Patrik Schumacher, Parametricism and the Autopoiesis of Architecture

September 15, 2010 6:30AM - 8:30AM

Columbia University
WOOD AUDITORIUM, AVERY HALL

Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects, Founding Director AADRL, London

Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects and founding director at the AA Design Research Lab. He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988.

Patrik Schumacher studied philosophy and architecture in Bonn, London and Stuttgart, where he received his Diploma in architecture in 1990. In 1999 he completed his PHD at the Institute for Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University. In 1996 he founded the "Design Research Laboratory" with Brett Steele, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and continues to serve as one of its co-directors. Since 2004 Patrik Schumacher is also tenured Professor at the Institute for Experimental Architecture, Innsbruck University. Currently he is also a guest professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

The lecture will present the case for Parametricism as a new unified, epochal style for the 21st century. The reach of Parametricism is global, and its scope is universal, including urbanism, architecture, interior design, as well as furniture and product design. The discussion of Parametricism will be conceptually framed within the theory of architectural autopoiesis which analyses architecture as a self-referentially closed system of communications that takes exclusive and universal responsibility for the innovation of the built environment within society. During the last 30 years society radically transformed into what one might call post-fordist network society. The attendant crisis of Modernism engendered a period of radical critique, experimentation, and theoretical confusion. Only recently, in the new millenium, has a new avant-garde movement gathered sufficient strength, coherence and confidence to establish a new global paradigm after modernism. Against this horizon  Parametricism will be defined operationally  - both positively and negatively -  via its  functional and formal heuristics. The arguments will be illustrated and underpinned by recent work from Zaha Hadid Architects and from the AA Design Research Lab.
Source