Jonathan Morrison
Patrik Schumacher, the world’s most provocative architect
Zaha Hadid’s business partner explains why he stands by his radical speech about social housing
He has been called the world’s most controversial architect. He’s also been called a “hater of the working class”, a “social-cleansing fascist”, and the “Donald Trump” of the profession. There have been protests outside his studio. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has labelled him “just plain wrong”. He has been chased down the street by anti-capitalist protesters. Class War, an anarchist group, even followed him into a property seminar.
“They stalked me to the conference,” Patrik Schumacher says, looking a little hurt. “They threw things at me. I was shocked. It took me by surprise: the hostility, the defamation. It was bad.”
Schumacher’s crime, so to speak, was to deliver a provocative address in Berlin in which he floated the ideas that tenants in social housing could be moved out of city centres and that most planning regulations could be scrapped. He questioned how much of Hyde Park was used and whether it could be built over. For good measure, he added a defence of London’s loathed foreign property investors, arguing that “even if these global entrepreneurs are only here for a few weeks, they throw some key parties and these are amazing multiplying events”. The speech, in November last year, was broadcast online and quickly ended up on the front pages.
The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan
There was something of a backlash. Schumacher, the design partner of Zaha Hadid, the Anglo-Iraqi polymath and feminist flagbearer, quickly found himself demonised. Others wondered whether, eight months after Hadid’s sudden death from a heart attack (he didn’t know she was ill, he says, “it came as a shock”), Schumacher had gone off the rails. It didn’t help that he was quickly denounced by the other three executors of her will — Lord Palumbo, the developer; Brian Clarke, the artist; and Rana Hadid, the architect’s niece — who said that the left-leaning Pritzker prizewinner “would have been totally opposed to these views”.
Schumacher stands by his speech. He accepts that he struck the wrong tone with talk of “free-riding” council tenants who should be making way for his hardworking employees (a suggestion that he simply pays his staff enough to live in central London is met with polite incomprehension). Yet, having moved gradually from Marxism to free-market libertarianism — a choice of politics, he says, that was confirmed by the 2008 crash — he is convinced he is in the right, as well as on it.
“I wasn’t just trying to be provocative,” he says in a slightly mournful, clipped German accent. “It was part of a discourse — speculating about resetting the rules. That has to be worth discussing. It wasn’t about meanness or helping the rich to get richer: I believe in freedom and the planning system has become so rigid.”
He would like a wholesale redrafting of the regulations to allow greater density, even if it means much smaller rooms. He feels that creativity is stifled and that the government holds too much power. Born in Bonn, where most people rent for life, he doesn’t really understand the British obsession with homeownership in an era of ever-increasing mobility. But yes, if you need to pay council tenants to move farther out, he’s in favour of that.
“We’re heading towards a fully planned economy, and the way housing is allocated at the moment is simply not fair. The more social housing you build, the more everyone else has to pick up the bill. People are playing the system — so where’s the merit?
“You can’t have big places for everyone,” he adds. “Taking away choice is not the same as offering protection. The private sector is being forced to operate in handcuffs.”
The word he uses most often is “entrepreneur” — he would like to see entrepreneurs, free from regulations and tired thinking, tackle the housing crisis head on.
“Market forces provide discipline, sure, but entrepreneurs in the technology world quickly reach a stage where it’s not really about money . . . they want to forge new models and gift the world innovative ideas.”
The design plans for Forest Green Rovers Eco Park Stadium, Gloucestershire
Schumacher, 55, is far warmer and less stern in person than his black-suited images suggest, but he is uncompromising when it comes to making his point. He talks over questions until he is satisfied he has fully expressed himself. One hand chops at the air like an enraged sensei. Nonetheless, he admits that he feared his speech might have serious consequences for the company entrusted to him: the 400-strong Zaha Hadid Architects, one of the world’s most famous design empires.
“I had just taken responsibility and felt that maybe I’m compromising business,” he says. “At that moment I was a bit rattled — I had a precious thing to gather and develop. But it didn’t have a negative impact in terms of work. Everyone was very relaxed and understood I’m not this fascist person that was depicted.”
Schumacher started working with Hadid in 1988, while he was an exchange student at London South Bank University, and it is clear that he is determined to preserve her legacy. They were perhaps the most famous double act in architecture (with the possible exception of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Tate Modern fame), with the irascible but brilliant Hadid, designer of the astonishing Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan, often rowing publicly with her design partner and protégé. Nonetheless, she left him £500,000 in her will.
Vitra fire station in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany (ALAMY)
“We had big arguments,” he says with a shy smile. “Maybe that was why she respected me. She could be very dominant, but I had my own opinions and I think that was good for her. We battled out the path together. After Vitra [Fire Station, in Germany, one of the earliest projects Hadid got off the drawing board], we made our own experience and grew the firm.”
In fact, the Clerkenwell-based company has gone from strength to strength since Hadid’s death, surprising many observers who doubted it would long survive its founder. It is working on futuristic hotels in Qatar and Melbourne, a 207m skyscraper in Beijing that has the world’s highest atrium, a purpose-built city in Egypt, and the practice has just completed a railway station in Naples for high-speed trains. In a year’s time, the company expects to have finished the flower-like terminal of a new airport serving the Chinese capital. There are projects across much of the Middle East, including the Iraqi parliament. The world’s first wooden football stadium — for Forest Green Rovers, in Gloucestershire — is in for planning. New satellite offices in Miami and Mexico City have just opened.
The Leeza Soho in Beijing
In London, where he lives with his wife of two years, Schumacher is drawing up plans for long urban walkways: think cycle lanes, but for pedestrians. He is excited by his company’s research into robotics and the idea of responsive environments in which partitions and furniture move and reconfigure according to demand. He would most like to work with Google to create a campus that embodies his ideas of what a truly flexible workspace would be; it’s fair to say that he thinks of himself as much as a Silicon Valley pioneer as a traditional architect. Hence, perhaps, the libertarianism.
No wonder: technology is at the heart of everything he does. Like Hadid, Schumacher studied maths before switching to architecture, and both were early adopters of advanced computer modelling techniques. Nowadays his buildings are created via complex algorithms before the intricate shapes produced are sculpted and refined: a technique he labels “parametricism” because all the parameters are variable, but interlinked. This process enables and necessitates the increasingly organic, curvaceous forms that are the hallmark of the company and that factor in data on everything from environment to likely crowd dynamics. Crucially, it’s a style that is proving popular: the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, South Korea, for example, has attracted 25 million visitors since it opened in 2014.
Schumacher believes strongly that parametricism is the architectural language of the future: a unified design code that will come to be as commonplace as modernism was in much of the 20th century — soon pretty much everything will be swoopy and curvy.
“I love the story of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius meeting in 1915,” he says. “Then in 1965 they meet again, they look back, and discover they’ve transformed the whole planet.”
Is that what he aspires to? He laughs. “Absolutely. The pluralism of styles we have at the moment is immaturity, weakness. This would be a paradigm shift of a type you get mostly in science. I think it will come. I want to make a big movement.”
It’s a striking ambition. But surely to get people to accept his vision of a single, unifying style of architecture, he will have to tone down some of his rhetoric? Surely, to forge his big movement, he needs to win friends or at least try not to alienate the rest of the profession, let alone the public? He thinks for a moment and grudgingly admits with a shrug that “people have been resisting a bit”.
So will he steer clear of controversial speeches from now on?
“I don’t think there will be a second storm. It’s old news that I have certain opinions, but I will argue more quietly in future. I’m relaxed about it.”
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