Patrik Schumacher is an architect who thinks the world needs more unfettered capitalism, not less. He loves Brexit and the escape it offers from “the paralysing embrace of the EU’s interventionist regulatory overreach”. He wants all public funding of art schools to be stopped because “contemporary art is not justifiable by argument”. He is unapologetic about working for dictatorships and has attacked a list of “moralising critics” of which I am proud to be one. In short he delights in taking the opposite position to the centre-left consensus of much of his profession. He is also the high priest of parametricism, a style or philosophy of architecture whose “rationality” and “obvious superiority” means, he believes, that it should and will supplant all alternatives. Among its adherents, parametricism inspires devotion; others view it with mistrust, not to say fear and loathing. But unlike many architects he is game for a good argument, for which reason I was pleased to spend the best part of two hours hearing his views and occasionally offering my own.
Born in Bonn in 1961, Schumacher worked with Zaha Hadid in her London office from 1988 until her death earlier this year, and rose to become her right-hand man. The projects that appeared under her name, especially in the later years, were strongly influenced by his ideas and are the main evidence of what parametric architecture might look like. Now Schumacher is in charge of the 400-strong practice, with the daunting task of continuing without the impetus that came with her fame and charisma. They have on their books projects such as the Beijing airport new terminal building, due for completion in 2018, a colossal splayed, curvaceous sea creature of a structure that will eventually handle 72 million passengers a year.
“I very much miss Zaha’s caring friendship, her energy, her probing humour, and much more,” he now says. “As a practice we miss her indefatigable and infectious passion for architecture and her relentless drive for perfection. However, we have pulled together and we are in good spirits, and I discovered that my own drive and passion for architecture and for the progress of our discipline – together with the enthusiasm and commitment of our staff – can propel us forward without loss of momentum.”
So the mission to spread the parametric word continues unabated, at which point in the story it might be helpful to say what it actually is. This is not easy, as Schumacher is given to explaining it in impressive but impenetrable strings of polysyllables, but essentially it describes a way of designing buildings in such a way that every element can change in response to the multiple parameters – the way people might move through it, for example, their frequency of encounter, their dwell times – to which it is subjected. It exploits the ability of computers both to process complex information and to conceive complex architectural shapes.
The dream is that you might feed every imaginable factor into a computer, which would then help you deliver a building that harmoniously reflects and responds to all these factors. In this way architecture might base itself on scientific data rather than the intuitive judgments on which it usually relies. All architects, he believes, should accept the “dominant paradigm” of parametricism. At present a proliferation of approaches has left architecture “in disarray”.
An example of what he means might be theBeijing airport project, which is even vaster than the vast terminal Foster + Partners has already built in the city. What will this structure do that Foster’s non-parametric design doesn’t, I ask. “It will guide you and tell you where you are,” says Schumacher. “It will use slopes to direct you to something.”
He sees parametricism as the architectural style of capitalism, to which he is a relatively recent convert. “My early heroes were Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, people who wanted to make an impact”, but he now believes that free enterprise is the best means of the “human development of prosperity and freedom”. The innate logic of parametricism means that, in a truly free market, with “freer utilisation of land”, it would eventually triumph.
It also extends beyond buildings into products and clothes, for which reason he is taking part in an exhibition called The Extraordinary Process at a new London gallery, Maison Mais Non. The show is about “innovative technologies” in fashion design, a discipline that Schumacher says is “still behind the curve. It should learn from the sports industry and use gradient fabrics that keep shifting their porosity.” He has created two dinner jackets for himself, “elegant, but subverting the norm”. They use “zippers, and leather in particular zones, and lightness and perforations in zones where you might perspire more”.
The attraction of parametricism is that it promises to do away with the maddening doubtfulness of architecture and indeed art, the impossibility of proving anything conclusively, the feeling that there’s nothing there but whim and taste. It offers instead the comforting certainty of apparently objective processes, combined with unity of appearance: parametric designs, whether for an airport, a cultural centre or a chaise longue, have an uncanny knack of looking like each other – curvy, complex, often shiny or seamless.
But, for something so keen to base itself on scientific information, parametricism is short of evidence that it actually works. It rests on the unproven belief that it is possible to mould architectural forms perfectly to the complex and unpredictable uses they will contain. It is supposed to be adaptable, fluid, responsive and connective with its surroundings, but most parametric buildings so far tend to be the opposite. Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Museum in Glasgow, for example, is an isolated and expensive monument that accommodates its intended use awkwardly and is hard to adapt. Nor are they always easy to navigate. Their strongest quality is their visual impact, which puts them in the realm of the art works from which Schumacher is keen to escape.
Perhaps for these reasons the world of competitive capital has yet to embrace parametricism as Schumacher hopes, the style’s main line of business being in singular trophies for governments and individuals. I give him an elevator test: if I were a venture capitalist, looking to invest in your product, how would you convince me? “It’s not an easy one, you can’t nail it,” he replies. (Ding! Test failed.) He also cites inconclusive evaluations of completed buildings and “fragmentary student-based or illustrative projects”. So how can he be so sure of parametricism’s “obvious” superiority? “To the extent that architecture matters and makes a difference,” he replies, parametricism means that “what used to be ineffable and intuitive becomes finally more scientifically tractable and computationally modellable.” Which still isn’t really evidence.
The style’s grand non sequitur is the assumption that, just because computers have the ability both to process complex information and to conceive complex shapes, one should lead to the other. Schumacher is right that information technology creates new possibilities, but there is no inevitability about the forms it takes. There might, for example, be a reason why such an advanced piece of technology as a smartphone tends to be flat and rectangular: given the richness of the content, it helps to have a simple form.
In the art deco period, before the second world war, there was a fondness for giving buildings the streamlined shapes of planes and cars. It didn’t make much sense, as buildings don’t usually have the same issues of wind resistance as fast-moving vehicles, but it could lead to visually engaging results. On the available evidence parametricism is something similar – a technophile aesthetic with shaky technical justification. Which is not enough to grant it the world domination Schumacher thinks it deserves.
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