An exploration of the association between politics, architecture and Parametricism reveals that, even when disconnected, the three are irrevocably linked
I don’t really know why I decided to read both volumes of Patrik Shumacher’sAutopoiesis of Architecture, but I did. Diligently. Cover to cover. I studied them with the sincerity of a schoolboy reading canonical texts. They now sit on my bookshelf, two colossal tomes, one white and one black, heavily annotated in red ink. All I can say is that it was like reading source code: thousands of lines, each with perfect syntax, that slowly built up the variables and conditions of some immense programme. Purely by chance, shortly after I finished the first volume, I had a coffee with Patrik on the terrace of the Architectural Association — the home of the Design Research Laboratory, and in many ways the ground zero of Parametricism.
‘What did you think?’ he asked me. I paused. ‘Well, Patrik, I admire the book very much, but I must admit I have grave misgivings about the subject matter and its handling. Far from being comprehensive, I have a lot of unresolved issues.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled, ‘all questions will be answered in volume two.’ Needless to say, they weren’t. If anything, Schumacher’s detailed universal theory of architecture only expanded the scope for problematics.
That was 2011. Almost five years later, The Politics of Parametricism is the book I have been waiting for; it stands alone as the best attempt yet to comprehensively understand this ‘movement for the 21st century’. Most importantly, it is the first book to critically contextualise Patrik Schumacher’s contributions to architectural theory, and to seriously respond to his claims. Contemporary reviews of Autopoiesis, as well as so much of the subsequent literature around the topic, has tended to stem from camps with predetermined agendas – either fawning acolytes or staunch enemies. By contrast, Politicsengages and explores Parametricism with great care. It respects Schumacher’s ideas even when it categorically disagrees with them, and has done much to untangle the mess of misconceptions and misinformation surrounding the architect’s frequently controversial positions.
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At a global level, stasis is the best way to describe what’s going on in the world today: since 2011, when the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, several entire continents have become destabilised, the EU has staggered from economic to humanitarian crisis, even China seems to be going neither backward nor forward. The advance of global society has effectively been put on hold, while factional interests (Russia versus America versus Iran versus Saudi Arabia to name a few) battle out their positions. We could call this a condition of global civil war – and by the Greek definition it is no surprise that politics (particularly democracy) has ground to a halt and become utterly ineffective.
Architecture as building is always political, because it literally embodies a mixture of state interests and clan interests (probably better thought of today as corporate interests). The sliding scale between collective and individual ambitions becomes frozen in structure; architecture is therefore always a snapshot of a political climate. It is certainly true that Parametricism’s political position is the avoidance of a political position; that doesn’t mean architecture isn’t political, merely that Parametricism does not have the means to understand its own political agency in the world.
This rather complex sentence basically explains how Parametricism’s indifference to its political context has allowed it to validate both authoritarian regimes and property speculators: by not taking a political position, Parametricism has become a mercenary of undemocratic states and neoliberal developers. This is profoundly disappointing, especially as one could easily imagine it otherwise. Parametricism’s unwillingness to promote social stability and the interests of the many is ultimately what has prevented it from becoming a paradigmatic style.