Okay, that was one minute. Okay, so glad that you're here today. I want to welcome you to today's free enterprise forum sponsored by the Ball Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise here in the Hank School of Business at Baylor University. My name is Peter Klene. I'm chair of the department of entrepreneurship and corporate innovation as well as the academic director of free enterprise speaker series. I'm really delighted that we have a special guest with us today, Patrik Schumacher, and we'll get him started in just a moment. Let me tell you a little bit about our event. The free enterprise forum is a distinguished lecture series bringing prominent academics and policy makers and journalists and other voices to campus sometimes virtually sometimes in person to speak to faculty, staff and students about important issues related to the nature and operations of a competitive free enterprise system. We're very interested in the business school and of course at Baylor and in our entrepreneurship and free enterprise program on the nature of a market economy and how it contributes to things like economic growth and overall societal well-being. As a lot of you know, entrepreneurship has been a signature area at Baylor since the 1970s. One of the top ranked, well I'll go ahead and say it, the top ranked undergraduate program at Baylor is the entrepreneurship program. If you saw the US News rankings that came out a couple of weeks ago highlighted by President Livingstone, we also are very strong in entrepreneurship research. Our research faculty were recently rated on one index as the number four, as the fourth most productive entrepreneurship research group in the entire world. So London, we're very interested in creativity, novelty and innovation often in an entrepreneurial context but more broadly as these things impact society. So it's my pleasure to have Patrik Schumacher deliver this lecture for us today. Patrik is the principal of Zaha Hadid Architects. He's one of the most influential thinkers, speakers, writers, and actors in the design world. I know we have a lot of visitors from interior design and from fine arts today. And I'm sure you guys are very familiar with the buildings with his buildings. His Zaha Hadid's work and Patrik's contributions in particular. He's known for really visually striking buildings with a unique organic flowing design. I'm hoping maybe he'll show us some samples of projects he's working on today. But Patrik is also an accomplished theorist, speaker and writer on issues related to art and design and urban planning and broader themes in society as well. So, I met Patrik several years ago at a conference and last year I came across an article that he wrote published in 2024 called the end of architecture published in an academic journal and he argued in that paper that quote architecture as an autonomous theory discipline has ceased to exist. That was the tagline of the article and I'll just quote a few words from the abstract without stealing too much of his thunder. Patrik says in that article, 'Once defined by rigorous critical discourse, architectural innovation and theoretical grounding, architecture has devolved into a fragmented practice now operating on the level of a mere craft rather than a science-based academic discipline and profession. Academic institutions, biennials and other professional critique have abandoned their roles as incubators of architectural thought instead engaging with tangential sociopolitical issues that stray from architecture's core competency.' So I said we got to get this guy to come and give a talk to our students. And Patrik's going to address those issues today, put them in a broader context, and especially relate ideas about design and creativity more broadly to issues of entrepreneurial, business, and technological innovation and creativity as well. Patrik holds a degree in architecture from the University of Stuttgart from 1990. In 1999, he completed a PhD in cultural studies at the University of Plaggenport. He's a co-founder of the design research laboratory at the architectural association of London and he's been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 2014. He taught a class with Zaha Hadid at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna for many years. He's also taught at Harvard and at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. He holds an honorary doctorate from Francisco Marquin University in Guatemala. Patrik has published two books and over a hundred academic articles. He's received academic and professional articles on architecture and design and urban planning. He's received many awards for his design work. And of course, most importantly, his signature works are in cities all across the world. So, please join me in welcoming Patrik Schumacher to Baylor.
Great. Thanks, Peter. I hope everybody can hear me. Can you guys hear? Great. This will be a very informal chatty talk. Interrupt me many times, or Peter you can prompt me with questions. I thought I'd start just to show a few images of what we've been doing and what innovation and architecture might look like. And then to contrast this to how architecture actually has stalled. What I'm showing you here is a drop in the ocean of an otherwise stagnant and stalled development. So can I share my screen for a few minutes?
Yes, you should be able to share.
Okay. So it's just to give a bit of a visual flavor. I'm not going to explain a lot. One second. Okay. Is that now slide by slide?
Perfect. Yes, there you go. We can see it.
Okay, architecture for the 21st century. Zaha Hadid Architects started in the 80s, with research and innovation in the 90s, but the takeoff came at the end of the 90s and early 2000s, when we proliferated works across the globe, riding the boom until 2008. We work across all continents and typologies: cultural buildings, mixed-use complexes, bridges, sports facilities, museums, airports. Our projects in Beijing, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere showcase our expertise in three-dimensional public space, atria, and bridges to maximize communication. This is typical of the post-Fordist restructuring: the shift from mechanical mass production to economies of scope, fast innovation cycles, and computationally empowered design. The 2008 crash brought a halt, and a wave of woke concerns infected the architectural discipline. The profession, academia, and cultural critics abandoned the discourse on innovation, focusing instead on social justice, community inclusion, and sustainability. This led to the end of architecture as a science-based academic discipline, reducing it to a mere craft. In Europe, planning paralysis, overregulation, and NIMBYism have stifled development. Developers are prescribed every detail, from land use to room sizes, leaving no room for innovation. The result is a housing crisis and a lack of creative urban development. Our firm, with 500 people in London and offices worldwide, has been forced to find markets in China, the Middle East, and India, where innovation is still possible. Parametricism, the new architectural paradigm, aligns with the computational and telecommunication revolution, but it is ignored in the West. The built environment in London is more regressive than what was built in the 1960s. This is a huge infringement on prosperity and creativity.
You know, what you really want when you earn more is a larger, nicer space, better located. But if that's not available or becomes astronomically expensive, young people come to London and compromise, but they can't compromise their whole life spending 80% of their salary on a crappy flat share. These are former social houses converted into flatshares. Co-living would be an answer with very small units, but the government prescribes 49 square meters minimum, calling it not worthy for human beings. They allow student housing but only for students. We would love to innovate on co-living types and how small you can come. The government also has arbitrary prescriptions like window distances that just make everything more expensive and reduce density. Leave that to the market and to us to figure out. There's an Aladdin paralysis, handcuffs for developers. I recently talked to someone in Austria who said he's giving up and going to Dubai where there are no restrictions and zero tax. That's why Europe is dying: half a percent growth vs two and a half in America. Over 20 years it's massive. Prosperity is cumulative. Europe is languishing in paralysis. The US elite university design is still in a woke distraction. When I published my article, people were surprised. Architecture has descended into this kind of woke paralysis. I've witnessed it at Harvard with the Me Too movement and George Floyd. There's been backlash, and some political parties have identified planning as a huge problem, but the courage to bust it up is lacking. It will only come with a deep crisis like in the 1970s before Thatcher. Without that, the frog will be cooked to death on a slow burn. Anyway, I stop here and we can open for questions.
Thank you very much. We do have time for questions from the audience. Those of you in the room, there are microphones in the ceiling, so if you just speak up he should be able to hear your question. We don't have a hand mic, but please anything that you would like to ask for clarification on or maybe to challenge something that you heard. We'd love to get opinions from students and maybe some professors too, but professors don't try to monopolize the conversation.
Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you. Well, I think
