Alexander Tzonis

Alexander Tzonis (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Τζώνης; born November 8, 1937) is a Greek born architect, researcher and author.

He has made contributions to architectural theory, history, and design cognition bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches in a rare synthesis. Since 1975 he has been collaborating in most projects with Liane Lefaivre. In 1985 he founded and directed Design Knowledge Systems (DKS), a multidisciplinary research institute for the study of architectural methodology and the development of design thinking tools at TUDelft. Tzonis is known for his work on creative design by analogy, the classical canon, history of the emergence and development of modern architectural thinking, and introducing the idea of Critical Regionalism.

Alexander Tzonis was born in Athens where he attended The Athens College. His parents studied in Athens, Gratz, and Vienna. His father was professor of biology in the University of Thessaloniki and active in politics and in the Greek Resistance, his mother the first female chemical engineer in Greece. Tzonis studied architecture in the National Technical University of Athens and was instructed privately in mathematics and art meeting regularly with the architect Dimitris Pikionis who was by then retired from teaching. During the period of his university studies, he worked professionally as a stage designer in the theatre and art director in the cinema. (Never on Sunday, 1960 directed by Jules Dassin). In 1961 he moved to the United States as a Ford Fellow, where he pursued his studies at Yale University, briefly in the Drama School and soon after in the School of Art and Architecture under Paul Rudolph, Shadrach Woods, Robert Venturi, and Serge Chermayeff. In 1965, with sponsorship from the Twentieth Century Fund he was appointed fellow at Yale where he carried out pioneering research on Planning and Design Methodology in collaboration with Chermayeff with whom he co-authored The Shape of Community (1972). In 1968 he was invited to teach at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University by Jerzy Soltan and Josep Lluis Sert appointed assistant professor. There 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 Salama, introducing the newly developed method ELECTRE he worked out a new method for multi-criteria evaluation of architectural projects (1975). In collaboration with Michael Freeman, Etienne de Cointet, and his undergraduate student Robert Berwick, who became later professor of computational linguistics at MIT, he developed a method for design discourse analysis applied to the case of 17th and 18th century texts of French architectural theory, a project funded by the French Government carried out at Harvard (1975).

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