Architect Forum. Architect Patrick Schumacher here from the studio Zaha Hadid Architects. Welcome Patrick. Welcome to Belgrade.
Thank you. Good to see you.
You had just a few minutes ago one interesting lecture.
And I think by the faces of the people that it was very interesting. But I have some different questions.
I do not want to ask you what you spoke over there. We want to speak about parametricism.
I'm sorry because my English is not 100% you know. But I think we will understand. Before we start to speak about that subject, let us say that at the beginning of the 20th century, in the 20s and 30s, at the school of Bauhaus, in the Soviet Union, in France, in the United States, it was the movement that was called international modern architecture. And the characteristics of those buildings, that architecture was something very new, and those ideas reshaped the architecture of Europe and the world in that time. But now at the beginning of the 21st century, the parametric projecting, parametric or parametricism in architecture reshaped the architecture of the 21st century, and you are one of the pioneers of those ideas, of that movement. I do not want to speak anymore. Let us hear something from you.
Well, I like the comparison. And I've been so impressed by the global success of modernism, which then was started in Germany and France and Switzerland, maybe the Czech Republic, etc., and Holland, and then moved to UK and US in the 30s. And then postwar it got an interruption during the Second World War. It moved around the world to all continents, and this was very satisfying to observe. And the protagonists, the early heroes of modernism, could live to see that happening.
Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, they were all in one office.
Mhm, in 1911 in the Peter Behrens office.
Then they started working properly in the early 20s, lived all through into the 60s where they saw the world have been remade in their own image. That's very great. And to some extent that should also happen with parametricism. That's the idea, that's the power and potency of parametricism. It's the new epochal style substituting for modernism.
Modernism went into crisis in the late 70s and the 80s. We were experimenting, we were searching. There was postmodernism, then deconstructivism, and these were not the solutions I would believe. But we had a social-economic transformation which necessitated a transformation of the built environment. It's basically the computational and microelectronic revolution, telecommunication revolution, the knowledge economy revolution. And where work is really creative work, research, development, marketing, finance, creativity, rather than physical work. And what we're generating is so new and different and diverse and ever new and novel. That requires a totally different city and a different architecture. And the same technologies which transform everything also transform architecture, to make itself adapt to these new conditions. And that's actually the promise of parametricism. And I call parametricism anything which feeds into this, which does that, has new levels of complexity, uses sophisticated tools to make this, optimize this complexity, to analytically and generatively evolve these new architectures. And it should roll out. Now the problem is it was proliferating through all schools of avant-garde architecture, but it got halted partially in the 2008 crisis.
Then the European debt crisis.
Then you had kind of also political freezing up, and unfortunately it hasn't rolled out as it should have been. I mean, of course we did massive amounts of work and there's a few others, and also some commercial firms picked that up. And China has been a great territory, the Middle East has been a great territory, but in Europe there isn't enough. So we have to still wait for that remaking of the physiognomy of the built environment. The right moment, it should happen now, and AI will help.
Because it's difficult to make these forms. And I can see that a lot of students and a lot of young architects desire to create them because when they use AI, that's what they do.
When they face a client then they still do modernism. So I think it's about to happen and it's wonderful. And it is really, if it doesn't happen we're really missing out on architecture not being what it could be.
Because modernism, minimalism, also on the urban scale as well as on the interior and architecture scale, cannot deliver that subtlety of connection, of intervisibility, inter-awareness of finding yourself in a very complex city, that navigation. And by the way, I've just showed a number of metaverse projects. The metaverse will come and it will be using parametricism to best advantage, and it will show the way as well. AI and the metaverse will help architecture to proliferate parametricism, and then I think it will also eventually transform the physical world more than it has already done so.
And but what you have done with Zaha Hadid in the past, that was some first steps to do this. It was very hard to do those shapes, to project that, and to make something that nobody has done in I don't know 10, 15 years ago. And you were pioneers. But now everything changed because AI, because everything. But there was a joke here in Serbia.
No problem. One guy asked, how can I put a picture on the wall when the wall is like this? It was a joke. But you know, all our life is reshaping, remodeling. Okay, we have some traditional habits, but everything is changing, everything.
Well, I don't think what purpose you want to serve to put a picture on the wall. Well, I think in a beautifully curved surface, you can have a panoramic screen.
To run a film, a video, or open a virtual window into a virtual space.
So for that the curved surface is better. But look, we're adapting our architectural offering to the actual social processes and social functionality. And we have a very subtle and varied and versatile repertoire to do that. And if somebody wants, if a straight surface is better, we do straight surfaces.
Not a problem at all. But I've seen, for instance, sometimes you just have default conditions: make the floors always flat, flat, flat. But actually I've seen quite some exceptional spaces. For instance, in Osaka I did a kind of lobby space around an auditorium in Paris which kind of flows. It's great. You feel your body better. You can actually follow the gradient to find the door. Or there's this kind of office space in a knowledge economy incubator where the floor was at different levels, but the tables were surface straight. So then you can go to different, you can kind of sit at the table, you can go somewhere else, and you stand at the table at low, middle height. So you have a more varied relationship to the tables because the floor isn't flat. But the table surface maybe has more necessity to be flat. The floor doesn't. So we should not get stuck on these stereotypes.
That's very important to make our life more rich and more interesting, dynamic, as well as more productive.
Because you know, if you have a quick meeting and standing at a table, that's faster. You come to the point and break off. Once you sit down, you're bored and also your legs hurt, your back hurts, and you don't get up anymore, and you overstay the meeting and you miss other potential meetings. So I mean, that's why I like high-performance institutions who have to get a lot of things done in a short space of time. They like our architecture, like Facebook, Google, these kind of high-pressure, fast companies. Or if you want to have high-performance spaces where you can communicate a lot, conference spaces, you know, we're thinking a lot about these kind of things. So for what is our life today, where your home, you should also be able to invite people and have social events and work at home, and maybe a sleepover in the office. So there is more diversity of function.
You know these kind of de-territorialized or non-territorial office spaces where you don't have a fixed desk but a kind of landscape of diverse offerings. You can migrate through and use these kind of things. And that means you have to have kind of diversity of offerings. That means you don't have just kind of a grid of tables, which would be the minimalist solution. So I believe that this is more stimulating, more fun, but it's also more functional what we're talking about.
Yes. In Belgrade, we had the chance to meet Zaha Hadid Architects in 2010 when one project was...
Yeah. Yeah. Beko, Beko. You remember?
I remember it. I was here. I was looking at the site. We were talking to the client. It was a very ambitious project. I don't fully understand why it didn't happen. But I know, really, I know, because the investors said, if we have that kind of architecture, the price of that architecture is on one level, but when we want to sell the square meters, maybe... Look, I had this suspicion that we were overenthusiastic and maybe overdesigned a little bit for the money.
Maybe. I mean, they first said, yeah, great. Let's do it. Let's do it.
