Markus Breitschmid

In 2018, Breitschmid and Olgiati published the book Non-Referential Architecture, a treatise on contemporary architecture. It analyses the societal currents of the early 21st century and argues that those currents are radically different from the epoch of postmodernity. The book proposes a new framework for architecture and defines the seven underlying principles – 1) Experience of Space, 2) Oneness, 3) Newness, 4) Construction, 5) Contradiction, 6) Order, 7) Sensemaking – for a Non-Referential Architecture.

Since 2013, Olgiati and Breitschmid propagate Non-Referential Architecture as a response to a contemporary societal current that increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, political and otherwise. The first use of the term Non-Referential appears in a reprint of an interview between Olgiati and Breitschmid in the Italian journal Domus. In 2014, Breitschmid published a rebuttal titled "Architecture is Derived from Architecture" (published in German language) 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.

Since 2006, Breitschmid has made a name for himself by means of a sustained collaboration with architect Valerio Olgiati on numerous publications that took on the form of books, essays, and interviews. In her 2012 book "Forms of Practice", the Rumanian-British architecture historian Irina Davidovici argues that the thesis "The Significance of the Idea" – that Breitschmid used to describe Olgiati's œuvre – is pertinent for all of the contemporary architecture of “post-Enlightenment culture.”

Breitschmid is a professor of architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) since 2004. Previously, among other academic appointments, he was the "2003 Visiting Historian for the History of Architecture and Urbanism" at Cornell University and taught at the University of North Carolina. He has been a visiting lecturer and visiting critic at many universities, museums, and professional associations in America, Europe, and Asia.

Breitschmid submitted his doctoral dissertation "Der Baugedanke bei Friedrich Nietzsche" at the Technische Universität Berlin in 1999; it was subsequently published as a German-language book titled "Der bauende Geist. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Architektur" (The Building Spirit. Friedrich Nietzsche and Architecture). Together with books on Nietzsche by Fritz Neumeyer and Tilmann Buddensieg, "Der bauende Geist" became the foundation for scholarship on the subject of Nietzsche and architecture. "Der bauende Geist" was included in Hanno-Walter Kruft's "A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present" for the revised 2013 edition.

Markus Breitschmid (born 20 April 1966, Lucerne, Switzerland) is a Swiss architectural theoretician and the author of several books on contemporary architecture and philosophical aesthetics. His most highly regarded books are Der bauende Geist. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Architektur (2001), The Significance of the Idea. The Architecture of Valerio Olgiati (2008, first print), and Non-Referential Architecture (2018, first edition). He has lived and worked in the USA since the 1990s, and is a permanent resident of the USA. Breitschmid, together with the architect Valerio Olgiati, has introduced the term Non-Referential Architecture into the architectural discourse.