Latest news with #WorldArchitectureFestival
National Post
29-04-2025
- Business
- National Post
Ability Biotherapeutics Moves to Inspire Bio Innovations in Montreal, Pioneering the New Generation of Targeted Antibodies
Article content MONTREAL — Ability Biotherapeutics, a Quebec-based leader in antibody therapeutics, is proud to announce its new location at Inspire Bio Innovations. The company will occupy the 6th floor of Phase 2 in the transformative redevelopment of the former Montreal Chest Institute, marking a significant step in its growth within Montreal's thriving life sciences ecosystem. Article content Article content The project's first phase is scheduled for completion this summer, with the second phase, including Ability's new space, expected to wrap up by the end of 2026. Ability Biotherapeutics is pioneering a new generation of targeted antibody therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, powered by its proprietary generative AI-based AbiLeap™ platform. Ability is advancing multiple drug discovery programs, with three lead programs now entering optimization and development as it prepares for preclinical studies. Taking advantage of Inspire Bio Innovations' dynamic environment, Ability plans to complete preclinical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of its therapeutic products and to begin large-scale production in preparation for the first human clinical trials. These steps are expected to enable the company to triple its number of employees by 2028. Article content Since its unveiling less than two years ago, the Inspire project has sparked genuine enthusiasm within the life sciences ecosystem. Initially hosting the headquarters of Cellcarta, it has since brought together various Montreal universities and the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM). The project gained international recognition by being awarded the title of Future Office Project of the Year at the prestigious World Architecture Festival (WAF). This life sciences hub is already attracting a community of forward-thinking researchers and entrepreneurs focused on innovation, and continues to welcome companies from around the world seeking to thrive in its dynamic environment. Article content Located in the heart of downtown Montreal, Inspire Bio Innovations offers an ideal location with easy access via public and active transportation and proximity to major highways. This life sciences innovation hub is strategically located near a vibrant community of research centres and top-tier researchers, including MILA, CR-CHUM, CR-CUSUM, IRCM, and IRIC. This proximity will significantly enhance interactions and knowledge sharing. Additionally, being close to major hospitals like CHUM and MUHC will streamline the execution of local clinical studies. These factors make Inspire Bio Innovations highly attractive for retaining current talent and recruiting global experts. Article content 'We are excited to pursue our activities within Inspire Bio Innovations, a cutting-edge hub that fosters exchanges and interactions with top-tier researchers and innovative entrepreneurs. The collaborative environment created by Jadco is ideal for advancing the development of therapies with the potential to transform the treatment of patients with cancer or autoimmune diseases, both in Québec and globally.'—Patrick Tremblay, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at Ability Biotherapeutics. Article content 'We firmly believe that Inspire Bio Innovations is the ideal hub for nurturing the next generation of researchers and innovators who will propel the entire life sciences ecosystem forward. Montreal possesses all the attributes necessary to strengthen its role as one of the most dynamic and promising international centres in this field. This new space, dedicated to innovation and precision medicine, will unite talented teams whose work will continue this tradition while facilitating the commercialization of discoveries.'—Normand Rivard, Managing Partner, Life Sciences and Innovation, Jadco Group. Article content 'Ability Biotherapeutics' addition to the Inspire Bio Innovations scientific hub once again demonstrates the excellence of this innovation centre dedicated to scientific research. This new partnership strengthens the project's leading role in biotechnology. We are delighted to see this promising collaboration take shape in Plateau-Mont-Royal.'—Luc Rabouin, Leader of Projet Montréal. Article content About Ability Biotherapeutics Ability Biotherapeutics is the next-generation biotherapeutics company developing logic-gated antibodies with exceptional contextual selectivity and stability, driving safer, more effective immunotherapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its proprietary platform, AbiLeap™, uses generative AI powered by one of the largest and exclusively held, therapeutically relevant human antibody databases, providing distinct insights for sequence space exploration. Combining AI with in vitro display and screening technologies, AbiLeap™ generates fully human antibodies that are conditionally activated and multi-specific, directing therapeutic targeting to specific cells and disease sites. This approach enables solutions for indications with high unmet clinical needs by reducing toxicity and significantly broadening the therapeutic window, maximizing treatment benefits. Ability's experienced team is committed to revolutionizing targeted therapeutics to transform patient outcomes and redefine industry standards. Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Contacts Article content Article content Article content
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ability Biotherapeutics Moves to Inspire Bio Innovations in Montreal, Pioneering the New Generation of Targeted Antibodies
MONTREAL, April 29, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ability Biotherapeutics, a Quebec-based leader in antibody therapeutics, is proud to announce its new location at Inspire Bio Innovations. The company will occupy the 6th floor of Phase 2 in the transformative redevelopment of the former Montreal Chest Institute, marking a significant step in its growth within Montreal's thriving life sciences ecosystem. The project's first phase is scheduled for completion this summer, with the second phase, including Ability's new space, expected to wrap up by the end of 2026. Ability Biotherapeutics is pioneering a new generation of targeted antibody therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, powered by its proprietary generative AI-based AbiLeap™ platform. Ability is advancing multiple drug discovery programs, with three lead programs now entering optimization and development as it prepares for preclinical studies. Taking advantage of Inspire Bio Innovations' dynamic environment, Ability plans to complete preclinical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of its therapeutic products and to begin large-scale production in preparation for the first human clinical trials. These steps are expected to enable the company to triple its number of employees by 2028. Since its unveiling less than two years ago, the Inspire project has sparked genuine enthusiasm within the life sciences ecosystem. Initially hosting the headquarters of Cellcarta, it has since brought together various Montreal universities and the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM). The project gained international recognition by being awarded the title of Future Office Project of the Year at the prestigious World Architecture Festival (WAF). This life sciences hub is already attracting a community of forward-thinking researchers and entrepreneurs focused on innovation, and continues to welcome companies from around the world seeking to thrive in its dynamic environment. Located in the heart of downtown Montreal, Inspire Bio Innovations offers an ideal location with easy access via public and active transportation and proximity to major highways. This life sciences innovation hub is strategically located near a vibrant community of research centres and top-tier researchers, including MILA, CR-CHUM, CR-CUSUM, IRCM, and IRIC. This proximity will significantly enhance interactions and knowledge sharing. Additionally, being close to major hospitals like CHUM and MUHC will streamline the execution of local clinical studies. These factors make Inspire Bio Innovations highly attractive for retaining current talent and recruiting global experts. Quotes "We are excited to pursue our activities within Inspire Bio Innovations, a cutting-edge hub that fosters exchanges and interactions with top-tier researchers and innovative entrepreneurs. The collaborative environment created by Jadco is ideal for advancing the development of therapies with the potential to transform the treatment of patients with cancer or autoimmune diseases, both in Québec and globally."—Patrick Tremblay, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at Ability Biotherapeutics. "We firmly believe that Inspire Bio Innovations is the ideal hub for nurturing the next generation of researchers and innovators who will propel the entire life sciences ecosystem forward. Montreal possesses all the attributes necessary to strengthen its role as one of the most dynamic and promising international centres in this field. This new space, dedicated to innovation and precision medicine, will unite talented teams whose work will continue this tradition while facilitating the commercialization of discoveries."—Normand Rivard, Managing Partner, Life Sciences and Innovation, Jadco Group. "Ability Biotherapeutics' addition to the Inspire Bio Innovations scientific hub once again demonstrates the excellence of this innovation centre dedicated to scientific research. This new partnership strengthens the project's leading role in biotechnology. We are delighted to see this promising collaboration take shape in Plateau-Mont-Royal."—Luc Rabouin, Leader of Projet Montréal. About Ability BiotherapeuticsAbility Biotherapeutics is the next-generation biotherapeutics company developing logic-gated antibodies with exceptional contextual selectivity and stability, driving safer, more effective immunotherapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its proprietary platform, AbiLeap™, uses generative AI powered by one of the largest and exclusively held, therapeutically relevant human antibody databases, providing distinct insights for sequence space exploration. Combining AI with in vitro display and screening technologies, AbiLeap™ generates fully human antibodies that are conditionally activated and multi-specific, directing therapeutic targeting to specific cells and disease sites. This approach enables solutions for indications with high unmet clinical needs by reducing toxicity and significantly broadening the therapeutic window, maximizing treatment benefits. Ability's experienced team is committed to revolutionizing targeted therapeutics to transform patient outcomes and redefine industry standards. About Jadco GroupFounded in 1987, Jadco Group is a Quebec-based real estate company that designs, develops and builds signature residential and industrial projects specifically for the life sciences ecosystem. Renowned for the high quality of its projects, which meet the most stringent ESG standards, Jadco and its institutional partners have accumulated over $1.2 billion in investments in Québec. The company also acts as a property manager. View source version on Contacts Information and interviews: Stéphanie BilodeauCommunication AdvisorAbility Biotherapeuticsstephanie@ Sign in to access your portfolio
Associated Press
29-04-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Ability Biotherapeutics Moves to Inspire Bio Innovations in Montreal, Pioneering the New Generation of Targeted Antibodies
MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 29, 2025-- Ability Biotherapeutics, a Quebec-based leader in antibody therapeutics, is proud to announce its new location at Inspire Bio Innovations. The company will occupy the 6th floor of Phase 2 in the transformative redevelopment of the former Montreal Chest Institute, marking a significant step in its growth within Montreal's thriving life sciences ecosystem. The project's first phase is scheduled for completion this summer, with the second phase, including Ability's new space, expected to wrap up by the end of 2026. Ability Biotherapeutics is pioneering a new generation of targeted antibody therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, powered by its proprietary generative AI-based AbiLeap™ platform. Ability is advancing multiple drug discovery programs, with three lead programs now entering optimization and development as it prepares for preclinical studies. Taking advantage of Inspire Bio Innovations' dynamic environment, Ability plans to complete preclinical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of its therapeutic products and to begin large-scale production in preparation for the first human clinical trials. These steps are expected to enable the company to triple its number of employees by 2028. Since its unveiling less than two years ago, the Inspire project has sparked genuine enthusiasm within the life sciences ecosystem. Initially hosting the headquarters of Cellcarta, it has since brought together various Montreal universities and the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM). The project gained international recognition by being awarded the title of Future Office Project of the Year at the prestigious World Architecture Festival (WAF). This life sciences hub is already attracting a community of forward-thinking researchers and entrepreneurs focused on innovation, and continues to welcome companies from around the world seeking to thrive in its dynamic environment. Located in the heart of downtown Montreal, Inspire Bio Innovations offers an ideal location with easy access via public and active transportation and proximity to major highways. This life sciences innovation hub is strategically located near a vibrant community of research centres and top-tier researchers, including MILA, CR-CHUM, CR-CUSUM, IRCM, and IRIC. This proximity will significantly enhance interactions and knowledge sharing. Additionally, being close to major hospitals like CHUM and MUHC will streamline the execution of local clinical studies. These factors make Inspire Bio Innovations highly attractive for retaining current talent and recruiting global experts. Quotes 'We are excited to pursue our activities within Inspire Bio Innovations, a cutting-edge hub that fosters exchanges and interactions with top-tier researchers and innovative entrepreneurs. The collaborative environment created by Jadco is ideal for advancing the development of therapies with the potential to transform the treatment of patients with cancer or autoimmune diseases, both in Québec and globally.'—Patrick Tremblay, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer at Ability Biotherapeutics. 'We firmly believe that Inspire Bio Innovations is the ideal hub for nurturing the next generation of researchers and innovators who will propel the entire life sciences ecosystem forward. Montreal possesses all the attributes necessary to strengthen its role as one of the most dynamic and promising international centres in this field. This new space, dedicated to innovation and precision medicine, will unite talented teams whose work will continue this tradition while facilitating the commercialization of discoveries.'—Normand Rivard, Managing Partner, Life Sciences and Innovation, Jadco Group. 'Ability Biotherapeutics' addition to the Inspire Bio Innovations scientific hub once again demonstrates the excellence of this innovation centre dedicated to scientific research. This new partnership strengthens the project's leading role in biotechnology. We are delighted to see this promising collaboration take shape in Plateau-Mont-Royal.'—Luc Rabouin, Leader of Projet Montréal. View source version on CONTACT: Information and interviews: Stéphanie Bilodeau Communication Advisor Ability Biotherapeutics [email protected] KEYWORD: NORTH AMERICA CANADA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: ONCOLOGY HEALTH TECHNOLOGY HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BIOTECHNOLOGY SOURCE: Ability Biotherapeutics Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 04/29/2025 07:45 AM/DISC: 04/29/2025 07:44 AM
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.
