can i just go on the record as saying that patrik schumacher is the biggest buffoon in architectural theory? What kind of an ego does it take to hold up the work of your own office as the ONLY model for a “new epochal style”? 

My practice is thoroughly parametric - In some way or another, everything I do (including much of the art I post on this blog) utilizes parametric tools and processes. But this particular line of theory makes me want to throw up. If Schumacher thinks this is how “styles” come about, he hasn’t been paying attention to his history. He’s rehashing old modernist ideas (“novel forms enable novel social organizations”) and calling it something new. All he’s managed to do is identify a set of current formal trends and slap a name on them. Parametric modeling and parametric thinking transcend style absolutely. A parametrically designed building can look like mies or corb or gaudi or even bernini and be no less parametric for it. The fact that it curves, or flows, or is gradiated, in NO WAY makes it more accommodating of reality, EVEN if you choose to understand that reality in terms of flows and fields a la deleuze (who seems to be the go-to philosopher for the parametricist crowd.)

How can a single style be appropriate for all situations? How can a style emerge in an instant and suddenly be the only way to produce? 

The whole thing pisses me off especially because it gives parametric practice a bad name, associating it with the kind of naive, shallow formalism that schumacher promotes. Parametrics as a tool set, as a methodology, as a practice, hold enormous promise for the future of architecture, but associating them with one kind of formal expression disguises and distracts from that fact. 

I am by no means against novel forms - far from it - but I am disgusted by the idea that a specific, fashionable subset of those forms should be held up as the great style of our age, and the appropriate way for every architect to practice.

jessebudlong:

In an exclusive text for the AJ, Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects argues that the unified style of architecture for the 21st century will be parametricism

In my Parametricist Manifesto of 2008, I first communicated that a new, profound style has been maturing within the…

(via elpliego)