The long halls of the Watergate apartment towers in Emeryville are numbingly hotel-like, so it comes as a shock when the last door on the left opens and there stands a man in a bright yellow, ventilated pantsuit covered by a heavy black cape lined in pink and trimmed in gold.

He is Dr. Eugene Tssui, formerly Tsui, an architect so visionary that time still has not caught up to his "fish house" in Berkeley, and it was built in 1994. Three ensuing Tssui buildings that went up have since been purchased and torn down for the land value. That leaves one silver carp of a house to show for 20 years of labor, and still he stands proud in his "solar suit" and cape, unfazed by rejection and ready to go into battle with planning commissioners and preservationists everywhere.

"Often people don't follow reason. They follow acceptability, which is why we don't have buildings that stand up in tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes," he says. "If I'm just being paid to build a Georgian mansion, what meaning does that have? I'm about making the changes necessary to make the future a better place."

That is the point of departure for "Telos: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui," a documentary film that makes its Bay Area premiere next Saturday at the Roxie Theater, as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

At 58 minutes, the film is barely long enough to cover all of Tssui's costume changes and half the job titles on his business card, which unfolds to the size of two cards to accommodate "architect, city and regional planner, contractor, inventor, research scientist, author, fine artist, industrial designer, composer, clothing designer, and public lecturer."

Degrees from UC Berkeley

Also listed on the card are his master's degrees in architecture and city planning and doctorate in education, all from UC Berkeley, and his hobbies, which give the film its action: "performing musician, four-time Senior Olympic gymnastics all around champion, and eight-time amateur boxing world champion" (over-40 welterweight division).

"The movie doesn't deal with architecture particularly. It's about a person with an attitude that is unbreakable," he says during an interview at his condo, which has walls textured in bas relief fish scales and tentacles, with interior porthole windows. He'd have liked to have gone further with that, but his wife, sociologist and educator Elisabeth Montgomery, is practical. They've raised three kids there, and she has hopes of selling the place someday.

'I've had to compromise'

"My wife and I are at constant odds with each other about our living environment," he says, "She is of the thought that we will have to sell this someday, and we're never going to sell it if I go all out on my design. So I've had to compromise."

He's also had to compromise on the spelling of his last name, which mysteriously goes from Tsui to Tssui, in subtitles on the film. But there is a logical explanation.

"On Dec. 21, 2010, I was in China sleeping in my office, and just before dawn I heard a voice that identified itself as Genghis Khan," he says with an earnestness that suggests this is indisputable fact. "He said, 'I want you to add another S to your name, Eugene, because a double S has a magic power, and you need all the help you can get because you are about to do some very important things for the world."

Tssui awoke from this dream, emboldened by the second S, but his wife, again the voice of reason, persuaded him it would not be worth the trouble to have it legally changed. So it is Tsui in some places and Tssui in others, pronounced "Sway" or "Ssway."

Under either name, he sprang to action after that visitation, and headed north to Mount Shasta, where there were fewer neighbors to complain about his plan to create a utopian complex and conference center, called Telos (Greek for purposefulness).

Along the way, he met filmmaker Kyung Lee, who brought her camera to every public office where Tssui pleaded his case for Telos.

The film's dramatic tension comes from watching various elected officials squirm as they inform Tssui that a building that looks like a jellyfish might not sit well with some of the more conservative elements living in far Northern California.

'Best architect ever'

Throughout the film, the 59-year-old Tssui seems excessively flamboyant in his dress and design, but that is all a byproduct. His yellow two-piece ensemble is actually "moving architecture," he says, adjustable to the climate. All the flaps and tentacles and bug-eye windows in his designs serve a similar purpose of energy conservation, air-conditioning and earthquake resistance.

"My whole philosophy is the study of nature applied to human-made environments," he says. "I asked myself who is the best architect ever. It is not a person. It is nature. Nature has practiced architecture a lot longer than we have as a human race. It has all the answers. Our buildings would not fall down under earthquakes and tsunamis if we understood how that worked."

Tssui has been disappointed that the seemingly progressive cities of Berkeley and San Francisco have not come around to his way of thinking, even 20 years after he showed the way with the fish house in the Berkeley flats off Ashby Avenue.

It has proved difficult to find clients as agreeable as those first clients. They could see his genius. They were his parents, who still own the fish house, which is probably why it has not been torn down like the others.

"It was designed as if nature were the architect," he says, proudly.

For years, his office headquarters was in a showcase he designed in Emeryville. He sold it in 2007 and should have known what was coming.

Too unusual to rent

"They couldn't find anybody to rent it because it was so unusual," he says, "so they destroyed it and built a box."

But he'd build it the same way again, and if Emeryville and Berkeley and San Francisco won't have him, San Pablo will. At his workstation is a scale model of a 12,000-square-foot, two-story residence that he will call Telos Window of the World. Shaped like a guitar, with no corners, it has been approved by the Planning Department of the city of San Pablo. The construction budget is $650,000 with a planned completion of February 2015. He already has a tenant lined up, Tsui (not Tssui) Design and Research Inc.

"A lot of good things have happened, one being this movie," Tssui says. "I don't know, does the double S have anything to do with all this?"

"Telos: the Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui:" screens at 4:45 p.m. May 31 at the Roxie Theater. Tickets: $15. The San Francisco Green Film Festival runs May 29 through June 4. (415) 552-5580.

To watch a short video go to: http://
