The Agency of Architecture

Patrik Schumacher, London 2017

Translated from German: Die Potenz der Architektur,
paper delivered at Architecture Matters, Mnchen, 10.03. 2017
Published in Stylepark Magazine, under the titel:
Architecture in a post-Fordist network society

Parametric architecture is, so Patrik Schumacher claims, the logical

consequence of social processes of modernization. Yet architects and politicians
shy away from drawing the necessary conclusions from this. The theories of
Patrik Schumacher, Director of Zaha Hadid Architects, are controversial. Here
we put them up for discussion on the basis of a lecture he originally gave in
Munich.

Patrik Schumacher:
The premise of any society: There is no human community without an artificially
designed environment. It is the built environment together with designed
artefacts that provides cultural evolution with the cross-generational, material
substrate it needs and by means of which an advantageous social order can persist
and acumulate, and in this respect is comparable to the DNA of biological
evolution. Human settlements form and accumulate ever larger and more
differentiated spatio-material structures, as the skeleton for social structures, as it
were, that without this substrate would not have managed to attain such a scale,
which is indeed unnatural for primates. Moreover, the level of cooperation so
important for the human productive abilities would not otherwise have emerged,
been replicated and advanced.

What applies to the beginning of cultural evolution and consequently to human

evolution per se still applies today in relation to the developmental tasks currently
facing us. For architecture is not only an expression of human progress, but one
of its a key factors. Its fundamental original achievement is not the oft-invoked
protection from the elements, but principally a structure-forming achievement, the
achievement of order.

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Urban development would blossom under the sign of Parametricism, develop a new organic identity and
overcome the visual chaos of recent decades, caused by obsolete architecture with insufficient
communicative capacity. In the project "Galaxy Soho" in Beijing the urban environment is designed as a 360
degree interface of communication for our post-fordist network society. A myriad of urban attractions are
unfolded in a space of simultaneity where, as users move through an intuitively navigable space, more offerings
come into view above, below and all around in layers.
Hufton Crow

The built environment organizes social processes of interaction and plays a role in
the establishment and stabilization of social order. It also involves ownership,
spatial exclusion and demarcation by means of physical barriers with
corresponding rights of access. Yet above all it involves the spatial distribution
and functional configuration of types of interaction or communicative situations
by means of semiological codes, whereby relative spatial positioning is also a
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means of coding. The built environment structures social situations and provides
orientation for the participants of the social processes thus organized, who then
find their place of their own accord. It communicates the social structure. While
the social structure as a whole can hardly be made visible any longer, each of the
local social structures, offerings and options for communication are still evident
in short, spaces communicate who can take part in which cooperations where and
how.

Urban spaces, both interior and exterior, are always designed spaces and also
always function as a form of communication: They inform users about the types
of interaction and the types of participants they can expect to find there and thus
provide an initial, framing definition of the situations to be expected.
Communication can hardly take place without a preceding definition of the
situation.

Accordingly, a well-positioned and well-articulated space is a communication,

namely an invitation to participate in a specific communicative situation that, like
any communication, can be accepted or rejected. Should the communication be
accepted, communicated by entering the space, the space functions as a common
premise of all participants and all further communication that subsequently takes
place in this context.

Moreover, the furniture frames and configures the communicative processes of

interaction also in interplay with other equipment and fittings.
The adaptive-innovative advancement of this necessary structuring, framing and
configuring of all communication, is the real social function of architecture and of
all design disciplines, including fashion design, Web design and graphic design.
Together with the other design disciplines including urban design but not
regional or urban planning architecture forms a unified discourse, a function
system in the sense of sociologist Niklas Luhmann (cf. Niklas Luhmann, The
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Society of Society), with exclusive universal competence in terms of the
physiognomy of the total built environment and the world of artefacts. The
production of everything that surrounds us in phenomenological terms in daily
life and serves us as a communication interface must go through the needles eye
of our discourse.

A well-placed and well-articulated space for him invites people to participate in a specific communicative
situation, that can be accepted or rejected. The project: "Library Learning Centre" at Wirtscha ftsuniversitat
Wien provides an interior "space of simultaneity" as communication space and orientation hub.
Iwan Baan

The Bauhaus showed just how powerfully the discipline can transform the world
from one point. All communication, without exception (including
telecommunications and text-based communication, viz. Web design and graphic
design) depends on our ordering efforts, and incidentally also on the ordering
accomplishments of the other function systems (economy, politics, legal system,
science).

Fashion design, for example, provides us with options for identification,

differentiated according to situation. This graphic, as it were, visual language of
social designators is, just like the built environment, a universal phenomenon of
human life and as such arguably likewise a functionally necessary aspect of
human evolution. Graphic designators (ornamentation in the broadest sense) are
also almost without exception a universal phenomenon of all built environments
and artefacts, in the past and present. For the most part the purely physical and
practical (i.e., engineered) differentiation of structural morphology (without

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additional markings) is not sufficient to communicate all the situations requiring
social differentiation.

This communicative achievement of built environment and artefacts becomes

more difficult with increasing complexity and increasing degrees of freedom
among all parties involved in urban development process. Consequently, it
becomes a non-trivial challenge that in my view should be an explicit design
objective of architects as well as designers in all other design disciplines. All
design is also always communication design, from now on hopefully explicit and
in this regard willing to face discursive criticism.

Parametricism, developed its methods and adaptive formal vocabulary in the context of the new societal
conditions and, unlike Modernism and the outdated retro-styles, is up to the related challenges of complexity.
The built environment orders social interaction processes and has an impact on the creation and stabilize
social order. Project: Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Hufton Crow

There is no human society without an artificially designed environment. The built world, together with
designed artefacts, creates the necessary order for societal processes to unfold predictably.
The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku was allowing spatial complexity to soar by reducing visual complication
through the formal unification of subsystems. Project: Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Hufton Crow

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Since the Renaissance architecture as a discipline has established itself as a
profession based on theory and critical discourse vis--vis the traditional manual
building trade. Everything that came before was strongly traditional construction.
This big bang of the specialized function system architecture, which like all
modern function systems is oriented on innovation, ushered in a greatly increased
historical pace of transformative urban development and in connection with other
function systems such as the economy, the political system, science and the legal
system, which all became differentiated at the same time, contributed to the
correspondingly increased historical pace of development of society as a whole.

Owing to the socioeconomic structural changes since 1980 with their key
characteristics such as mass customization, flexible specialization, lifestyle
differentiation, fast cycles of product and service innovation, the Hollywood
principle of organization, focus on R&D, self-directedness of work, life-long
learning and many more, our society has in the meantime moved far away from
the fordist industrial society.
In urban development, the suburbanization of past periods was inverted. The
suburban industrial society found its appropriate expression in architectural
Modernism. In the decades since 1980 we have seen a new urban concentration
that now for the first time takes into account the communicative intensification of
the labor process and the societal process per se through the focus on research,
marketing and financing. Post-fordism means economic dynamization and urban
concentration that can be neither organized using the principles of modern urban
planning (separation, specialization, repetition) nor adequately articulated by the
monotonous means of modern architecture.

Parametricism developed its methods and adaptively deployed formal diversity in

the context of these new conditions and, unlike Modernism and the outdated
retro-styles, is thus ready to tackle the related challenges. Urban development can
blossom under the banner of parametricism, evolve a new organic identity, and
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escape the visual chaos of recent decades that has derived from an obsolete
architecture with inadequate communicative capacities. Here, the complexity of
the development process exceeds the competence and capacity of statist central
control. To this extent, the so-called neoliberal revolution was an adjustment to
the potential the post-fordist economy and unleashed the productive powers that
are only ever available in a market framework. Urban planning has transformed
itself accordingly, but in my opinion not radically enough, which is why it has
become a brake, like the weak reformist policies.

As an active architect and advocate of Parametricism I cannot leave the analysis

there, but need also to position myself politically. The basic technologically-
driven socio-economic developmental vector of post-fordism, which I describe
positively under the notion of post-fordist network society, tends to be rated
favorably and be accepted, even if not all of the detailed effects of it are. However,
its congeniality with neoliberalism tend usually (and increasingly since 2008) to
be judged negatively and there is an attempt by political counter-movements to
repel it. I must also position myself politically, not least because my discipline (at
any rate in its explicit discursive utterances) has been politicized and almost
wholeheartedly turned against neoliberalism. My position thus runs contrary to
the majority in my discipline, as well as contrary to the majority in society per se,
and is libertarian.

As a result, my trailblazing program of future-oriented architecture and action

rests on three aspects:

1. The general spread of Parametrism as the 21st-century epoch-making

architectural style and thus as architectures definitive contribution to the
development of the post-Fordist network society.
2. The program of a new architectural semiology explicitly based on the
communicative capacity of the built environment, one that does
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 communicative justice to the complexity and dynamism of post-Fordist
social structures and interaction processes.
3. The program of a market-based urban order in which development
entrepreneurs can explore the market to identify synergies for creating
urban networks (which is why we push our way into cities in the first place)
as far as possible without restrictive planning regulations and geared to
profit and loss considerations that signal efficiency. Only in this way can
we generate a resource-optimizing space utilization (the above-mentioned
sorting of interactive types and participants in interaction), without being
controlled and misdirected by a forever obsolete and crude bureaucratic
central plan.

Architects would then, with these parametric-semiological methods, be called

upon to spatialize and articulate this allocative order of our clients participation
offerings, i.e. architects would facilitate make these synergetic clusters of
communication situations by making them legible, by configuring them and
communicating them phenomenologically (i.e. vividly) and semiologically (i.e.
by means of a morphological-graphic coding) such that orientation, navigation
and participation can function at a new level of complexity. Architects would thus
contribute fruitfully to the progression of productivity and the general quality of
life.

References:
Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Vols1 & 2, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 1998
Patrik Schumacher: Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design, in: AD
Architectural Design - Digital Cities, Vol 79, No 4, July/August 2009
Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 1, A New Framework for Architecture,
published by John Wiley & Sons, 2010
Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 2, A New Agenda for Architecture, published
by John Wiley & Sons, 2012
Patrik Schumacher, Advancing Social Functionality via Agent-Based Parametric Semiology
Published in: AD Parametricism 2.0 Rethinking Architectures Agenda for the 21st Century, Editor: H. Castle, Guest-
edited by Patrik Schumacher, AD Profile #240, March/April 2016