About the Piece

TITLE:  Telos:  Interdisciplinary Public Education, Recreation, and Restorative Technology Park

YEAR:  March 29, 1989

ARCHITECT/ARTIST:  Eugene Tssui

MATERIALS:  Prismacolor pencil, colored ink, pencil and pastel chalk on architectural copy paper

SIZE:  22.5 inches high by 49 inches wide (actual drawing not including the frame)

PRICE:  Not for sale.

DESCRIPTION:  

The word, Telos, is a Greek word meaning, purposefulness, or, the final purpose.  On a 910 acre tract of land in Brisbane, California, USA, architect, Eugene Tssui, designed a park that educated global visitors about the challenges and responsibilities of our future.  The land was owned by Mr. Y.H.Chen, president of Tuntex Corporation, a Taiwanese-based global textile manufacturer, and Mr. Chen wanted to create something educational, timeless, and extraordinary on the site where the world's population could easily visit.  The project is a platform to show the interrelationship of architecture to Nature and how the two are intimately related in multidimensional ways, and to show how Nature can be our teacher to guide us to the direction of restorative design--design that does no harm to the living organisms of our planet, and to develop a way of life where optimal physical and mental health becomes based on compassion, empathy, and the search for life's meaning and purpose.

The drawing shows only one portion of this 910 acre development, the portion that is the marina area where small ships and boats on the waters of the San Francisco Bay, can dock and de-board amongst an array of oval, swiveling windmills that generate electricity to the development.  Behind these windmills stands the mile-long, 70 foot high, recycling waterfall which can clean itself through oxygenation of the falling water that also falls on a continuous bank of Pelton water wheels that generate electricity.  This water source travels throughout the mile-long site and is used for showers, sinks, toilets, and drinking fountains after it passes through a filtering system now called Lifestraw, which creates drinking water from any polluted water source.   The ultimate goal of this park is for visitors to question their daily assumptions and dare to look beyond themselves into a world where the challenge of the unknown becomes the motivating factor to question and destroy the human behaviors that harm others and all living things.  This is a place where privilege and domination have no meaning.  It is a place where inquisitiveness and originality without thought of financial gain becomes the platform of human relationship and kinship with Nature.

Eugene Tssui Biography

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During primary school and middle school at the University of Minnesota, Eugene Tssui, was part of an experiment in creativity and talent development initiated by educational psychologist, E. Paul Torrance, in the 1960s. Tssui attended Columbia University, the University of Oregon, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds an Interdisciplinary Doctorate in architecture and education. He worked for the Organizing Committee of the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics and with the revolutionary American and German architects, Bruce Goff and Dr. Frei Otto. In the late 1980s he worked with the Bay Area Open Space Council researching historical rates of growth and predicting the growth and needs of San Francisco Bay area cities in the areas of population, economy, sewer capacity, housing, green space, traffic, pollution, road capacity, utility use, effects of climate change, businesses and schools. He opened his own California-based firm in 1990 and was asked to teach architecture and ecology at elite universities throughout China from 1999 to 2015, and at UC Berkeley and Ohio University. In China, he assisted in the internationalization of the Chinese education system in the city of Shenzhen, a city of 21 million residents, and was responsible for 275,000 students, 17,000 teachers in 155 schools. He is the author of 12 international books, calendars and portfolios on architecture, ecology, and behavioral change and over 100 international articles about his work. He has won professional grant awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and the American Institute of Architects. In 2011 and 2012 he was a research scholar at Harvard university. He has designed two, 50,000 to 100,000 population cities in China, for two indigenous minority cultures.

In 2013 he was given the title, “Guardian Angel of the Planet”, sharing this title with Jane Goodall and Jean Michael Cousteau, conferred by Project Coyote, a national coalition of scientists and educators. He is a World and Senior Olympic level competitive athlete and is the Four-Time Gymnastics All-Around Champion in the Senior Olympics, an Eight-Time Amateur Boxing World Champion, and an Eight-Time US Presidential Sports Award winner conferred by US Presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He is a music composer and his piano pieces have been performed in the USA, Canada, and China. Dr. Tssui’s interdisciplinary/anticipatory philosophy is a platform for his impetuous search for meaning, purpose and excellence in a multi-dimensional way of life. He has been featured on numerous television programs such as National Geographic, Discovery Channel, PBS, CNN, the BBC network, The McNeil/Lehrer Report, MTV Cribs, The Learning Channel, Disney Channel, The History Channel, CCTV China, EuroTV, NBC, ABC, CBS, and others and is the subject of four documentary movies. The New York Museum of Modern Art exhibited a selection of his architecture projects from September 15, 2023 through January 20, 2024 in a joint exhibit titled, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, featuring the 21st century pioneers of ecological architecture. He was recently featured in the London Financial Times HTSI magazine. He is married to international sociologist / educator and Emmy Award winning movie producer, Dr. Elisabeth P. Montgomery. They have three children and four grandchildren, and reside in Emeryville and Mount Shasta, California and Shenzhen, China.