Patrik Schumacher interviewed by Vladimir Belogolovsky - Curatorial Project Interviews

I remember us sitting in the Royalton, which was our usual hotel when we came to New York. I don't remember the particular client or the project you're mentioning. It certainly hasn't materialized, so maybe that's why I kind of don't.

Okay, the Guggenheim time. Yeah, wow, that's a long time ago for me.

Yeah, this rising was the major takeoff. I mean, let's say from 2004 to 2008 we went from 40 to 450, or from 25 to 450. I mean it was an amazing boom period, slightly unsustainable because we hit the 2008 crash. We had all these projects in Dubai and UAE and all over the Middle East, but also across Europe, and a year later the European debt crisis closed that down. We had projects in nearly every city of Spain and some other European countries. So yeah, it was amazing for us. It was amazing to see that we could fill the whole Guggenheim Museum with our works, models, drawings, paintings, installations, the whole ramps and all the side extension big rooms.

And it was a pleasure. Yeah. So a good moment for us. At that point parametricism had been spreading for over 10 years. I had founded the Design Research Lab at the AA 10 years earlier and we shifted to computational design and had more and more explored these new tools and new methodologies, and also formal repertoire, organizational repertoire on all scales from urbanism to interior and everything in between. So it was an exciting moment.

And this dynamic kind of got halted post-2008. It wasn't immediately obvious, but in 2008 innocently we published the manifesto on parametricism at the Belval in 2008. We started talking about it a year earlier. Of course, the phenomenon had been going on for 10 years already by that time or more. And we had no idea that it would relatively soon unravel — not as a core group kept going and developing it, but the kind of surge of more and more people joining in, and particular the schools of architecture being more and more following and becoming hegemonic, that didn't take place because of, I think, 2008 — all of the opportunities were no longer there. You had Occupy Wall Street, you had back-to-basics anti-capitalism spreading.

So that was the beginning of the end, unfortunately, of what I now call the end of architecture, where it should have been the beginning of the massive takeover and takeoff for parametricism. And tectonism at the time already existed as well, because a lot of schools of architecture and young firms had been exploring the organizational diagrams and new forms of continuity and interarticulation, and then discovered that you have to kind of — how do we structure this? How do we realize it technologically through cladding tessellations, through space frames? How do you bring aperture into these openings, connections, and then how do you fabricate this? So that all had happened in the late 90s, early 2000s.

So we had a high point. It took me nearly another 10 years to then articulate that tectonism. It always takes longer to summarize a movement in retrospect. But the tectonism movement, which kicked off seriously in that period, was a smaller movement because it was the core people of parametricism who kept going, kept deepening, kept investing. And of course you have that wonderful world of Grasshopper and Grasshopper plugins and all this machine building and robotics introduction in the schools of architecture. So that was still interesting, but it was no longer the whole of the field. It was a slice, an increasingly slightly shrinking but maturing slice.

And that's also what I talked about, the end of architecture. It's not a total washout because we kept progressing capacities and we had a kind of niche discourse through some of these conferences like ACADIA and Smart Geometry, and we have the whole world of Grasshopper, et cetera. We have the Philip Block research group, we have ETH, et cetera. We have the Design Research Lab at the AA, MSc at the AA, et cetera. So there's something kept going, but the broad majority of the field was no longer — we kind of severed off.

Well, that decision — I mean, which one do you choose? But it was also the excitement of getting admitted into Zaha's studio, which was very small. I hadn't noticed her work at Stuttgart because I was just beginning my studies and I saw this global architecture publication, the Japanese publication of some of her works, the peaks, the paintings, the fantastic drawings. There was also a small publication from the AA, this kind of box set, Planetary Architecture. So I was quite aware.

And when I came to London in '87, I joined the South Bank with many other German students and was a mixed class in terms of British and German. And Robin Evans was a teacher and we learned quickly about deconstructivism. Not that this name was familiar to begin with, but the protagonists — Zaha, Libeskind, Eisenman, et cetera — we looked at their works. And Robin Evans was also contributing to something which was first called 'The New Spirit in Architecture.' There was an Architectural Review issue coming out which collected some of the same protagonists under the heading 'New Spirit in Architecture.' So there wasn't yet deconstructivism.

But then I saw the announcement for this conference and I was lucky to go and witness Zaha. And she was very charming and very genuine, whereas the guys were showing off and seemed less genuine. She just showed what she was trying to do, what she was working on. And the works were more sophisticated, I thought more complex, more resolved and powerful than all the other deconstructivists.

I had been hanging around at the AA where she was still teaching, but she never came. She had one or two students she was teaching at the office or at home. But I was hanging out at the AA, seeing what's going on and learning about the co-structure — the theoretical kind of wrapper around this deconstructivism thing, the works of Derrida, et cetera — and learned about the collaboration between Libeskind and Derrida. So I was quite familiar with deconstructivism.

And it was nice to be admitted. It was a super small studio. There were only three or four employees. But the studio could grow when there was a competition that wasn't continuous. There were a lot of her ex-students and she had a great unit for several years. You could also look that up in the library project reviews of the early 80s, into '85, '86, I think her last studio, with the protagonist then coming and working with her and with us on competitions. And that's the way the studio was.

And she had just opened that space, which was an old school building, in '86, so two years before I came. And before that she was working from home or sometimes maybe using AA spaces to do these competitions. So it was really at the very beginning, and it was very exciting and stimulating to work because we had no real work, but we did these competitions and we had outlets like exhibitions. There was a show in '87 or '88, and then we had a show in the Aldis Gallery in Berlin where we contributed, and publications. So we felt what we were doing was in the public eye, was noticed in the discipline.

So that was also stimulating and we thought we were breaking new grounds. And so it was an exciting time. There's no way that I would have just kind of gone back. I did have to go back to finish my project. I only had a diploma left to do. I did this two years later, fully tooled up and idea-wise geared up to do a good project quickly and to return immediately.

Well, the curves have been there for quite a while, and it was also what made it different from some of the other deconstructivists. There were also other themes of deconstructivism — superimposition — she had in her early work. She picked that up even in her student work, and it also came partly out of observing the Russian constructivists or suprematists, these layered graphics — Moholy-Nagy, for instance, or El Lissitzky, et cetera. So that was one element, but the curve came early in her work. She had a collection of French curves and ship curves, and we had specially made ship curves. This was before we used computers.

So that was there, but maybe there was also a lot of sharp angles and distortions. But I think where I wouldn't put it there — yes, there could have been many ways, and there was a tendency to potentially be more like a retro '50s thing, kidney shapes and a little bit too much influenced by cartoons. So the way in cartoons a lot of lines get curved and things are elastic, and this kind of facility of sketching, cartoon-like sketching, was what a lot of her students did.

So I think I was trying to tie it in more with more strength, complexity, elegance as well, and move away from cartoon-like projects. But mostly, I think what was really important for me, which emerged in the early '90s, where we had communication with somebody like Jeff Kipnis. When he was at the AA he came in '91, '92 and he came to the office. And we were then looking at the work of Greg Lynn, and then we went to Columbia in '93 and meeting him and Jesse Reiser. There was this kind of — and the work of Eisenman folding, the Frankfurt project.

So there was something going on which was different from the deconstructivist idea of collage — something more coherent, something more continuous. And there were certain notions and concepts put forward which made sense, and we were early on connecting with this. So Zaha was kind of the youngest deconstructivist and then became one of the most mature, let's say, teams joining that younger group which was running soon under the headline of folding in architecture.

So I was helping that along, and Zaha also liked it. And she was very friendly with Jeff Kipnis and Greg, we became friends. And what we saw happening at Columbia University that year, from '93 into '94, '95, was that many other young architects, emerging architects, they converged onto this paradigm. So Hani Rashid and Asymptote, or Bill Macdonald, Kolatan Macdonald — Ben van Berkel was actually a Zaha student as well, as was Farshid Moussava and Alejandro Aravena — becoming Foreign Office Architects. So you had people from Eisenman's office, Ben van Berkel, et cetera. So they all converged onto this paradigm.

I kind of helped that along, that we are fully embedded in that. And then with the founding of the DRL in '96, taking over from Kipnis's studio and making it bigger and more mature — that's I think where I see my concrete contribution of directing Zaha into this way. She was always a bit resistant of being part of a movement. She never said 'I'm a deconstructivist.' She was always a bit skeptical. Of course, she was proud to be part of that illustrious show, but you never heard her talk about Derrida, for instance.

And equally when it shifted to Deleuze and this new group, she was slightly hesitant and resistant and didn't want to talk about that. But she allowed it to happen because it's also with the absorption of all these computational tools which started to be developed and we started to introduce them in the office as well. So that's where my influence is — that could have been going elsewhere, as I said, with the kind of neo-'50s thing, or where even OMA was — in a sense a version of postmodernism if you look at the Dutch Dance Theatre, an OMA project, it's kind of a neo-'50s thing. It connects with this whole punk, new wave, neo-'50s aesthetics, fashion aesthetics of the '80s.

You remember that? So there was a potential there of going in this direction or staying more with the deconstructivists, although most of them eventually came through as well — even Himmelblau and the Eisenman office, they developed more into what came folding and later, I mean, called parametricism. So that's where I think I was also co-steering the direction.

So what is important — we have on the one hand this repertoire expansion, which Zaha was always interested in already. But through computational tools and looking at computer graphics, and also looking at certain analogies of nature — organic nature and inorganic nature and landscape analogies — we get a lot of new concepts, morphologies which could be relevant for architectural design, and then with the tools could be promoted.

So it's just natural — if you have more repertoire, more options, a larger solution space, you can adapt your project better to functional requirements, social requirements. And also because we're going into complex urban settings, this idea of multiple affiliation is another phrase — and making the form plastic so it can fit in and modulate itself to attach itself and make connections and fit itself into odd-shaped environments and mediate levels. All of that — these are of course degrees of freedom which help to make the solution better fitted and more high performance.

There is another word — embeddedness. Embeddedness as well, because if you come into an existing urban context, the client seeks out a site, he wants to be close to various other facilities and institutions, and then you want to kind of maybe connect to them, gesture to them, make symbiotic relations with them. From a functional level that should be formally expressed. And these ideas we've been picking up from somebody like Eisenman and Greg Lynn. So it was very conceptually fertile, and a lot of that was coming out of Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus, a lot of these ideas. And that was a very productive period, and that's really what was establishing the new paradigm.

But my role was to see the performative potency and functional rationality of all of that, because when it comes to Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, Jesse Reiser — all these Americans, they are formalists. And Eisenman himself in particular, Jeff Kipnis aggressively so, refusing to see these as functionally driven. There's a kind of post-functionalism. And I respect to some extent the formalist attitude — it allows you to be more freewheeling and explorative, and you don't have to worry or inhibit your creativity at that point by functional constraints. But it can't be, of course, the final story. But you can generate formal research, which I believe is important. But then you need to look at them as problem-solving repertoire — formal repertoire as problem-solving repertoire.

So if I would characterize my role in the overall movement of what was later called parametricism, which captured the imagination of a whole generation, it was insisting on the programmatic and functional advantages and rationalities. Because we were also a firm already working on projects. So while using these repertoires, they become problem-solving repertoires. Why? Because we have to solve problems and we have to meet constraints and explain to clients the advantages of our designs. So if you're more of an academic like Kipnis, or even Greg, or you don't have jobs, you can be a pure formalist and feel great about it. And then you kind of — so that was my role.

I was particularly interested in tying what we're doing with this historical transformation of capitalism and industrial societies from Fordism to post-Fordism, which had a number of features which we recognize in and somehow intuitively expressed and deconstructed, unfolding. First of all, the moving back into urban concentrations and cities rather than spreading out onto the green fields with new towns and greenfield offices and factories spreading out and sprawl.

The new economy is an economy of faster cycles, of innovation, of integration, where you have outsourcing and small network organizations, and you pull together for innovative projects by project rather than running an assembly line for 30 years. You have this kind of knowledge economy emerging, synergy clusters emerging. That means you layer new into old and you make connections rather than being undisturbed — I make my territory and I don't need to communicate. So I was very clear that a lot of these features of deconstructivism, and then also the layering and superimposition and integration of multiple systems — you find reflections of this in the way the dynamics of the economy work, and also you find very much reflections in the world of management consulting and organization theory.

The matrix organization, the network organization — they were talking about the blurring of boundaries between departments, multiple affiliation — you are part of many teams simultaneously, networking and self-organization of networks of competency and sort of pre-prescribed hierarchies — all of these phrases. And interestingly, Deleuzian language fits into this intuitively because the left resistance to these new capitalist dynamics — they also were no longer the kind of hierarchical Stalinist cadre party. They were the autonomia movement, free flow of currents, networks of resistance, guerrilla war, fluid leadership, et cetera. So this new sociology fitted into the left, it also came into business organizations.

And so I tie in the repertoire and rhetoric and formalisms of deconstructivism then folding into parametricism with the kind of new post-Fordist network and knowledge economy dynamics. And that's one of my roles. And I didn't fully succeed in this — I don't feel I have enough following in this, and that leads to a lot of misunderstanding about this movement. Parametricism itself — most protagonists went more technology-oriented or formalist-oriented, and then more and more technology-oriented and not so much socioeconomically oriented.

It's partly also to do with the fact that it was still to a large extent academic and research-based — research institutes, PhDs, et cetera — and they were not in the real world. We were trying to win big master planning competitions where we also have to talk about these urban dynamics and so on. So that's where I feel that intellectually that's been my role. And I think these notions and teachings have a lot of validity. And I had for instance, my theory seminar was always pairing up articles — architectural theory articles with social, economic, corporate organization or business organization articles — and show the interconnections.

Because what I found fascinating — on the one hand, if you look at some of these deconstructivist or later parametric compositions, they feel exuberant, they feel irrational, you don't get the rationality of them, and oftentimes they aren't. But if I can demonstrate that the most advanced and hard-nosed business organizations are talking, using the same phrases — self-organization, interpenetration, making fluid, flattening hierarchies, making connections, the concept of networks and the blurring of boundaries — all of these slogans you find in the management literature.

And to show that, then we did these corporate fields, business organization — and this is still an interesting topic for me. We did later on BMW Central Building, and we pitched for various — we had Sparkassen technology campus. So we have some of those projects, various headquarters, where this makes a lot of sense. So that was also very important — that we can see the historical pertinence and power of these repertoires and this paradigm of architecture aligning with the most advanced business and economic prosperity engines. This is the built environment for the prosperity engine of the 21st century.

And as kind of coming from a Marxist heritage, where productivity gains and the development of the forces of production is really driving history — that we are on the right side of history. And that's why we pitched for Google, and I would have loved to do Google campus. And in the end, when Bjarke and Thomas did the Google campus, what did it look like? It was exactly what I was pushing a few years earlier at the GSD doing Google campus or DRL kind of style project — huge kind of shell with open, fluid, multi-level playing field. That means — but of course in the wrong place, because they are still in power, doing kind of suburban campuses. They should be embedded in urban conditions. So I feel I'm still on the right side of history long-term.

But then again, advanced societies are themselves kind of blocking themselves and paralyzing themselves. So that in Europe, since the financial crisis, we have 15 years of stagnation — architecture stagnating but economically stagnating despite this amazing takeoff of technology through robotics and software, proliferation of the internet, as well as now AI. None of this is coming through. And that's the kind of indictment — I'm on the right side of history, but 90% of the world are on the wrong side of history, including the architecture of the world.

You have to dissociate — you can't do it in one go. So basically, the formalists — the Dutch, RAM and MVRDV and these guys — they think they can only work with program, but they have a formal apparatus which is more or less boxes within boxes, or they have some kind of highly constrained formal repertoire, and they think they can only advance program just on the basis of thinking of new program relationships. But they always fit them into grids and so on. So that's highly problematic. You can't do it. You can't derive new form from new program or program. So you need to independently match them and explore them separately.

And the same way nature — nature evolves its endless forms of nature. All the forms of nature, they have been continuously repurposed — they evolve for one purpose and then discover capacities which trigger the next iteration and maybe refinement. So I believe in formal research. But of course it's difficult to do that for every job, in particular if you only have four weeks to finish it completely or six weeks photorealistically developed competition. So you need to have separate arenas for formal research.

That means inside the office, Zaha was this kind of engine of mutation — just kept sketching, not related to projects, new graphic structures, new ideas. And then when a project came, we looked at what can we use, what could be applied. Similarly when we did teaching — the teaching arenas were these explorations of repertoire. And at the AA we've always done not form to program, so we're starting with systems — computational techniques, what do they generate — general systems, formal systems, whether it's continuous surfaces in the early days, or blobs and metabolic compositions, or swarms and swarm formations, various magnetic field kind of interference patterns, formal structures — not knowing yet, exploring them, developing the tools, the algorithms.

A lot of physical form-finding like physical models, and then hunting for what could these things be useful for. So you just build up the repertoire and then see, bring program in later, and let these structures and repertoire expansions find purposes. Be alert, of course, what could this ever be used for, what scale should we use this idea, et cetera. That is the way we've done these projects — starting with systems, then doing these workshops, et cetera, and then later on we're developing a program based on what could this be used for. So that's form-before-program heuristics.

Now you have to do many of those. When you get a brief, of course you have the program given, but because you have that background, that search, that huge space of examples — then you can say, ah, this could be used here, or we have three or four, and then we test them out. But we couldn't have started looking at that brief if we hadn't for years accumulated a repertoire of solutions and ideas and projects which always start with form and then find program. Then we have already examples of program — oh, here's an urban condition, here's an opera house, here's a museum, here's an infill, a mixed use. So we had examples to draw from as well as reusing formal systems.

So that's the way we work, and you can say the way we work cannot be isolated to project by project. The way we work is a whole large group of people extended into multiple university studios and peer groups, and all of that comes to bear. All of that is allowing us to make these innovations and realizations. And also then later on, all this material research, this fabrication research, these tectonic researches — knowing what we can later on also build and realize. So that's really the way we work. It's this kind of extended search space, and then on every project we have many simultaneous studies drawing from that big catalog, and then testing out — somebody's preparing the brief and three-dimensionalizing that.

So we're starting from two ends and then we see how they match and how this works. And that's my involvement at this point — telling, suggesting what else can be drawn in, or then making selections. That's the process. But it really is an extended network of explorations which are then kind of brought to bear on a project.

Well, yes. I mean, the balance — there's these cycles of innovation, the paradigm development. Of course, at the beginning, in the '90s and 2000s, there was more repertoire expansion and more spreading. And then later on, more selecting, funneling, realizing, and more technical translation — and having examples already. So the balance is shifting towards from exploration to rationalization, application, maturing.

We also, we have more — we now are brought in on projects which are burdened with a lot of parameters and performance criteria — time, cost, big massive infrastructure projects, airports or mixed use. But it's different from doing an installation or doing a museum, an art institute. So that's one thing. The balance shifts, but we have research teams developing capacity. I'm teaching PhDs, we're still doing design research where this exploration is still going on. Inside the firm, I think the overall balance is shifting away from more repertoire expansion to more application and rationalization. But it's not shut down.

And particularly with AI, we opened up again — rapid exploration more extensively. But also when we use AI, we also quite often times quite focused in training up these LoRA models for every project. And also we're training now tectonism — which isn't the capacity of any AI system at this point — we're training tectonism, fit networks. So then we are more preconceived at least, more strategic, and not so wide open. And I think that makes sense with respect to the overarching cycle of innovation of what I call the built environment for the post-Fordist network and knowledge economy society. The broad criteria and agendas, performance criteria and success criteria are relatively clearer now.

So that's why also, if you had modernism in the '20s, there was much more exploration — you had the Bauhaus, all the artists, you had to weed out expressionism and the excesses of suprematism and so on, and then you kind of home in. Similarly dynamic — let's say this was a paradigm of Fordism, and when it comes to the paradigm of post-Fordism in the architectural, so we had this kind of massive revolutionary explorative period from postmodernism to deconstructivism into early folding, and then a kind of maturing and reading and application mode. The tragedy is that there's only few who are in that application mode. So the exploration continues, but the relative focus and proportions of wild experimentation versus focused research and development — that has shifted towards focused research and development.

Yeah. I mean, nature, but again, it's helpful to set up systematic searches. So the studios we've done on looking at landscape formations — letting students go around and look at ice formations and mountain formations, and organic or organismic — let's say this whole thing of biomimicry or biomimetic research could also work into architecture. Vernacular, kinetics, adapting to local materials, passive systems, local environmental — so I'm not kind of — art sometimes, yes. Anish Kapoor — I mean, definitely going to some of his amazing spaces and structures has influence, and you can see it in some of our work. If you compare what we've done at the Serpentine Sackler with what Anish Kapoor put up in the Turbine Hall, there are these connections as well.

So it could be from anywhere. Also computer graphics and process tools like Processing and what you can do — looking at the developer of Processing, an artist, and what he's generating. And in the DRL we have multiple studios, and there's been great kind of material research explorations, kind of merely like physics experiments and material form-finding experiments. I think these are still inexhaustible, so these will be inspirations I look for. But of course I'm looking at what other architects are doing, and so on. But you know, the work of Zaha remains a source of inspiration.

Yeah, there have always been new families of projects. It's more kind of populations of projects, if you like.

We're continuing an investigation. And that's the advantage. Every Monday morning we get new — we always have at any time at least five master plans, and then there's new coming in. There's going to be always some cultural buildings, some urban conditions, some mixed use. We have a whole family of towers. We're evolving in these populations of projects. And the individual project is always one of a series. And we have now this huge internal repertoire and reservoir of references, but it keeps being augmented.

It also has its own dangers that we kind of repeat too many things, but if they haven't been done yet — we're losing a competition or we have studies which remain on back of my mind, hey, it's a shame it didn't happen. Let's do this idea here. This time it might work out, and then you can. So that's also important — that makes it very kind of agile and resourceful, that we have all these things to draw on, as well as continuously having a number of students. It's not only me teaching. It's about 50, 60 people teaching studios around the world, and some of that will come through. I sometimes go to juries on some of these studies. So there's always this staying kind of exposed, or remaining exposed — I've exposed myself to a lot of architectural exploration.

Yeah. I mean, the paradigm has set up the heuristics — the heuristics of the paradigm are set up. You had time on an individual project, you could always make iterations and ratchet up the ambition and make them more sophisticated. So for instance, when we're talking about paradigm and heuristics of parametricism — all elements are parametrically variable. So you could have a blob with a number of parameters, or you have a repertoire of several. You can always increase the number of parameters you can play in your elements, and how many families of elements you have. So you can increase there.

It's about building systems and fields and arrays of these elements somehow, and you can increase the differentiation — and basically the range on the parameter formation, not only the number of parameters. And then when it comes to correlating the systems internally within the building or to the context, you can always do more. You're already responding and fitting and absorbing a number of influences, but then you say, but there's a river out here — could it also be reflected here? Or there's a tower here, can we bring that in simultaneously? So you can always do more.

And then you articulate into the technologies — you can optimize further and keep many simultaneous ambitions at play. So you can make something super refined. It's a bit like — if you compare an earthworm to a snake, you can see the similarity, but you can also see that the one has evolved much longer anyway, has been more cumulatively evolving differentiation, sophistication, which also makes the snake way superior to an earthworm. It can also scale up and is a serious, bright and agile predator, and the worm is just an undifferentiated thing.

So that's the way also — let's say a lot of our colleagues' architecture is the kind of degree of simplicity of like an earthworm, and what we do have is all kind of intricately articulated and evolved organisms, which have therefore much higher performance and potency. So that's where you can always do more — another round of evolutionary optimization. And that means within each project, but of course project to project.

Now it's a tough call, and the problem is you always have new people and they have to be trained up. And it's not easy if you have 500 people to kind of spread this to everybody, so there's a slight unevenness with some of the projects. That's why we put also our top team on the more important projects. And it's a kind of struggle — it's non-trivial. But then of course the tools keep evolving and we have the code team evolving the tools, training up people, disseminating the agendas. So we're getting better. And I mean, it's easier for a car company — they have these five models. But if you put them decade by decade, you can see the trajectory of refinement, the way the headline is massaged into more complex itself, continuous with the surface and the interior. Many more elements are integrated, but better integrated — surface continuity with different materials, the seaming — so we can compare that to what we would love to do with our architecture.

Buildings and you can also look at, sometimes I would express my agenda like this: let's say look at a super articulated building like a Richard Rogers, even Lloyd's or something like this. But it's an industrial paradigm and it's non-organic. Then you get glimpses where you can have that level of articulation and systems sub-articulation but make organic, make parametric. Rather than having a parametric which is only a tessellation of concrete tiles, but maybe more that kind of skeleton deep details, and they have glimpses of this kind of Rogers canopy, where carbon fiber, elegant, technically and structurally optimized kind of beam. But it's only a small canopy. They can't deliver on a large building. We haven't delivered on the last building and we're trying, let's say. So there is a certain vision, a certain agenda where I say: how do you move from the earthworm to the snake, in terms of our projects. But also the versatility, I mean the endless forms of nature also means if you put our repertoire out, if you spread that out, all the kind of morphological types and degrees of complexity, compact, network, like all these families, there's a huge variety, morphological variety and also in terms of materials and so on. And all of them should be sophisticated. So that's a tall order.

But in terms of an, I mean, I recently, you said 2006, let's fill the Guggenheim Museum. I would love to do that again. And it could be a double-sized museum and we could show how much we've achieved and what we can do. And you know, if you compare, I once had this epiphany when I saw the Renzo Piano show in Rome a few years ago and it was stunning. I said, my God, okay, this one office, this one guy, one team, has done more than the whole of the Italian Renaissance put together in terms of versatility and sophistication. On the other hand, you can say, well, there's still, you know, Gothic cathedral, okay, there took 150 years and there's repetitive elements but there's still something there. Or St. Peter's, where we could still say, hey, what would be the St. Peter's of today? So they have these dreams of projects which are surpassing everything which has ever been seen. And I think with sufficient challenge of brief, site, and budget, we could deliver something which outshines St. Peter's by a mile.

Exactly. I mean, you're quite right that there is some refinements, but overall this paradigm doesn't lend itself to this kind of cumulative, exponential refinement. There's just different versions more of similarly good things and so it doesn't lend itself to this kind of progressive trajectory.

We have definitely. As I said, inherently paramatism, and this is also the move from paramatism to tectonism, is a kind of leap forward within an overarching paradigm. Because we have, in paramatism, we had these kind of NURBS surfaces and of course we had swarms, but the many more types of geometry and global surface quality, whether you go in curve folding, ruled surfaces, active bending surfaces, articulated shell, and plus the rationality increases which also reduces the proportion and can show more the subsystems and structures. So there's the richness and the articulation, the repertoire which we need for the semiological project in terms of articulating, showing what belongs together but also differentiating more.

In a normal parametricism repertoire, to do a large project like Google campus would fall into monotony, whereas the tectonism can be both coherent, continuous and much more conspicuously differentiated, the material, number of materials and so on, so forth. There's a massive advance in sub-paradigm, which is why it deserves a new name for a subsidiary style or paradigm. It's still parametricism. But then also, of course, within, once you start on the trajectory of tectonism, you can do these versions upward. One of the best things we've designed, where we spent enormous amount of time, is unbuilt, is a presidential palace for, alas, Belarus. It's not much published, but the amount of studies and they, let's say, that was one of the things I say, wow, not in scale but this is kind of surpassing the best Baroque churches, palaces, in many levels.

So yes, this is not possible so much in the paradigm under which Piano is working.