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The Profound Social Instrumentality of the Built Environment
Patrik Schumacher in conversation with Maroje Mrduljaš
Published in: oris 113, magazine for architecture and culture of living, Zagreb 2018
Oris: You studied Architecture, but also Philosophy and Mathematics. You could say that it is kind of a Renaissance intellectual profile, but it actually fits the complexity of the contemporary challenges. Why did you decide to study these three fields?
Patrik Schumacher: Philosophy wasn’t meant to be a profession. This was just self-development. I didn’t like the pretence of a group of people in that field - philosophers - pretentiously claiming to have deeper and superior overview, so I wanted to get on top of this, and I did. I studied very rapidly and very intensively. I ended up and stopped my formal studies with the subversive work of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein and his thrilling, devastating deflation of philosophy’s pretensions. As it turned out, this was not the end of philosophy, neither in the world, nor in my development. For me philosophy remains is a lifelong learning process. Soon after Wittgenstein, I had formally switched to architecture, I discovered Marx, Marxism, social philosophy, political philosophy and economics. Now social philosophy has replaced the philosophy of language as 1st philosophy where all reflection begins and ends. Mathematics was also very absorbing, but at the time, the way it was taught mathematics, was very brutal: just going through the axiomatic systems, and cranking out proofs but with no grasp of mathematics’ purposes or history. We were learning how to drill into abstract systems, but had no idea what they are there for. Mathematical logic, however, turned up to be very useful later.
Oris: You also completed PhD in Philosophy.
Patrik Schumacher: I completed PhD in Cultural science and it was about architectural theory and history in connection with economic theory and history. The PhD was on the Werkbund, an organization bringing art and industry together in Germany in the early 20th century. The thesis reflected socio-cultural changes of industrialised society in relation to the progression from laissez faire capitalism to monopoly capitalism., analysed from a Marxist perspective. At that time artist and artist craftsman mutated into industrial designers and were connected with branding for large corporations like the A.E.G. Advertising and branding were totally new phenomena. My PhD was a socioeconomic critique of conventional stylistic and aesthetically based art- and architectural history. I excavated the deeper socioeconomic reasons behind the “artistic” controversies of the era and could show how the formation of Modernism in architecture and design was the fuelled by the clash of ideologies representing different societal forces, namely small craft shops versus larger industrial, multinational corporations. Ever since my architectural theory continues to be embedded in a historicizing theory of society that sees cultural phenomena as essentially tied with technological innovations, the development of the forces of production, prosperity potentials and social conflicts engendered by the socio-economic restructuring. All settlement structures, urban fabrics and the world of designed artefacts reflect these processes.
Oris: You are in command of different types of knowledge and you are critical regarding contemporary architecture schools which you sometimes describe as art colleges. Do you think that schools of architecture need thorough reform in order to provide broader knowledge that would help understand the reality of increasingly complex contemporary world?
Patrik Schumacher: Unfortunately, there are a number of dimensions in which we have to upgrade our discipline. To achieve this we need to converge towards a shared paradigm that can orient cumulative research and development within the field. We had a shift in socioeconomic history from the era of mass mechanical production or Fordism, which is based on fixed machineries, assembly line, repetition, everybody working from 9 to 5, to our contemporary era, Postfordism, engendered by the integration of the computational revolution with the telecommunication revolution, fuelling globalisation. Innovation became much more rapid. We have a new urban concentration in the knowledge economy,the information economy, postfordist network society. That creates a very different dynamics in the city. So, this really shook up the discipline. The canons of modernism, the industrial city, zoning, the separation of subsystems, all that collapsed already in 70s and 80s. In the situation of radical crisis of the discipline’s certainties and recipes, you need to initially browse and brainstorm. So there emerged extra-ordinary openness to radical ideas. Every idea had a chance, nobody knew the answers. This period established the art-school culture within architecture. This was appropriate then, but brainstorming must stop and be followed by rational evaluation, selection and cumulative elaboration. This started only in the mid 1990s. In the early 90s we started to understand that we have to think about the self-organization, of mixed-used complexes, new dynamism and complexity and social relations. We had to learn the lessons of variety, multiple system and we had developed the methodology of “folding”, an glimpse of what later evolved into parametricism. It was quite electrifying. The whole discipline, my generation realized that we are developing new paradigm which is viable and robust and can be developed further by an increasingly sophisticated computational methodology, empowered by increasing computation power and soft-ware development. The early formal studies evolved into a strong design capacity incorporating the latest engineering rationality. The problem was that the financial crisis of 2008 had stopped all of that soaring collective enthusiasm of the movement. The preceding years we had been lifted by an artificial boom which made us all exuberant. We were on the way to finally substitute modernism, but because that discussion didn’t complete, because we didn’t march on further, we still did not have the transformative impact on the global built environment the way Modernists had in the 20th Century. The goal of convergence is extremely relevant, and we shouldn’t have re-fragment, sadly which happened since 2008. It seems there is nothing stable because all the canons once more seem bankrupt. However, I think that there is no need for new architectural paradigm after 2008. Parametricism is far from having exhausted its potentials. There is no other viable candidate for the epochal architectural paradigm of the 21st Century.
The schools must once more be like the schools in 60s, moving from art to science. Schools should teach about system theory, cybernetics, about space syntax, and start to bring AI into the discipline. Architectural studios need to develop more rigour and mature into large, potent corporations that can sustain research departments. Only then can we reshape the build environment on the scale and with the depths of impact like the Modernists once had. We need to build an institution, one similar to the Bauhaus which was for ten years a place of coherent development and design research, on a large scale, in line with the higher degrees of complexity of our contemporary tasks.
Oris: That’s what you wanted to do with Design Research Laboratory at the AA, during the electrifying period of the second half of 1990s and 2000s.
Patrik Schumacher: Yes, for the first ten years it was very potent. We did an exhibition about ten years of AADRL and we showed how our students got involved in many of the the major works of architects like ZHA, Herzog & de Meuron, Ito, OMA and others. We were looking back at 10 years of surprisingly consistent, cumulative work. This retrospective triggered a sense that this is something that is equally significant to Modernism. Columbia University was also a hot house, but it fell in the hands of Mark Wigley in the context of the re-politicized discourse. I know that the transformation of design schools into debating clubs was to some extent inevitable because architectural discourse was puzzled: is this another revolution, is this the end of capitalism, is this the end of history? I also became politicized but in a different direction, in the direction of capitalism, turbo capitalism, in the form of anarcho-capitalism. My analysis of the 2008 crisis was not that we had too much capitalism, but on the contrary not enough capitalism. State interventionism had blocked the self-regulating mechanisms of capitalism.
Oris: I would go back to 2002 when you and Zaha Hadid curated exhibition Latent Utopia in Graz. You were claiming that every time needs its own utopia. Maybe we can introduce Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopia which is aiming to projective, near future. Radical concepts can be feasible.
Patrik Schumacher: Absolutely. The concept of ‘latent utopia’ was crafted to signal that societal progress can continue after the bankruptcy of the grand narrative of continuous modernisation and emancipation according to a grand blueprint or central plan. We realized that long term, detailed prediction and projection in form of exact large-scale master plans has become impossible. Utopia was latent in the principles, methodologies, general tendencies that would work themselves out via a self-stimulating, self-regulating, optimizing market dynamics. In an open, competitive as well as cooperative process, involving both open markets and open discourses, only one thing can be predicted or guaranteed: progressive change for the better. How innovation is achieved and into which urban forms our lives will cast it is, like all path-dependent, cumulative evolutionary processes, utterly unpredictable. Perhaps be can very generally and abstractly anticipate increasing levels of density, complexity, versatility and dynamism.
Oris: This statement from the exhibition I find especially important: “these strange and abstract forms have profound social meaning.” Some critics tend to dismiss too easily contemporary avant-garde for being purely formalistic.
Patrik Schumacher: Yes, to reject parametricism as mere formalism is a huge misunderstanding. The funny thing is that some of the key protagonists of our movement themselves don’t realize this, because they don’t have the capacity to think about the underlying sociology, or don’t care about it, like Peter Eisenman and Jeffry Kipnis. They work with the new level of the complexity in the city fabric, their projects are being set into complex, central contexts, their projects form part of a system of layers upon layers in the city, so they have the right intuitions but they see only the formal propositions. This kind of approach is very problematic because the new concepts are very vulnerable to being critiqued and closed down because many wonder why we should spend enormous resources, energy and effort to create meaningless formalisms just because they are delightful. My whole theory is based on studying the social performance values of the environments which are vital and productive. We don’t have to follow an absolute or preconceived notion of beauty, but we are organisms who navigate our environment aesthetically and we have an aesthetic learning capacity. As we experience that the new complex, dense urban environments are where social and economic vitality resides, we acquire a new aesthetic sensibility. We are learning and become intuitively attracted by an intriguing new aesthetic: Random collage is preferred to monotonous seriality of yesteryear. What was beautiful became ugly and vice versa. We have developed a lust for complexity, because it is in these complex environments is where you thrive, where you find to be a part of a network rather than being cut off. However, I believe the aesthetic revolution continues: Parametricism is trying to overcome the random, visual chaos of contemporary urban agglomeration with a complex variegated order that will allow users to regain legibility in the face of the inevitable, vital complexity of our urban condition. These are the conditions of high social performance. You can participate in these complex morphologies intuitively. However, to make this happen on a largescale requires us to explain the rationality of this new design language and methodology, so that the necessary investments can be argued for by clarifying the societal benefits. We have to explain that parametricism is congenial with the network society where the facilitation of a new level of communicative intensity is delivered by a densely woven, layered urban fabric.
Oris: Exhibition entitled Deconstructivist architecture in MOMA New York already in 1988 tried to detect new tendencies, but it also seemed like an attempt to bring together too diverse scope of architectural approaches under reductive keyword borrowed from philosophy.
Patrik Schumacher: It was presented like some illustration of the connection with the Derridian philosophy which itself was not grasped in its societal significance. Both philosophy and architecture were treated as a l’art pour l’art phenomena. That is why I and the AADRL looked at business districts and corporate headquarters as building types with the demand of high economic performance. Corporations and knowledge industry hubs crave for porosity, complexity, openness; accordingly they had already generated a kind of proto-Parametricism, developed by people working outside of canon of architecture, being sensitive to new clients’ demands and thus working with the changing pragmatics of the progressing socio-economic process. If you look at their work, it’s very open, contingent. It is similar to the idea of collage city by Colin Rowe and some architects in artistic field. But a real collage is coming from cities like Tokyo which are high-performance environments and that link can’t be overstressed because otherwise we are vulnerable to superficial dismissal of our works. We need this complexity because building minimalist means building reductively, cutting connections cellularising social processes which need to be open and fluid. The social rationality of new advanced architecture is about the versatility and adaptive capacity because buildings are not sterile inert pieces which land on sites ready-made, but they need to adapt, they need to make connections, they need to be tailored. The repertoire and methodology of parametricism is well-suited to this task. Minimalism is not.
Oris: I remember the exhibition of Zaha Hadid Architects in MAK in Vienna in 2003. Show was filled with beautiful models, mostly first prizes at the competitions, most of them unrealized. Thinking about it today, the complexity of the projects during the 90s was achieved by using analogue tools. You don’t need necessarily digital tools to address this level of complexity at the conceptual level. Of course it is evident that these digital tools aid and help produce more complex forms. There is continuity from analogue to digital, embedded in the 2003 exhibition.
Patrik Schumacher: Absolutely, you can get there with a lot of hard work, even without digital aids. Realization is another question. You can do these designs from manual drawings and that indeed happened in our early works, but obviously this is very difficult, inefficient and costly. Algorithms allow us to achieve an altogether new level of intricacy. Also, parametric models allow us keep the design flexible and adjustable also during the later design stages. To do this by hand is virtually impossible. But you are right, there is a deep continuity between our early analogue work and the later digital work. The style of parametricism wasn’t born from computer tools but rather the desire for more complex, fluid, open, adaptive architectural figures and compositions was the prior motivation to bring certain initially alien tools from computer-graphics simulations into architecture.
Oris: This is my point, it is not the availability of the digital tools that created new architecture. New architecture triggered the need for development and application of the new tools. Of course, these two processes are interrelated.
Patrik Schumacher: I fully agree. However, there is a dialectic relationship at play between tools and intentions. Tools are drawn in on the basis of intentions and ideas and then inspire the development of these ideas and of new ideas. Parametric modelling is about dependency relationships, about the correlation between various elements and subsystems. The systematic working with rules of dependency, as suggested by the parametric tools , became a new, profound conceptual idea, offering a new conceptualisation of architecture. It is not coming from the tools only, we had the anticipations, but tool makes what was vaguely anticipate a prominent and systematically pursued agenda. The way bodies are fusing and deforming in various degrees through laws of attraction and repulsion is something we knew intuitively, because we can find it in nature, but the new tools deliver the capacity to emulate this and thereby also firm up and develop the conceptual registers.
Oris: In 2010 and 2012 you published The Autopoiesis of Architecture, two volume books on theory of architecture. The first volume starts with the sub-chapter with the title Architecture as system of communication. Can you elaborate on this starting point?
Patrik Schumacher: The first volume of AoA is a comprehensive discourse analysis of the discipline, inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society. With Luhmann I am looking at the whole society as a differentiated system of communication. Architecture is one of the function systems of society, i.e. a subsystems of this functionally differentiated system of communication. Our architectural discourse-practice or discipline has separated from both art and from engineering. However, all the design disciplines, including urban design, architecture as well as landscape, interior, furniture, product, graphic and fashion design, form a single unified discourse or system of communications. We are collectively in charge of the global built environment and the world of artefacts, i.e. we have the universal and exclusive responsibility and competency over the totality of the phenomenal world that surrounds us. We are in charge of the look and feel, of the user experience of the whole world. We are in charge of the social functionality of all designed spaces and products, while engineering is in charge of technical functionality, by working out what has to happen under the hood.
We develop the designed user experience of the world by communicating, internally within the discipline, with words, with drawings, with buildings. Buildings also participate in the internal discourse, they become influential, they become reference point, and some of them are primarily manifestos for future architecture. But all buildings are also the end point of our work which we hand over to our clients and thus to society. These buildings are also communications within society at large. However, here they are our client’s communication. Thus is Luhmann’s theory, and in AoA, everything is communication. The built environment is framing and ordering social communication processes. A room is a premise which communicates a protocol of behaviour, which actions are permissible, what is excluded and what is suggested within this space or frame. All social actions are communications. It is very important for the overall societal communication process, that there is a legible spatial order for all the thousands of communicative interactions and social activities. The city is a matrix ordering the myriad of simultaneous and concatenated interactions that make up society. Architectural designs function by inviting, guiding and orienting us to assemble together in various places and to do the things which are required or permitted by these environments. The appearance of the environment is vital for the functioning of this spatial-visual communication. It is organizing, separating and connecting, articulating and guiding. And that puts emphasis on visual appearance of the environment, the look and feel of spaces and artefacts, things like decoration, they all operate like a visual language, a semiological system. All social interactions are in a sense semiologically coded by a spatio-visual language, informing us about where to do what and with whom. In a way the title of my lecture The Instrumentality of Appearances summarizes this. It is precisely this that I’m interested in, the profound instrumentality of the build environment as communicating ordering matrix and I think that this is very empowering. We can even start to operationalize that semiological conception of architecture through agent-based simulations. We now have a new research group developing the capacity of simulating the occupancy processes in relation to the information encoded within the designed environment. The agents’ behaviour is depending on which semiological clues they encounter. The more information-rich and legible the environment, the more empowered and efficient are the agents and thus the whole social process. Thanks to that research I will be able to show the superiority of those environments where more interaction situations are co-located in close proximity and where agents get more information and therefore participate in a more differentiated, more subtle, more effective social communication process. That is my semiological project. Then there is the phenomenological project which we also have worked on for quite a while. Here the problem to be tackled is the problem of the perceptual tractability of very dense and complex spatial compositions. Here we build on the psychology of perception, especially Gestalt psychology. Here we haven’t yet developed a computational operationalisation. But, we can imagine that we could use renderings which we feed into a machine vision system that tries to distinguish, classify and label relevant spaces and objects, simulating and predicting how human users would see and grasp the scene from different positions. Then you can appraise your design with respect to whether certain vistas will allow users to understand the spatial configuration they will be confronted with. I don’t have enough research resources to do all this at once, but my book lays out these research projects, which could and should be done.
Oris: In a way you are speaking about going beyond normative functionalism and move towards a more sophisticated comprehension of the organisation of the space.
Patrik Schumacher: Of course, the original modernist era was actually very simple. Now you are somewhere else every day, you have a work space, but you haven’t got a fixed desk, continuously roaming around for meetings, everything is much more dynamic. Each event is different, and you need a lot of openness and flexibility. We need an environment where every space and event has intervisibility with many other ongoings which we might want to plug into at short notice, in a kind of browsing condition where we are inspired by continuously meeting new people. This spells out the architectural requirements of our network society where we all must continuously recalibrate what we are doing with what everybody else is doing. We don’t need a five year plan but something much more flexible and which is much more accelerating innovation. In a contemporary world you don’t know what is going to happen next year, there are always new technologies, organisational ideas, new ways to live, work and learn.
Oris: Once we abandon the normative design then we need new methodologies. You use parametric semiology in order to address these complex issues of articulating networked spaces. New types of collectivity are still closely related to spatial configurations. You are working on the technique of crowd modelling which sounds very promising. It used to be mainly restricted to the problems of circulation but now it can be applied to other types of spaces.
Patrik Schumacher: It can be applied to any type of interaction. We can also build on some prior research and skills developed in the gaming industry and film industry, where they are filling these virtual worlds with agents. Some of them are rather realistic, so they have worked on the problem. We have several people in my research group working on this, both in Vienna and in London, using scripted agents and developing scientific methodologies, simulation methodologies and empirical tests. A lot of people scanning and measuring spatial occupancy patterns, how people move and act in space. We are perhaps the first to simulate these processes with the crucial ingredient of semiology. Prior crowd modelling models space as physical space, with physical barriers and channels. We are modelling space as information-rich, semantically encoded space. Our agents behaviours are accordingly guided by a semiological code. I refer to them as semiological crowds. We are only at the beginning and it takes time, but we are building this new capacity, step by step. We all have our own intuitions and know what is realistic and what people would do in certain scenarios., so we can start to reconstruct the rules by which we navigate the socially charged built environment. We build such scenarios based on our intuitive knowledge which we all share as competent, socialized actors. Then we also try to back them up with empirical observations and measurements. that’s tough, it is harder than it looks like. But the capacity of social functionality modelling is compelling in a world where intuitions fail when complexity soars.
Oris: In this type of research a lot empirical experiment should be done in order to prove the argument, it not just on speculative level.
Patrik Schumacher: I agree with that and that is why we have a space set up in the office where we have sensors and we start to record and measure what is going on. We need to do that in more detailed ways. There are issues like people don’t like to be observed, it is a question of trust, these are anonymous data. We are aiming to show that a more richly differentiated and expressive environment is empowering each agent and therefore the overall social process. We can now start to measure social functionality. The point is that for the first time we get a handle on optimizing for the final purposes of architecture. At the moment we architects are incapacitated in relation to complex, novel design tasks. We literally don’t know what we are doing. We can stare at a plan and say I like this, but that is meaningless, in fact we are truly agnostic and incompetent at the moment. All we can design with confidence are simple routine scenarios, the scenarios of the modernist era, but not contemporary social scenarios. With respect to designing a Google campus, there are no easy precedents, there is nothing stable you can go by. How do you know what is the best arrangement for placing 6 000 people of the most varied roles and collaboration requirements? How do we know which arrangement maximises both intra-departmental and inter-departmental encounters and interactions? Nobody can read this off a plan by looking at it. You get a handle on this through simulation and through formulating with the client what social interaction patterns they are looking for. Of course, they are looking for some kind of synergy gathering, collaborative team formation, sharing of knowledge, cooperation, and co-inspiration. We would also use social science questionnairs. Who do you talk to? Where do you sit? Where do you go? This is much more sophisticated and potent architectural service and project that gives architects and clients a handle on the communicative efficacy of their buildings. My intuition is that comparative simulations will reveal the superiority of parametricism. Design processes and spaces using an expanded repertoire will be validated as high performance. If you have more intervisibility between the spaces you have more interaction, but then again you have to watch that the complexity installed remains legible so that this intervisibility isn’t producing visual pollution but empowering information.
Oris: Architecture discourse actually lacks substantial knowledge about the social performance of space. Bill Hillier did pioneering work in that field, but it can be reduced to several core thoughts.
Patrik Schumacher: You are right I am trying to collect in my books all the key references which should be a base knowledge of any architectural work. I like Hillier’s work and he managed to theorize and measure spatial permeability. What he doesn’t do is geometry overlaid with programming. Hillier made a start and he also used the computation tools early on. Another reference point is the phenomenological project, with prior contributions from Kevin Lynch and the work of Colin Rowe pointing towards the productive exploitation of ambiguous figures and multiple readings. These are very important milestone as well as the work of Christopher Alexander in terms of the urban domain. These are the ingredients of a sophisticated architectural project. It is so important that we have a discipline which matures. We have to attract more diverse types of protagonist into the discipline, people who would otherwise go into sociology, psychology, or economics. We need stronger analytical thinking capacity and we will only attract them with a discipline that is intellectually sophisticated and ambitious, i.e. interesting enough. At the moment if one looks at the architectural textbooks and sees kindergarten stuff or obscurantism, it won’t attract the right characters. It is essential to understand that architecture can be more ambitious, by working on social organisation, participating in institution building and working towards societal progress and social emancipation. Only then does the excitement of the depths and profoundity of an architectural project, hopefully, come through. This is very difficult because in our discipline we have many artistic characters, intuitive characters who aren’t reading much and who find all this very hard to absorb.
Oris: You are strongly advocating Parametricism as the future unifying force which could define the new solid base for the architectural discipline. But at this moment there is a lack of any cohesion within the architectural discipline.
Patrik Schumacher: Yes, that is why I am lecturing more and trying to ramp up my rhetoric and critical discourse. I am also trying to find potential disciples, via more intimate seminar settings, to build a following so that my extensive theoretical work does not remain a dead letter. It doesn’t have to be many but I need more than one or two co-protagonists to see this take off. Of course, there is a great flourishing with respect to technical innovations, proto-engineering, new fabrication, computation. I call this new style Tectonicism which recognizes a lot of the advances of the last 10 years which is mostly on a technical front, fabrication logics, engineering logics, much more richer morphologies, much more high performance technically and environmentally. It is very mature but not yet homing in with the social functionality aspect. That’s why I also have started criticizing and challenging my peers more, trying to push them out of their comfort zone, to become more outspoken. For me on the agitation front, it’s a three-pronged battle: self-critique within the movement, a much more assertive critique of those who indulge in the backwardness of retro-styles, and thirdly building up the research and indeed constructively forging a school by picking up and training up disciples.