Tzonis is known for his work on the classical canon, history of the emergence and development of modern architectural thinking, creative design by analogy, and introducing the idea of critical regionalism.

Between 1941 and 1945 his father, Konstantinos Tzonis, was professor of biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his mother, Hariklia Xanthopoulos, the first female chemical engineer in Greece, were both active in politics and in the Greek Resistance.

[2][circular reference] His architecture archive is deposited in the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki and by Dimitris Pikionis, by then retired from active teaching at the Athens Polytechnic.

[3] In 1965, with sponsorship from the Twentieth Century Fund, he was appointed a fellow at Yale, where he carried out research on Planning and Design Methodology in collaboration with Chermayeff with whom he went on to co-author The Shape of Community (1972).

He taught and did advanced research in analytical design methods in association with Walter Isard and Ovadia Salama, receiving outside advice from Anatol Rapaport and Seymour Papert.

[5] The research participants included Michael Freeman, Etienne de Cointet, Ovadia Salama, Liane Lefaivre and his undergraduate student Robert Berwick, (later professor of computational linguistics at MIT).

Among the collaborators were Joop Doorman, (TUD), along with Donald Schön and William Porter both from MIT, Daniel Shefer from the Technion, and Liane Lefaivre, co-professor at [the Universität für angewandte Kunst], Vienna.

While welcoming what the open world can offer give a hand to interaction and exchange, they should value the uniqueness of the ‘region’, the quality of social ties, the physical and cultural resources.

The Swiss sociologist, writer and artist Lucius Burckhardt, the leading editor of the book, invited Tzonis and Lefaivre to contribute an essay which prompted a chain of studies and numerous debates and symposia – among them the International Working Seminar on Critical Regionalism organized by Marvin Malecha and Spyros Amourgis (1989) hosted by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona - and inspired projects around the world.

[13] Parallel to his teaching, research and writing, Tzonis worked as academic general editor with Penguin Books during the first part of the 1970s initiating the multidisciplinary series Man Made Environment.