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Telegraph
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Virtue signalling has killed my profession: an interview with the ‘world's most provocative architect'
If you believe his critics, Patrik Schumacher is not only 'the world's most provocative architect' but 'the architect of social cleansing fascism'. In person, however, the man who built Dame Zaha Hadid's practice alongside the British-Iraqi before succeeding the 'starchitect' upon her sudden death in 2016 is much more laid-back and light-hearted than his haters, or even his own essays and polemics, might suggest. This time, he has lobbed a grenade into the hallowed halls of the biennales of Venice and Chicago by declaring that 'architecture is dead', having 'self-dissolved, eroding its intellectual and professional autonomy under the pressures of anti-capitalist politicisation and woke virtue signalling'. Across the discipline, the 'communication space and air-time' has been usurped by 'politically charged, non-architectural agendas', he writes in a hefty 13,000-word thesis published in the architecture and philosophy journal Khōrein. The 'principle of indiscriminate, pluralist tolerance' has produced a culture that 'repels students with intellectual ambition' and where criticising university work 'is increasingly avoided and seen as disrespectful'. Meanwhile, 'a lesser talent pool' is marooned in an 'increasingly incestuous academic culture of dilettante distraction'. He concludes that 'the whole apparatus of the academic discipline might as well be shut down'. The German-born 63-year-old – whose practice designed the Pringle-shaped London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics and won the Stirling prize for the Maxxi modern art museum in Rome – says he first noticed the trend way back in 2008. But after I ask him to explain what he actually means by 'woke', he still has a look of bafflement on his face as he reels off a list: 'Issues with so-called social justice, identity, supposed discrimination – which I think is exaggerated – safe space, cancel culture and heightened awareness of language. You have to become unreasonably cautious, but also the topics were shifting out of what would be our domain of competency – issues and problems we might be able to address professionally.' This sense of perplexity peaked when he visited Venice in 2023 and witnessed 'the surreal event' of a prestigious architecture biennale with few actual blueprints or models, instead finding installations and documentaries about recycling and the refugee crisis. He writes that he 'gave up looking for architecture after finding none in 12 out of 12 pavilions visited'. Schumacher says he is surprised his treatise has garnered so much mainstream attention. Admittedly, it is heavy-going for anyone who does not know their 'morphological articulation' from their 'pluralistic complacency'. But this is not his first rodeo. In 2016, eight months after the death of the 'Queen of the Curve', he delivered an incendiary speech at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, in which he proposed privatising all public space, abolishing all forms of social and affordable housing and building on 80 per cent of Hyde Park, asking Londoners in the audience: 'How much are you actually using it?' His co-executors of Dama Zaha's will, including her niece Rana Hadid, issued a statement saying she would 'have been totally opposed to these views'. The acrimony continued in the courts when his firm sued the Zaha Hadid Foundation to try to end a licencing agreement requiring the practice to pay 6 per cent of its net income to the charity in order to use the trademark 'Zaha Hadid'. It lost the case in December. Schumacher had previously failed to have the three other trustees removed as executors of her estate in what the presiding judge described as 'a toxic dispute'. Dame Zaha and Schumacher were clearly extremely close. She left £500,000 in her will to the protégé who began working with her as an exchange student in 1988 and left him as sole partner of the company. But their relationship could also be fraught. In a documentary with Alan Yentob, Hadid said she 'sacked him every week' when he first joined, but she was eventually won round. 'He's a really fantastic guy,' but quickly added 'he's stubborn, my God.' She gave pet names such as Fluffy and Cappuccino, but still, at a 2011 public event, in which he was promoting his book, branded him 'a complete pain in the ass'. Schumacher coined the term Parametricism to define their algorithm-heavy design style, while Dame Zaha was known to dismiss her colleague's lofty academic theories as 'Patrik-metricism'. Yet Schumacher is convinced she would be in agreement with his latest broadside. 'I think she would be on board,' he says. 'She definitely had similar intuitions.' He does admit that 'the furore, she probably wouldn't have liked', recalling the 2016 protests outside his offices and adding: 'Of course, the company was worried that it would be detrimental to us – bad press, all of that. We had [anarchist group] Class War demonstrating with posters, me with a Hitler moustache outside of the gate and when I walked out, they tried to chase me in the road.' For his part Schumacher, in his latest treatise, compares the 'hierarchical command-and-control structure', engendered by the 'do-good' brigade and interventionist politicians, to Hitler – and Stalin too. Both overrode the 'open discourse' required for innovative architecture – as opposed to 'mere building' – enforcing their own whims while sweeping away the 'cumulative knowledge of the experts'. I ask him for examples of the 'hundred-year-old recipes' that, because of the diminishing of innovation and dynamism, mean buildings opened in 2024 'could have been designed in 1974 or indeed in 1924'. 'Well, of course,' he says, gesturing out of the window of his Islington offices. 'Everything which is going on now here, particularly anything residential, in London. It's even more like end of the 19th century.' While he says the challenges of the housing crisis should be throwing up avant-garde solutions such as co-living complexes: 'Somehow it settled into this retro condition where there is no more experimentation.' He attributes this in part to the dead hand of onerous regulations, but also 'this kind of atmosphere in the discipline where you worry about more the marginality, some kind of atmosphere of not upsetting anybody, maybe'. Architects themselves have become preoccupied with designing around the negatives – such as carbon footprint – at the expense of proposing a vision that will bring benefits. 'So if you have a cost-benefit analysis, this is all on the cost side, reducing the carbon footprint in terms of the environmental cost, you only talk about this. You don't talk positively about what we are meant to be investing in.' While Schumacher says that in his own teaching at the Architectural Association, 'I've never ceded a millimetre to this,' he has witnessed that at other elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale, 'they hardly come to design anything', instead spending time on 'a statement, an intervention, urban activism, something which is nearly like a conceptual art piece. So these schools become more like art schools and debating clubs.' (This interview slightly has the feel of a university seminar. He begins answering before I have finished asking the question but is reluctant for his lengthy monologues to be interrupted.) Schumacher has little sympathy for the architectural proclamations of King Charles. 'He didn't really contribute much,' he shrugs. 'He was connecting up with some people who went out of postmodernism into the neohistoricism, very nostalgic and they did some village in Dorset. I mean, how does it help the metropolis of London?' Yet he decries the way His Majesty was 'not welcomed' into the debate. 'Of course, everybody can come in and architecture is also a discipline where I wouldn't overemphasise the expertness which is required to convene. Everyone has an opinion about it and should.' And though he is bashing the 'woke take-over' by the left, he is optimistic about Labour's promise of cutting planning red-tape and building new towns. 'It's a huge thing that this nimbyism has to be broken through and I think the Labour Party is on the right track on this one,' he says. He was on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Regeneration and Levelling Up alongside investors and developers: 'And simply we have planning paralysis, everybody said. This is a great labour market with a lot of opportunities and if you can't participate because it's just too expensive [to live in London], or you have to spend an hour and a half commuting and never participate in the evening events and so on, it's really curbing people's careers and standard of living.' Those who have derided Schumacher as 'the Trump of architecture' may have missed the point. The architect-philosopher genuinely wants to engage in a constructive debate. At the same time as running a company with 400 staff working on about 100 projects in up to 50 countries, he has been busily answering comments to his article on Facebook – even posting a 1,500-word postscript in response. He tells me he was shocked this week to discover that some progressives regard using the word woke as 'an equivalent of a racist slur'. At the same time, he is getting used to his detractors 'making me a caricature guy who is trying to gaslight and dog whistle to the alt-right'. Perhaps Patrik Schumacher is not the 'most provocative' architect in the world, but the most misunderstood. Although he started out as 'a Marxist socialist' – like Dame Zaha, reading the Guardian – and 'ended up to become a libertarian' who believes that 'only capitalism can solve the housing crisis', he insists: 'I'm coming from the same place. I would claim what is really motivating it is a sense of flourishing of the society for everybody.'
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Virtue signalling has killed my profession: an interview with the ‘world's most provocative architect'
If you believe his critics, Patrik Schumacher is not only 'the world's most provocative architect' but 'the architect of social cleansing fascism'. In person, however, the man who built Dame Zaha Hadid's practice alongside the British-Iraqi before succeeding the 'starchitect' upon her sudden death in 2016 is much more laid-back and light-hearted than his haters, or even his own essays and polemics, might suggest. This time, he has lobbed a grenade into the hallowed halls of the biennales of Venice and Chicago by declaring that 'architecture is dead', having 'self-dissolved, eroding its intellectual and professional autonomy under the pressures of anti-capitalist politicisation and woke virtue signalling'. Across the discipline, the 'communication space and air-time' has been usurped by 'politically charged, non-architectural agendas', he writes in a hefty 13,000-word thesis published in the architecture and philosophy journal Khōrein. The 'principle of indiscriminate, pluralist tolerance' has produced a culture that 'repels students with intellectual ambition' and where criticising university work 'is increasingly avoided and seen as disrespectful'. Meanwhile, 'a lesser talent pool' is marooned in an 'increasingly incestuous academic culture of dilettante distraction'. He concludes that 'the whole apparatus of the academic discipline might as well be shut down'. The German-born 63-year-old – whose practice designed the Pringle-shaped London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics and won the Stirling prize for the Maxxi modern art museum in Rome – says he first noticed the trend way back in 2008. But after I ask him to explain what he actually means by 'woke', he still has a look of bafflement on his face as he reels off a list: 'Issues with so-called social justice, identity, supposed discrimination – which I think is exaggerated – safe space, cancel culture and heightened awareness of language. You have to become unreasonably cautious, but also the topics were shifting out of what would be our domain of competency – issues and problems we might be able to address professionally.' This sense of perplexity peaked when he visited Venice in 2023 and witnessed 'the surreal event' of a prestigious architecture biennale with few actual blueprints or models, instead finding installations and documentaries about recycling and the refugee crisis. He writes that he 'gave up looking for architecture after finding none in 12 out of 12 pavilions visited'. Schumacher says he is surprised his treatise has garnered so much mainstream attention. Admittedly, it is heavy-going for anyone who does not know their 'morphological articulation' from their 'pluralistic complacency'. But this is not his first rodeo. In 2016, eight months after the death of the 'Queen of the Curve', he delivered an incendiary speech at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin, in which he proposed privatising all public space, abolishing all forms of social and affordable housing and building on 80 per cent of Hyde Park, asking Londoners in the audience: 'How much are you actually using it?' His co-executors of Dama Zaha's will, including her niece Rana Hadid, issued a statement saying she would 'have been totally opposed to these views'. The acrimony continued in the courts when his firm sued the Zaha Hadid Foundation to try to end a licencing agreement requiring the practice to pay 6 per cent of its net income to the charity in order to use the trademark 'Zaha Hadid'. It lost the case in December. Schumacher had previously failed to have the three other trustees removed as executors of her estate in what the presiding judge described as 'a toxic dispute'. Dame Zaha and Schumacher were clearly extremely close. She left £500,000 in her will to the protégé who began working with her as an exchange student in 1988 and left him as sole partner of the company. But their relationship could also be fraught. In a documentary with Alan Yentob, Hadid said she 'sacked him every week' when he first joined, but she was eventually won round. 'He's a really fantastic guy,' but quickly added 'he's stubborn, my God.' She gave pet names such as Fluffy and Cappuccino, but still, at a 2011 public event, in which he was promoting his book, branded him 'a complete pain in the ass'. Schumacher coined the term Parametricism to define their algorithm-heavy design style, while Dame Zaha was known to dismiss her colleague's lofty academic theories as 'Patrik-metricism'. Yet Schumacher is convinced she would be in agreement with his latest broadside. 'I think she would be on board,' he says. 'She definitely had similar intuitions.' He does admit that 'the furore, she probably wouldn't have liked', recalling the 2016 protests outside his offices and adding: 'Of course, the company was worried that it would be detrimental to us – bad press, all of that. We had [anarchist group] Class War demonstrating with posters, me with a Hitler moustache outside of the gate and when I walked out, they tried to chase me in the road.' For his part Schumacher, in his latest treatise, compares the 'hierarchical command-and-control structure', engendered by the 'do-good' brigade and interventionist politicians, to Hitler – and Stalin too. Both overrode the 'open discourse' required for innovative architecture – as opposed to 'mere building' – enforcing their own whims while sweeping away the 'cumulative knowledge of the experts'. I ask him for examples of the 'hundred-year-old recipes' that, because of the diminishing of innovation and dynamism, mean buildings opened in 2024 'could have been designed in 1974 or indeed in 1924'. 'Well, of course,' he says, gesturing out of the window of his Islington offices. 'Everything which is going on now here, particularly anything residential, in London. It's even more like end of the 19th century.' While he says the challenges of the housing crisis should be throwing up avant-garde solutions such as co-living complexes: 'Somehow it settled into this retro condition where there is no more experimentation.' He attributes this in part to the dead hand of onerous regulations, but also 'this kind of atmosphere in the discipline where you worry about more the marginality, some kind of atmosphere of not upsetting anybody, maybe'. Architects themselves have become preoccupied with designing around the negatives – such as carbon footprint – at the expense of proposing a vision that will bring benefits. 'So if you have a cost-benefit analysis, this is all on the cost side, reducing the carbon footprint in terms of the environmental cost, you only talk about this. You don't talk positively about what we are meant to be investing in.' While Schumacher says that in his own teaching at the Architectural Association, 'I've never ceded a millimetre to this,' he has witnessed that at other elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale, 'they hardly come to design anything', instead spending time on 'a statement, an intervention, urban activism, something which is nearly like a conceptual art piece. So these schools become more like art schools and debating clubs.' (This interview slightly has the feel of a university seminar. He begins answering before I have finished asking the question but is reluctant for his lengthy monologues to be interrupted.) Schumacher has little sympathy for the architectural proclamations of King Charles. 'He didn't really contribute much,' he shrugs. 'He was connecting up with some people who went out of postmodernism into the neohistoricism, very nostalgic and they did some village in Dorset. I mean, how does it help the metropolis of London?' Yet he decries the way His Majesty was 'not welcomed' into the debate. 'Of course, everybody can come in and architecture is also a discipline where I wouldn't overemphasise the expertness which is required to convene. Everyone has an opinion about it and should.' And though he is bashing the 'woke take-over' by the left, he is optimistic about Labour's promise of cutting planning red-tape and building new towns. 'It's a huge thing that this nimbyism has to be broken through and I think the Labour Party is on the right track on this one,' he says. He was on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Regeneration and Levelling Up alongside investors and developers: 'And simply we have planning paralysis, everybody said. This is a great labour market with a lot of opportunities and if you can't participate because it's just too expensive [to live in London], or you have to spend an hour and a half commuting and never participate in the evening events and so on, it's really curbing people's careers and standard of living.' Those who have derided Schumacher as 'the Trump of architecture' may have missed the point. The architect-philosopher genuinely wants to engage in a constructive debate. At the same time as running a company with 400 staff working on about 100 projects in up to 50 countries, he has been busily answering comments to his article on Facebook – even posting a 1,500-word postscript in response. He tells me he was shocked this week to discover that some progressives regard using the word woke as 'an equivalent of a racist slur'. At the same time, he is getting used to his detractors 'making me a caricature guy who is trying to gaslight and dog whistle to the alt-right'. Perhaps Patrik Schumacher is not the 'most provocative' architect in the world, but the most misunderstood. Although he started out as 'a Marxist socialist' – like Dame Zaha, reading the Guardian – and 'ended up to become a libertarian' who believes that 'only capitalism can solve the housing crisis', he insists: 'I'm coming from the same place. I would claim what is really motivating it is a sense of flourishing of the society for everybody.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Don't throw Salford's groundbreaking Centenary Building in the bin
When the Stirling prize was launched nearly 30 years ago, the Royal Institute of British Architects wanted to create an award that would match the high level of media attention that the Turner prize for art and the Booker prize for fiction then attracted. It could hardly have expected that its first winner would still be causing controversy a generation later. There are two arguments for keeping the University of Salford's Centenary Building. One is ecological: that demolition would squander the energy, resources, materials and carbon costs that went into building it. The other is architectural and historical – that, as recognised by the award of the first Stirling prize in 1996, it was a significant building of its time. Similar arguments apply to the handsome 1915 Adelphi building that stands next to it, also due for demolition. Neither of these arguments are absolute. If a building is truly beyond repair and adaptation, there's little real environmental benefit in keeping it. And the views of an awards jury nearly 30 years ago are not absolute proof of a building's worth for all the ages. But the university doesn't offer much detail to support its claims that it's impossible to update the building's infrastructure, which it says 'no longer meets modern standards and requirements'. Nor does it provide much evidence that 'careful consideration has been given to the history of the building with multiple options explored'. The site of the Centenary Building is a small and peripheral part of the colossal £2.5bn 240-acre Crescent Salford regeneration project that the university is undertaking with its partners, the English Cities Fund and Salford city council. There's empty space around and near it. It's hard to believe that the project depends on crushing this building. Demolition would not, as one news story claimed, 'make way for 900 homes': it would be an impossible miracle of density to fit so many on this spot. Institutions like the university and city of Salford should set the highest standards in sustainability, which they are proud to announce in relation to such things as its biodiversity and green infrastructure. These good intentions should extend to minimising demolition. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion The Centenary Building is a work of care, thought and style, of which at least some of its alumni speak with affection – 'great building, halcyon days', wrote one to its architect, Stephen Hodder. Another described it as 'wonderful'. It is a moment of ambition and distinctiveness in what might otherwise be an ocean of building blandness. It should not be casually thrown in the bin.
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Praised, then razed: why is UK's best building of 1996 being demolished?
When judges awarded Salford's Centenary Building the inaugural Stirling prize in 1996, they declared it 'a dynamic, modern and sophisticated exercise in steel, glass and concrete'. The recognition as Britain's best new building from the Royal Institute of British Architects cemented Salford as an emblem of emerging northern architecture. But last month Salford city council approved the demolition of the Centenary Building – which has not been in use since at least 2021– despite vocal opposition from preservation campaigners and the architecture industry. The Crescent partnership, which includes Salford city council, English Cities Fund (ECF) and Salford University, which owns the building, said in a joint statement that while 'careful consideration has been given to the history of the building with multiple options explored', it will be demolished next month as part of the comprehensive development of Adelphi village, an area surrounding the university. The project is part of a £2.5bn plan that aims to deliver housing. 'While the Centenary Building has been part of the university estate for a number of decades, it is now unecological to run, with major structural, heating and ventilation flaws throughout,' the partnership said. Critics, however, say the decision is 'wasteful and irresponsible' and are urging the partnership to change their minds. The Twentieth Century Society criticised the decision not to list the building and said it wasn't too late for the university to reconsider its plans. 'The decision has allowed the local authority to wave through demolition without adequate scrutiny,' said its director, Catherine Croft. Opened in 1995 by the Duke of Edinburgh, in the area east of the River Irwell, and originally designed for the University of Salford's school of electrical engineering department, the building was used by the faculty of art and design technology upon completion. Stephen Hodder, the architect responsible for the Centenary Building, said he was disappointed, and felt that history was being erased, as it had been built to mark 100 years since the formation of the university. 'The question has always got to be, has that building outlived its usefulness? Georgian buildings were candle lit, and then electricity was introduced,' Hodder said. 'So a building has got to be capable of being upgraded in its life. 'It was part of the brief that the building needed to be flexible. There's a servicing strategy within that building to allow it to be changed and upgraded. 'My reading of the situation is somebody's taking the commercial decision over the cost of it being upgraded.' The Twentieth Century Society tried to have the building listed by Historic England, but the public body concluded in its initial assessment report that, when considered against the high standard required for buildings of its age, the Centenary Building lacked the special interest in a national context required to merit listing. Previous attempts to adapt the building for a different use have also failed – proposed plans to convert it into a primary school were shelved in 2018. Until 2021, the Channel 4 reality series The Circle had editing suites in the building while filming in a residential block opposite. The Twentieth Century Society has described the demolition as 'wasteful and irresponsible', and critics point to the carbon footprint of the construction industry. In 2022 England generated 63m tonnes of non-hazardous construction and demolition waste. Making bricks and steel creates vast amounts of CO2, with cement alone causing 8% of global emissions. A Historic England study in 2019 stated that embodied emissions from refurbished or retrofitted buildings accounted for a minimum of 2% of a building's total emissions over 60 years. That figure rises to 28% in demolished and new buildings. Salford city council has a target of 2038 for net zero carbon emissions. Last month, Scott Atkinson, a mature construction student at Salford University walking by the Centenary Building, said there were other buildings on campus that were not fit for purpose. 'The construction industry is a beast that needs to be fed,' he said. 'If you drive around central Manchester long enough you'll see a new [building] going up every two minutes. If anyone had any sense in councils, they would just strip some of the old works out, put something new in. But there's more money to be made when you tear the whole thing down and build another big thing. Everybody makes money off that.' Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Blake Barker, a first-year marine biology student said he would be on board with the demolition if it meant more accommodation would be created, but was sceptical about redevelopment of the Adelphi village. 'It's a risk of it just being another cheap apartment building, because those Adelphi buildings are already kind of cheap,' he said. Stephen McCusker, the architect lead at the Manchester School of Architecture, said the demolition approval for the Centenary Building raised wider questions about reusing old buildings in the UK. 'It made me even more passionate that we need to have real national teeth to enforce consideration of reuse before demolition,' he said. 'There are a lot of innovative developers and companies who are looking at material reuse and the circular economy.' A spokesperson for the Crescent partnership said: 'Unfortunately [the Centenary Building's] infrastructure means it no longer meets modern standards and requirements. It has now been vacant for a third of its built life. 'The [redevelopment] project is part of the £2.5bn Crescent Salford masterplan which will deliver housing, to cater to a broad range of residents. Future proposals will also seek to incorporate sustainable building design practices and materials, ensuring support for Salford's sustainability goals.'
