Patrik Schumacher who seems to see himself as a cross between the fictional Howard Roark and the real life Albert Speer; he heads an architectural firm with an HQ just a short walk from Golden Lane.
Abolish social housing, scrap prescriptive planning regulations and usher in the wholesale privatisation of our streets, squares and parks. That was the message delivered by Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, to a stunned audience of architects and developers at a conference in Berlin last week, provoking a flood of impassioned responses online – with both opponents and supporters declaring him to be “the Trump of architecture”.
The late Hadid’s work might have long been a source of astonishment, for its sci-fi forms and gravity-defying structural feats, but now she’s gone, her practice is prompting incredulity for a very different reason. The queen of the curve has been supplanted by the king of free-market libertarianism. And he’s not holding back.
In lengthy Facebook posts, peppered with capital letters and exclamation marks, Schumacher – who worked alongside Hadid from 1988 and now heads her practice – has railed against everything from state-funded art schools (“an indefensible anachronism”) to the “PC takeover” of architecture (“trying to paralyse us with bad conscience”).
Schumacher is a regular at panel discussions, if not on stage then sitting in the front row, first with his hand raised to admonish the speakers for being part of the lefty liberal conspiracy. But his hour-long keynote speech at Berlin’s World Architecture festival went further in expounding his radical worldview than he had ever yet dared.
Raging against the “social engineering” of housing design guides and the “intellectually bankrupt” idea of land use plans, he set out his Urban Policy Manifesto, which rambled from scrapping housing space standards to abolishing all forms of rent control and tenancy regulation. He welcomed London’s influx of overseas investors and defended the “buy to leave” culture, arguing that “even if these global entrepreneurs are only here for a few weeks, they throw some key parties and these are amazing multiplying events”.
His uncompromising position on social housing estates provoked particularly audible disgust. “When socially renting tenants are asked to move and offered a new place somewhere else, they are given these new houses for free,” he thundered. “What a tragedy for them.” City-centre locations should instead be used to house “the most economically potent and most productive users who serve us most effectively,” he said, concluding with the suggestion that we should build a new city on Hyde Park. “How much are you actually using it?” he asked Londoners in the audience. “We need to know what it costs us!”
Zaha Hadid’s successor: scrap art schools, privatise cities and bin social housing. The extreme views of Patrik Schumacher, who has taken over at the global firm, are causing outrage. His vision? Let the market rule – and don’t put equality before profit by Oliver Wainwright, Guardian, Thursday 24 November 2016.
Read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/24/zaha-hadid-successor-patrik-schumacher-art-schools-social-housing
Spectres of Modernism 