Patrik Schumacher

Patrik Schumacher is a practicing architect, educator and architectural theorist[1] based in London. He is the principal of the global architecture and design brand Zaha Hadid Architects and founder of the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AADRL). He has coined the phrase ‘parametricism’ denoting a major trend in contemporary architecture based on the use of advanced computational design techniques and has argued that parametricism is poised to become the global epochal style for architecture, urbanism and design of the 21st century.[2]

Education and early Career

After finishing high school in Gerlingen, Germany, Patrik Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn in the early 1980s, under Prof. Hans Wagner, a late exponent of Neo-Kantianism and with Prof. Ernst Konrad Specht, author of ‘The Foundations of Ludwig Wittgenstein's late Philosophy’. In the mid-eighties Schumacher studied architecture in Stuttgart and in 1987 he continued his studies at the Southbank University in London, under the guidance of Kevin Rowbotham. In 1988 – still a student – he joined the design studio of Zaha Hadid, where he lead the design of the Vitra Firestation, the first built project of Zaha Hadid. During this time Schumacher also continued his study of philosophy, joining Professor Norman Malcolm's seminar on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations at King's College. Schumacher also joined the theory seminars of Marc Cousins at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) and studied 'History of Modern Architecture' with Professor Adrian Forty at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). In 1990 he returned to Stuttgart University to complete his Diploma in Architecture and then re-joined Zaha Hadid. In 1999 he completed his PhD at the Institute of Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University.[3]

Teaching

Schumacher started his teaching career in 1991, teaching a post-graduate diploma course in architecture at Kingston University. He then joined Zaha Hadid to teach a series of advanced architecture studios in the United States, i.e. at Columbia University in 1993 and 1998, at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1994, at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996, and between 2002 and 2016 five times at Yale School of Architecture, Yale University. From 1994 to 1996 Schumacher was assistant professor at the Technical University (TU) Berlin. In the fall of 1996 he founded (with Brett Steele) the Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London where he continues to teach. From 2000 to 2015 he joined Zaha Hadid to lead one of the master classes at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and currently remains an honorary professor there. From 2004 to 2014 he was also University Professor at the Institute for Experimental Design at the University of Innsbruck. In 2013 Schumacher taught a design studio (with Marc Fornes) as the John Portman Chair in Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.[4]

Professional career

Since its incorporation in the late 1990s Schumacher served as a director of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and is credited as partner and co-author of the practice's output. Since Zaha Hadid's passing in April 2016 he has been leading the firm as its sole remaining partner. Most of the 1990s was dedicated to develop an innovative formal/spatial repertoire and an increasingly computationally empowered design methodology that was explored in many widely published (but mostly unsuccessful) competition designs. Towards the end of the decade a decisive step in ZHA's development was achieved by winning (and eventually realizing) the design competitions for MAXXI in Rome, the National Italian Museum for the Art and Architecture of the 21st Century, the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, and the Phaeno Science Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany. During the first decade of the 21st Century the firm experienced an explosive expansion with hundreds of projects and a staff count of 450 since 2008. Projects were won all over Europe, in Asia, and the Middle East, including the Guang Zhou Opera House, the Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi, the Glasgow Transport Museum, the National Cultural Centre of Azerbaijan in Baku, the Dong Daemon Design Centre in Seoul, Innovation Tower for Hong Kong Polytechnic, and the Aquatic Centre for the Olympic Games in London 2012, among many others. In recent years ZHA has been expanding its scope further to include residential as well as commercial towers in Marseilles, Milan, Beijing, Singapore, Miami and New York, as well as with infrastructure projects like train stations (Naples, Riyadh) and airports (Beijing). The work of ZHA continues to be considered avant-garde and is being be widely exhibited and published around the world.[5]

Theory and Research

Patrik Schumacher has been publishing theoretical articles in architectural magazines and anthologies since 1996, persistently arguing for an expanded formal and spatial design repertoire as architecture's response to the new level of societal complexity and dynamism brought on by the socio-economic transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism. For an early exposition see ‘Business - Research – Architecture’, published in Daidalos 69/7, 1999. Schumacher considers the new spatial ordering repertoires and concepts like ‘field conditions’, ‘interpenetration of domains’ and the ‘blurring of boundaries’ congenial to the new forms of corporate organisation that stress flat hierarchies, participation, matrix organisation and the blurring of domains of competencies. Accordingly, he initiated a 3-year design research programme at the AADRL from 1998 to 2001. The results of this work were published in the book ‘Corporate Fields’. In 2008 Schumacher launched a manifesto for ‘Parametricism’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale and a year later published his seminal article ‘Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design’ published in Architectural Design - Digital Cities, Vol 79, No 4, July/August 2009. This article was widely and controversially discussed and remains the most downloaded article in the online archive of this influential theory-focused architectural journal. Despite the controversy surrounding his claim that the discipline was converging onto a new style, Schumacher's neo-logism ‘Parametricism’ became an established coinage to refer to the contemporary digitally based architectural style identified by Schumacher.

In 2010 Schumacher published the 1st Volume of his theoretical opus magnum ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ claiming to offer a ‘New Framework for Architecture’, followed by the 2nd Volume subtitled ‘A New Agenda for Architecture’ in 2012. Volume 1 posits architecture's societal function as the innovative spatial ordering of social processes and claims to provide a comprehensive discourse analysis and functional explication of architecture's concepts and competencies build up during its 450-year history since its emergence as self-conscious, theory-led discipline in the Italian Renaissance. Volume 2 turns normative and claims to offer theoretical guidance about how architecture might upgrade its contemporary competencies in line with the challenges and opportunities of our computationally empowered ‘Postfordist Network Society’. The final section of the book rehearses and elaborates once more the features and advantages of Parametricism.

In recent writings and lectures Schumacher has been announcing and advocating his research project of an ‘Agent-based parametric semiology’, positing the idea that the social functionality of the built environment depends on its communicative capacity as a semiologically encoded field that informs and instructs social actors and thereby coordinates social processes. Schumacher calls for making this dimension of the built environment's functioning the explicit task of design, i.e. architectural and urban design – indeed all design including interior, furniture, fashion, graphic and interface design – should now be understood as communication design positing the task of designing systems of signification. Schumacher refers to this as the ‘semiological project’ and proposes a new form of agent-based crowd modelling which he calls ‘life process modeling’ which purportedly allows for the operationalization of this approach whereby the simulated, frame-dependent crowd behavior represents the meaning and purpose of the design within the design model, thus making it susceptible to successive optimizing improvements.[6]

Writings: Select Bibliography

Books

Articles

Centre of Contemporary Art, Rome. Published in: MARS – Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana

References

  1. ↑ "Schumacher, Patrik". worldcat.org. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  2. ↑ "Patrik Schumacher". zaha-hadid.com. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  3. ↑ "PhD Patrik Schumacher". aaschool.ac.uk. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  4. ↑ "PhD Patrik Schumacher". aaschool.ac.uk. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  5. ↑ "Patrik Schumacher". zaha-hadid.com. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
  6. ↑ "Patrik Schumacher". patrikschumacher.com. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
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