Markus Breitschmid is an internationally active architectural theoretician, architect, and author on architecture.

Breitschmid received his education in Switzerland, the United States, and Germany. He is a registered architect (Level E.T.H. - No.1/6110) and a member of the Swiss Institute of Architects and Engineers (No. 135605). He received his Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) in Engineering Science from the Technische Universität Berlin.

Breitschmid has been teaching at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) since 2004. He is a former chair of the Bachelor of Architecture program. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Breitschmid was the “2003 Visiting Historian for Architecture and Urbanism” at Cornell University. He held a tenure-track assistant professor position at the University of North Carolina from 1998 to 2002. Breitschmid has held additional positions as an assistant professor, instructor, and visiting scholar at several European and American universities since 1994. He has been a visiting lecturer and visiting critic at many universities, museums, and professional associations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He serves on accreditation teams of the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) since 2012. He is a faculty councilor for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) since 2009. Breitschmid is also a faculty member of the material culture & public humanities graduate program of the Department of Religion & Culture. Breitschmid was appointed to the Diploma Commission of the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio in 2016. In 2020, he was appointed a visiting professor for architecture theory at the Universidad Nacional de Piura in Peru. Breitschmid's work has been invited to contribute or has been shown at such venues as the 2020 Biennale di Venezia di Architettura, the 2019 Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa, and the 2018 Architecture Biennial in Chicago.

Breitschmid’s scholarship focuses on the aesthetic mentality of modernism and postmodernity, in particular its promulgations in architecture and philosophical aesthetics. He has authored several books on subjects such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Valerio Olgiati, Contemporary Swiss Architecture, Tectonics in Architecture, and Bruno Taut. His publications have appeared in and have been translated into several languages, among them in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. His most widely acknowledged books are Non-Referential Architecture (1st ed., 2018), The Significance of the Idea (1st print, 2007), and Der bauende Geist. Freidrich Nietzsche und die Architektur (2001). Among other journals, his essays have been published in architecture's most prominent journals such as in Archithese, A+U, Casabella, Domus, El Croquis, and Werk, Bauen + Wohnen. Breitschmid’s work has been awarded grants and scholarships, among them from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies of the Fine Arts and Pro Helvetia. In 2015, Breitschmid received an Honorary Medal of the Institute of Peruvian Architects in Lima for his contribution to Swiss Modernism.