Patrik Schumacher Towards A Parametric Future

Patrik Schumacher has been a designer at Zaha Hadid Architects since 1988. He is a company director and senior designer of the practice as well as a co-author and project partner on seminal projects such as the MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, the BMW Central Building in Leipzig and the Guangzhou Opera House in China. He is registered with the Architect’s Registration Board, and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Parametricism 2.0 focuses on social responsibility. The empowerment of computational design has allowed us to be at the frontier of structural and environmental optimisation and fabrication technologies to develop complex geometries. It is also important to think ‘What do we need the complexity for?’ We need it for a new form of social functionality to build complexity within our urban centres for the interdisciplinary integration of research, development and innovation which brings us together. While our urban centres are converging we need a new architecture which is delivered by the new digital techniques of design and fabrication but also to find solutions for what he calls the Post- Fordist network society.

The kind of innovation in Frei Otto’s design had a new high performance morphology which called for aesthetic revolutions to push architecture to never appear to be the same for many years. Apart from Frei Otto’s innovation in the technological side, due to constant Urban agglomeration in the city architects were looking for new unfamiliar forms and rationality. The ability of Parametricism to adapt to a global cultural sensitivity, regionalism will enable it to thrive.