Why Space Is the New Luxury: Patrick Schumacher on Zaha Hadid’s Legacy and Future Architecture

Wow, yeah, it's been a while ago that I started. I actually got fascinated with architecture growing up because my parents were extending the house and there was an architect around and I thought this was quite interesting. Then I discovered at school in art class the work of Mies van der Rohe and I thought wow, this looks really otherworldly and beautiful and something promising. I picked up some TV shows on the work of Mies van der Rohe, particularly on his later works in the US and in Berlin. And then I discovered the work of Niemeyer, this is still as a teenager, in movies set in Brasilia. So all of this appealed to me. So when I got a bit older, I first had to study philosophy to just get something out of my system or crack that pretense that there is a higher level of comprehension and reflection. I had to first kind of drill through there and then moved to my passion of architecture.

Well, you know, if you hear about philosophy, it's supposed to be—or there's this kind of challenge that this is a higher level of reflection, a deeper level of thinking and more sophisticated approach to fundamental questions. So if somebody is thinking about these, I had to know about it. And I had to conquer that, and that's when I went to study at university first. Although I didn't necessarily think of this as to become a profession. So I studied a few years of philosophy. I did also mathematics just to test out my brainpower, as you like. And then I kind of learned a lot and I got an overview and reached somewhere, and then also formed a position—what kind of philosophy I would understand where philosophy had reached at that time in the early '80s. So I kind of understood that and then I moved on to architecture. But it helped me that I was able to understand theory. I moved on—my interest developed also into political philosophy, sociology, economics, these kind of social sciences which are more immediately linked up to what architects should be up to. Because architecture, I think, needs to be understood obviously as a fundamental contribution to the development of society. And one should basically understand where society is moving and what are the societal conditions and drivers for prosperity and progress, and then see how architecture fits in with that. So I did this while I was studying architecture and became a professional architect and teacher of architecture and writer about matters of and theory of architecture. I kept reading and studying the social sciences, the theory of society, to embed the theory of architecture within that. And so my initial formal studies in philosophy empowered me to be very confident about also absorbing these other areas of social philosophy, political philosophy.

Yes, I mean first of all, the fact that I discovered Zaha's works—I was still in my second year studying in Stuttgart, Germany—then inspired me. I then soon moved on to London to continue my studies there. And I was still a student when I joined her studio. I had met her at a conference at Tate Gallery in London. This was anticipating the opening of the MoMA Deconstructivism show. She was a kind of hot ticket already in the student world. We had noticed her, as I said already, as a student in Stuttgart, suddenly in London. And then she suddenly became one of seven protagonists of a new style in architecture called Deconstructivism, that was all very exciting. And so I'd love to participate with that. And there were all the other Deconstructivists speaking at the Tate conference, and I thought she was kind of more genuine, more—the work was more compelling, and she wasn't showing off but sharing what she was working on, and her passion came through. So it was clear to me that if I could choose which of these protagonists I would work with, it was her by a mile. The journey started—was it 30 years now? Yes, I guess. Started in '88, so that's 36 years ago.

Yes, so I think our styles are very different, so that's why we were maybe a good complementary team. Her style is very much driving everybody with a passion and impatience for excellence, for originality. Every project we had to find something new and it had to be developed to perfection at the same time, in one go. So very, very challenging, and a kind of sense of outdoing herself and outdoing everybody else. This really felt—and that kind of emanated and charged up everybody. So that energized everybody. And my role was then also to channel that energy and be supportive to the team and guiding the team with more detailed instructions, if you like, rather than Zaha's kind of general urge. She used to sketch a lot and had references and—yeah, pushing and kept rejecting what people were coming up with. And that could generate a lot of anxiety and excitement. So and also anxiety in her. So my role was doing kind of like a calming pole and somebody who could also convince her that we've reached something, and that she should go with what we've reached because it was great, rather than searching, searching, searching. That was the dynamic between us. So it was actually very good because also the division of labor—those who actually have to pull through and do it and those who push. If they're not the same people, then you obviously get further. Because the pain of redoing everything and spending another two nights if you don't, is sometimes what prevents people from finding the next level of solutions. So the pain was necessary, and it's difficult to inflict pain on oneself to that extent. So that's the way I understand the situation. But she got a lot of support. I mean, we had very few people at the beginning. She had hired—she had her assistant who helped her with many things, and maybe we had four employees on top of that. So with her we were six. And the first few years, but she had a lot of ex-students who came to help her for free in the evenings and the weekends. So for these competitions, the teams became much bigger, you know, after 7:00 until midnight, and then on the weekends. People were just loving it. But she couldn't pay these characters who needed—at that stage in their life, they couldn't live on nothing. I could still do that. I was still kind of student. I could live on next to nothing. And there's a few others. So that was the dynamic—some core staff and a lot of passionate help for free.

Well, I mean, she was incredibly generous and she was a star, as I said already, because she had won the Peak Competition in '83. Then three years later she won a great project on the Kurfürstendamm. She had been invited to do an IBA project in Berlin as well. And there were some shows of her work. I remember I came to London as a student in '87—they just had a show at the ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art, of her works. So it was thrilling. And she has wonderful detailed and large-scale paintings and models. And so for these friends of hers, ex-students who might have been doing less exciting work where they were hired and to pay for their lives, they got a more interesting outlet for their creativity in the studio. And at least our works weren't built at this time, but they were published in magazines, they were exhibited in exhibitions, museums, etc., like the Deconstructivism show itself in New York—that gave a lot of pride to people. And that was driving a sense of being part of that hot ticket and having this exposure. And so it was interesting, motivational, exciting. She was also very charismatic and very demanding, but also incredibly generous and friendly. The teams, together with the ex-students, they were like a big family—a lot of warmth and camaraderie, hanging out together. So there was a culture that was conducive to this kind of exchange of learning.

Well, I mean, what we've done—we started to teach in various universities together, which worked very well, similar dynamic. She had always everybody working together as a team, and I was kind of driving that and helping shaping the outcome. So we did that at Columbia University in '93, Harvard University '94, back to Columbia in '98, but also in between Chicago. I got an independent professorship there as well in '96. So we had all these studios and found students. Then in '96, I was also invited by the then chairman or director of the AA to found another studio together with Brett Steele, who had also sometimes been working with us at the studio, but not regularly, not permanently. And this was the Design Research Lab. So we developed—that was also at the point we had gone through this kind of digital revolution in architecture and were using computers now and algorithms, and that was very stimulating for Zaha as well. We could proliferate a more diverse repertoire in the direction she'd been formulating pre-digitally—these kind of gradients, very fluid forms, all of that we had done by hand, but now we could do more of it and faster and more intricately. So she loved that. That's the way we built the team and grew the team, by bringing in the students so they had a learning curve outside first, acquiring the ideas, the tools. So they noticed us and came to us. And then for 15 years we were teaching together in Vienna from the year 2000 to 2015. We did about eight and a half studios at Yale University. So that's where we mushroomed the firm. And then of course, all these students—they had friends and there were others. It's not 100% students we've been hiring, but we've been developing the teams from a kind of graduate level up. The master's degree at the AA was more mature students. This is a post-professional, post-graduate master studio of 18 months, quite demanding. But also at Vienna, we had the students for five or six or seven years, joining as first years and leaving with a diploma. So we had 67 students at any time but across all the years. And that was a fantastic kind of vehicle of developing a culture inside the studio where people can cumulatively over years build up the repertoire and the skills. And when they finally joined the firm, they'd already sometimes been six years our student. So this is a totally different concept of a master class. That was very productive. So that's the way—and my leadership style hasn't changed. We allow for a lot of creative exploration to the staff and the teams. And it's always a competitive process where several people come up with possible ideas. We might be sketching something, they might come up with something, then this 3D model is compared, selected, evolved further. So it's very different from what I've heard of studios like maybe Frank Gehry's studio or Calatrava's studio and others where only the master, inverted commas, generates ideas and sketches. In our case, it was not like that.

So first of all, I was personally working with computers as a student in '87. But the studio didn't have that, so the first few years we worked by hand. But early '90s—we're talking 1991, maybe '92—we had our first Apple Macs and our 3D modeling. We did it first—3D modeling only, not the drawings. And then we went to Columbia University in '93, where we had a mixed studio where we worked with hand, and they were starting to establish the paperless studio. That happened the next year fully, but people were slightly more advanced with their computation, so they worked on the computer. And this was very productive. So when we came back, I think in '94 or something, we upgraded our computation. '95 in fact—so we had been 3D modeling for sketches but no drawings. Then I started doing the drawings, I think it was '95 or so, and that was another leap of productivity. I could do all the plans by myself as different layers, different levels, easier coordinated rather than having literally 10 people drafting with less flexibility. So this was a leap of productivity. We bought some computers for drawing. So we had both drawings and digital—the renderings were not so great. I mean, it was good to generate perspective and understand what's going on, even small little animations you could start to do. But rendering out—we then translated some of this into paintings still, mixing 3D sketches, treatment, paintings. And then only at the end of the '90s, with 3DS Max, we had visualizations—not photorealistic like we can do now, but when we did Maxxi and also the Phaeno Science Center—and also Cincinnati—these three projects were our breakthrough projects, where the more detailed 3D modeling and rendering, still augmented by paintings, was kind of a breakthrough because we could take the scare factor out and show a completely resolved geometry. We also had toned down the geometry—so a few years, let's say '96, '97, '98, we had gone quite fluid and complex with forms, landscape-like forms, and lost all of those competitions. So then we shifted gear and toned down to some extent, rationalizing the geometry more. And that delivered these three wins. And then later in the early 2000s, particularly when the Dubai thing kind of took off—2006, '7, whatever—we had worked ourselves back to that hyperfluidity which we hadn't succeeded with in the late '90s. But by then, seven years later, with projects like the Dubai Opera House or the Saadiyat Island—I mean, these weren't built, but these were competition wins—extremely fluid, as well as something like the Dongdaemun Plaza in Korea. So we went back to the architecture we wanted to do in the second half of the '90s, and we managed to do them kind of ten years later, and win and build, like the Guangzhou Opera House, etc.

Oh, the boom. Leading up to 2008. Now, I mean, this turned out to be partly illusory and over the top and not fulfilled, part of a huge global bubble. But for us, it was incredibly important. This wasn't only Dubai—Dubai, Abu Dhabi was one thing, Qatar as well. But then also all of Europe in boom territory, with the kind of expansion of the EU all around—Spain, every city we had projects. So that was a huge boom period, and we mushroomed the firm from, at that time, let's say 2000—we were maybe 40 people. By 2007, we were 400 people. So we kind of tenfold mushroomed, because these competitions—even if the projects didn't happen—and early work through stages was quite well paid. And projects kept flying in left, right, and center. We were winning competitions, we were hiring whole studios. At one point I hired all 40 students of the AA DRL. Oh wow. In one go, put them into a room and said they pay for themselves once they win the competition. We only pay them at the end of the month. And so it happened. The BMW project in Leipzig was one like that, for instance. So that was an amazing period. Dubai was fantastic. Then came the meltdown. But we didn't lose people, because the next wave was North Africa. Somehow the same investors maybe shifted there. Anyway, it was literally the whole North African coast—from Syria to Jordan to Lebanon to Egypt, onto Libya, onto Algeria, onto Morocco. We only leaped over Tunisia. Otherwise, we had every single country with major projects. Unfortunately, that went up in flames in the Arab Spring. All of it stopped except the Rabat theater, which survived and arrived. But what's more, they started there. So we had a wonderful set of projects, but that happened. Unfortunately, that was when we did the first time we had to cut back people. Anyway, but we recovered, and then we discovered China. China was then the huge wave for us for the next ten years. And a wonderful story with many, many great projects.