry.