At Mute Magazine, Owen Hatherly picks at tensions in the rhetoric and built work of Zaha Hadid Architects, with a particular emphasis on both the claims Patrick Schumacher makes about parametricism as a new avant-garde and the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, one of ZHA’s recent buildings. Though it is not entirely representative of the full thrust of the piece, I found this particular paragraph insightful:
Nonetheless, there’s at least a few signs that [parametricism] really is an avant-garde, most notably the fact that many digital designers want absolutely nothing to do with the term, considering Schumacher a mere arriviste who has co-opted the digital underground. The architect Daniel Davis wrote on the blog Digital Morphogenesis that, rather than truly entering into a design with the machines and programmes, Hadid and Schumacher created a design in a top-down, artistic manner, as much as any other architect would. ‘Whether ZHA uses a parametric model to generate the construction drawings of their signature is meaningless because the design was generated through a different medium. So Parametricism in this weird double-talk is Schumacher’s attempt to associate ZHA (and even claim the ZHA created) a movement with which they have nothing to do. Stick at what you are good at Schumacher, making money, and let the third generation show you what this ‘revolution’ is really about.’ In its combination of claiming the term for an unacknowledged underground, political sniping and sectarianism, a statement like this is perhaps the nearest proof that there really is an avant-garde called Parametricism, although perhaps Schumacher has little to do with it.
Read the whole piece here.
