Patrik Schumacher

Architectural Association School of Architecture | AA School · Design Research Laboratory

As much of the responsibility of a building's physical design and fabrication has increasingly shifted to engineers, spatial communication has remained the sole and significant preserve of architects. Patrik Schumacher, Partner at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), explains how tectonic articulation through architectural design – the selection and employ...

As partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, Patrik Schumacher has become renowned for his substantial role in taking an experimental practice to a global level. Here he argues for some qualification in the way that transgression might be employed in architecture: Where should transgression stand in relation to a cycle of innovation? Should progress take u...

For Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, articulation is the central core competency of architecture; and designed patterns provide one of the most potent devices for architectural articulation. Schumacher ushers in a new era of parametric architecture in which pattern becomes an innovative and powerful register of articulation, providing am...

Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects describes how elegance in architecture thrives on and articulates complexity. For elegance to be fully expressed in any work, it must be mastered and refined throughout the building and construction process. This entails the refinement of spatial and structural organisation and the integration of all build...

Though parametricism has its roots in the digital animation techniques of the mid-1990s, it has only fully emerged in recent years with the development of advanced parametric design systems. Patrik Schumacher explains why parametricism has become the dominant, single style for avant-garde practice today and why it is particularly suited to large-sc...

This abstract outlines an ongoing research that uses an agent-based crowd simulation model to evaluate the social performance of a spatial design for corporate office environments within the field of architecture. Instead of focusing on the flow of movement which is the common approach in crowd simulation tools, the research described here aims to...

Freedom as theme within architecture starts with the modern movement: the free plan, the free façade, the free flowing space. The theme got another boost in the 1960s and 1970s in connection with the emancipatory thrust of counter-culture movements and was expressed in the pursuit of lightness and flexibility via spaceframes, capsules, inflatables,...

Patrik Schumacher reflects on the role and potential of Stereotomy 2.0 within the larger context of parametricism.

This essay is trying-in a constructive if not partisan spirit-to probe the prospects of what might be termed Object Oriented Architecture, an architecture inspired by the object oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. Five years ago I had been asked to appraise the value of Harman's philosophy for architecture. At the time I insisted that "the validi...

Various radical thinkers have categorised architectural ordering as ‘violence’ and architecture as ‘prison’. But the built environment is an integral part of all human society. Could individual and societal freedom be enhanced by a shift from the ‘hard order’ of the past to a new, libertarian ‘soft order’? Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid...

After ‘foldism’ and ‘blobism’ comes ‘tectonism’ – a new branch of the epochal style of parametricism that allows greater expressive and formal variety. It is made possible by an evolving range of digital tools for structural form-finding and physics analysis, linked directly to fabrication. As Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects,...

This paper poses the problem of perceptual orientation and spatial navigation in dense urban environments and proposes a scenario and methodology of urbanization in analogy to natural ecologies in which land formation, streams and rivers, flora and fauna come together according to rules of interdependency that build up a complex variegated order. D...

With the countryside becoming ever more sparsely populated as fewer people are needed to keep rural enterprises running, is there any point in engaging architects there? Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, argues that their time and skills are put to better use in cities, where buildings impact a far greater number of individuals a...

With the launch of Parametricism 2.0, Guest-Editor Patrik Schumacher asserts how Parametricism as a movement now needs to shift its main focus from computation and technological advancement towards social function. Here he advocates how Parametricism should realise its semiotic potential, with the power to express complex spatial arrangements in la...

How might Parametricism be widely adopted at an urban scale? Guest-Editor Patrik Schumacher argues that Parametricism 2.0 has now matured sufficiently at a technical and stylistic level to engage with the creation of 'a complex, variegated urban order'. Moreover, he avows that it should be adequately adaptable to respond to the dynamic forces influ...

Terminal 2, Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport; Mumbai; India; 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale; Architectural Association (AA); London; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); New York; Neo-Rationalism; Computation Works; Empathetic Space; Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA); Beijing New Airport Term...

What I am proposing is a global, unified epochal style for architecture, urbanism and all the design disciplines (parametricism ), argued for within a comprehensive, unified theory of architecture/design (the theory of architectural autopoiesis) that is embedded within an overarching theory of society (Luhmann’s social systems theory).

This chapter presents an essay by Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects. The essay highlights that the mathematics of parametricism, supported by today's electronic computing, appear as the best means to manage variability, hence to design and mass-produce variations. Parametricism brings to an end the transitional phase of uncertainty engende...

Architektur rahmt die kommunikativen Situationen im urbanen Raum. Sie lädt verschiedene Gruppen, verschiedene Publika ein, leitet an und stimmt auf Situationen ein. Die soziale Funktion ist das Erfolgskriterium: Schaffe ich es, Situationen zu defi nieren, zu unterscheiden und im öffentlichen Raum auffi ndbar zu machen? Schaffe ich es, Partizipanten...

Meine These lautet: Der Parametrismus ist der einzige Stil der Gegenwartsarchitektur, der die Herausforderung verschärfter ökologischer Rahmenbedingungen effizient und überzeugend in architektonische Erfolgsbedingungen umzumünzen vermag.

The University of Applied Arts in Vienna is of one those rare schools where teaching gives rise to original design research in the form of a systematic, theoryled exploration of new architectural possibilities.

Au début des années 1980, Zaha Hadid a fait une entrée inattendue sur la scène architecturale avec une série de projets spectaculaires. L’une de ses plus grandes audaces fut de transposer directement la dynamique et le flux de son écriture calligraphique dans des systèmes tectoniques tout aussi fluides. Une autre, incroyable, fut de passer de la re...