Patrik Schumacher
German architect and theorist; principal of Zaha Hadid Architects since 2016, after joining the firm in 1988 and becoming a partner in 2002. Writes essays on parametricism, architectural theory and the case for deregulating urban development.
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Our reading
The degrowth premise that natural limits have been breached contradicts the historical record.
Their wordsThe degrowth premise-that we have breached fixed natural limits-inverts the actual historical record. It is precisely growth that has, again and again, dissolved the limits that were confidently declared final: the Malthusian ceiling on food, the peak-resource panics, the recurring predictions of exhaustion, each overturned not by restraint but by the productivity and substitution that growth alone makes possible.
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Our reading
The built environment and planning regulations act as a major brake on British economic growth.
Their wordsIf we ask where the single greatest self-inflicted brake on British growth is to be found, the answer is unambiguous: the built environment. Here, uniquely, there is hardly a market at all. Since the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, development rights have been effectively nationalised.
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Their wordsEvery subsidised unit must be cross-subsidised by dearer market-rate units beside it, so each turn of the interventionist ratchet tightens the affordability crisis for everyone who fails to qualify for rationed provision.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsThe unmitigated housing crisis gripping Britain is not a failure of markets but the most visible consequence of their suspension.
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Their wordsHousing is expensive because politically rationed land with planning permission is expensive, not because bricks and mortar are costly.
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Their wordsThe housing crisis will not be solved by more intervention. It will be solved by finally allowing capitalism to do what it does in every other sector where it is permitted to operate: deliver abundance, choice, and falling real costs to ordinary people.
- 5 months earlier
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Their wordsThis does not make rational sense, and indicates that we are confronted with a moral panic and ideological fad, rather than a sensible, necessary reform process.
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Their wordsI have long been noticing this paradox that the disappearance of racism correlates with the intensification of anti-racism.
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Their wordsOne of the most fundamental fallacies of anti-racism is the shortcut identification of persistent group differences in economic standing or in occupational representation with evidence of prejudice and discrimination.
- 9 months earlier
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Their wordsArchitecture, as an autonomous, theory-led discipline, has ceased to exist.
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Their wordsHowever, the resultant structures are no works of architecture, but mere buildings, because the design of these buildings is no longer informed and steered by a living, critical discourse.
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Their wordsThe problem is that under contemporary conditions of societal versatility, complexity, and dynamism, only an academically based, discursively empowered profession, developed via theory-guided research and experimentation, can fulfil, adapt, and progress this societal function of the built environment.
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsThis paper argues that the characterization of beauty as subjective or irrational is fallacious, and that the abandonment of the category is a grave mistake that impoverishes architectural discourse and practice.
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Their wordsThe premise that beauty stands opposed to utility in the sense of an unavoidable trade-off, although a wide-spread assumption, is a fundamental fallacy that plagues our discipline.
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Their wordsThe core thesis put forward in this essay is therefore that our sense of beauty, our being drawn towards the beautiful, is our conditioned, intuitive way to recognize and choose the useful.
- 7 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWhen it comes to contemporary office spaces, especially the work environments of the knowledge economy, this implies that maximizing wellbeing and happiness of end-users must be expected to coincide with the workers' productivity.
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Their wordsThat is why the workers psychological wellbeing should primarily be addressed by focussing on the conditions of maintaining or enhancing productivity levels for everybody in the space or building.
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Their wordsThe above thesis thus translates into the claim that the psychological wellbeing of end-users is best served by the enhancement of the design's social functionality.