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.