Alexander Tzonis

Alexander Tzonis (Greek Αλέξανδρος Τζώνης, born November 8, 1937 in Athens ) is an architectural theorist and critic. In 2005 he went as professor at TU Delft in retirement. Since 2007 he is professor at Tsinghua University.

Biography

Tzonis is the son of a chemical engineer and a biology professor at the University of Thessaloniki. He turned only to mathematics, but worked during his studies as a set designer and designer for scenes. A grant from the Ford Foundation enabled him to study at Yale, where he published after his studies of the works of design methodology along with his professor Serge Chermayeff. He taught first at Harvard and later became a professor at the TU Delft. His wife Liane Lefaivre is Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she is also co- author of many of his works.

Work

Tzonis coined the term critical regionalism in architecture, as was his attention to the canon of classical Greek.