EVEN IF YOU’RE a design buff, you might not have heard of Patrik Schumacher—until recently. But the death of Pritzker-winning architect Zaha Hadid this spring has had the odd side effect of making Schumacher, her outspoken and ambitious deputy, famous.

Along with Hadid, he developed a style called Parametricism, which relies on digital algorithms to respond to environmental parameters like sun, wind, gravity, and geology. You can see it in the torqued, curved forms of buildings like Hadid’s never-to-be-built Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, whose rounded, white shell looked like smoke rushing over a car in a wind tunnel, and in the newly-completed Port House in Antwerp, Belgium, made of crystalline facets floating over an existing fire station.
This is not a rendering. This is Zaha Hadid Architects’ Galaxy Soho in Beijing. It’s part of the firm’s early efforts to focus more on human interaction and urban activity. HUFTON AND CROW

But beyond stylistic panache, colleagues know Schumacher—a strong-jawed German who rocks a look that’s equal parts CEO and Bond villain—for his blunt criticism of his profession’s weaknesses. He calls critics “dismissive” and “disdainful.” He accuses architects of “misguided political correctness,” and says they are guilty of “confusing architecture and art.” In his new role as head of Zaha Hadid Architects, Schumacher has turned his criticism on his own practice, rolling out plans for what he calls “Parametricism 2.0,” to better address the human factors like productivity, social interaction, culture, and well-being that detractors used to say Hadid ignored. “I have to step up,” Schumacher says. “I will build my own star power.”

Building by Numbers

Schumacher studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart and the Southbank University in London and philosophy at Bonn and London Universities. He has a PhD from the Institute for Cultural Sciences at the University of Klangenfurt, and he went to work for Hadid in 1988. Over the years he became known in small circles as the firm’s behind-the-scenes intellectual muscle. (Hadid being its artistic one, and its force of personality.) Schumacher coined the term “Parametricism” in 2009, and Hadid supported the movement’s shift into increasingly functional territory. “It’s not good enough anymore to just close your eyes and picture something, or have an anecdotal experience of what you might want,” Schumacher says. “Data can and should help inform the shape of a building.”

ZHA’s plans for Hyundai’s HQ in Seoul.ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS
Parametricism 2.0, according to Schumacher, will still create free-flowing buildings. But the terabytes of data that inform its structures will include not just sun studies and gravity load tests but measurements of how, when, and where people interact, and what makes them most efficient. It will also take into account less measurable parameters like history and culture. This approach goes well beyond the dry crowd modeling that engineers use to measure and predict entry and movement. Schumacher’s firm is already incorporating it into upcoming projects like the Sberbank headquarters in Moscow, where algorithms simulating thousands of social interactions helped shape its curving forms—walking corridors and meeting points around a grand atrium. The mirrored panels of the Port House, which the firm started before Hadid died, are designed to literally reflect the city around it, while their triangular shapes are drawn from the city’s nickname, the City of Diamonds.

Schumacher’s dream scenario: Within the next decade, Parametricism will become the defining style of our age, be employed by virtually every design firm in the world, and work under shared techniques and “principles of engagement.” It’s a grand plan: unifying a scattered profession and launching it into a more powerful place in society. “Lawfully scripted order becomes eminently navigable,” Schumacher says of this Parametric future, as opposed to what he sees today: a “plurality of styles and a plurality of approaches. Garbage-spill urbanization.”


Sberbank in Moscow, another socially active space by ZHA. ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS

Schumacher acknowledges, laughing, that getting architects to agree on a common style and methodology will be a challenge. But he recounts how Modernism (another style accused of cool detachment from context) grew from tiny roots in the 1920s and ’30s into, by the 1960s, an all-encompassing movement. Schumacher calls Parametricism the natural descendant of Modernism, built not for the industrial age, but the digital one.

The style already has a foothold. “I would say that Parametricism has entered the mainstream of architecture. It has been co-opted not only as the language of the avant-garde but also the corporate,” says Los Angeles architect Alvin Huang, who worked for Zaha Hadid Architects in London. “One can question whether or not that is a good thing, but I would argue that it is clearly here to stay.” Indeed hundreds of firms—from boutique shops like Huang’s Synthesis Design + Architecture to monoliths like Skidmore Owings & Merrill—use parametric software and algorithms, and their digitally sculpted results, in some form or another.

The movement has its critics, of course. “Parametricism cares not for history, culture, context, scale, or socio-economic strata—all things that are central to urban life,” says Los Angeles architect John Southern. Despite Schumacher’s efforts to humanize his approach by incorporating broader parameters, Southern and others say it’s absurd to try to unify architecture under one fundamental approach.

Rendering of El Wakrah Stadium for the World Cup in Qatar

And they bristle at Schumacher’s provocative statements in architecture journals and in public. “Patrik is widely respected, but he turns a lot of people off because of his delivery,” Huang says. “I would say the biggest hurdle he has to overcome is presenting Parametricism as if it’s taking over the world.”

But for Schumacher it’s all part of the larger goal of growth and conquest. “You’ve got to lose the polite shyness and collectively hone in on the best, most plausible way forward,” he says.

Schumacher doesn’t, it appears, want to become the next Zaha Hadid. He wants to become the Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, or Walter Gropius for the digital age. “I’m thinking larger,” he says. “I’m thinking of making history, in fact.” You may have just learned his name, but Schumacher wants to see that you—and the rest of the world—remember it.