Below is my transcript of the interview podcast with Patrik Schumacher conducted by Archinect Sessions on April 21, 2016.
Since I can’t tell who of the hosts is who, I’ll just identify all of them as ‘H’ for ‘hosts’, Patrik is ‘P’.
H: …Hi Patrik … condolences … we will talk about the future of the firm, but maybe we can start out with you sharing some early memories of Zaha. Do you remember the first time you met her?
P: Yeah. I had heard about Zaha when I was a young student in the 80’s and seen some of the first publications coming out that were a shock and a revelation. There was a brochure called Planetary Architecture which was published by the AA and that showed up in our university library, and I think there were also some articles in newspapers which were the first things I saw. Then, in 85 I think, there was the GA, Global Architecture, coming out with all the early works, including the Peak which was really opening up the discipline, in my imagination, to something totally unheard of and unseen. It gave a new dimension to what architecture might become. I was fascinated.
Not so much later I made my way to London and became a student there. I saw Zaha for the first time in person at the 1988 pre-conference anticipating the MoMA Deconstructivist show1.
I had been aware of the work which was the to be called Deconstructivism even before the event. The work of Zaha, Coop-Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi were references that I was getting into while already in Stuttgart and later in London at the South Bank. There was an earlier publication where some of this work was shown under the title of ‘The new spirit in architecture’ in the Architectural Review magazine. My teacher at the South Bank, Kevin Rhowbotham, was also a part of that group2.
For us at the time, Zaha Hadid was the absolute hotshot and a figure, but we had not encountered her. She wasn’t teaching at the AA any more, although I was hanging round the AA for seminars and lectures.
So I first saw her at the Tate conference. Although I knew her work already what convinced me at that moment was her openness, frankness and genuineness, compared with all the other protagonists who were speaking, like Libeskind, Tschumi or Eisermen, who were more – relatively speaking to Zaha’s genuineness, where she was revealing what and how she is working – they were more in a showing off game. So I had a lot of sympathy for her on top of having and admiration for her work, which was a kind of enigma for me at the time.
Right there, as I was finishing my year at the South Bank, I decided to stay in London and joined the office that Summer. I interviewed at her office by knocking at the door with my portfolio, with one of the few employees, at the time Chief Designer Michael Wolfson, who hired me on the spot.
H: So it progressed pretty quickly from you meeting her to you finding yourself working with her.
P: Very fast, yes.
H: You had this impression of her form the outside, how did your perspective of her working style change.
P: Well I had never worked, except as an intern in a boring corporate German firm, and I didn’t have any conceptions. Maybe I heard some myths about what it would be like working there, but they were pretty quickly scattered or rather shattered. It was surprising how small the place was – I believe it was five people all together.
Initially Zaha would show up relatively late, she would tease her employees, and seemingly not work. Curiously, as a new employee in a very small space my existence wasn’t recognised for the fist three weeks, she didn’t say hello to me. That was an interesting shock, but I was kind of playing along.
Fortunately for the office, there was an exhibition forthcoming in Aedes in Berlin , on the theme of a divided Berlin and we crated a cityscape drawing. I was put onto constructing these multi-perspective distorted field cityscape with the wall jagging across the painting. I was brand new in this fabulous firm and I was sent to out to Berlin to represent Zaha Hadid at Aedes. While I felt cool I was still puzzled about the whole atmosphere, it’s super casualness and hardly any talk about ideas at all, which was a bit of a shock.
But suddenly we had a competition for a multi use complex in Berlin which was planned to be put into an existing block condition, with a hotel, offices and retail, and suddenly the place came to life. We started working on something, discussing options, proliferating ideas and the little office of 5 employees mushroomed into a large group of 20 or 25 people with all sorts of ex-students, friends coming together and became a big team shredding deadlines, pulling all nighters, shared meals, etc. It was a totally intense experience. So after the first three or four weeks of doing nothing we suddenly entered production mode.
For a long time it was always like this. An ebb and flow with basically one project at a time, one competition at a time, until the end of the year or the beginning of the next, when Rolf Fehlbaum from Vitra stepped in and I ended up being given the project3. It was my first experience designing something which wasn’t a competition.
So that was the early days. In these charrette-modes when we met and fought over designs Zaha would also pull all nighters with us, and we would then just go back home, take a shower and take a flight to present the work. In such a small group we became very close very quickly. What was unusual was that after me being in the office for hardly a few months Zaha’s chief guy left the office to settle on his own, and somehow I got more responsibilities, becoming a lead figure having just landed there.
When there were competitions, people who had been working with Zaha earlier, going back to The Peak years would join and become a force. We worked like this for many years. Sometimes, when there was a real project with a real client, like in Dusseldorf4, we started to hire and the office mushroomed up to 20 people employed, and then it would shrink back down again. This happened again, for example, with Cardiff5.
Basically from ‘88 to the late 90’s, during that decade we only had Vitra and another building in Weil am Rhein6. Two buildings completed during the whole decade. Otherwise it was abortive projects or lost competitions.
H: Patrik, going back to the early days when you first started working at Zaha’s office, you mentioned that there was very little work or not much to do, did you feel that Zaha had the ambition of becoming one of the world’s greatest and most recognised architects, even when there wasn’t much work to show for?
P: Yes, I think so.
First of all, The Peak7 was a major milestone and the competition win against the whole line-up of top architects. She actually re-drew and built up the project into a compelling suite of renderings and perspectives. With each of the projects there was this incredible urge to beat everybody, to show absolute excellence and perfectionism, and an incredible drive. The force of energy could at time explode into negative energy, because the will to succeed and excel was so immense.
She always felt to be this larger than life star figure. I think she was a star as a student already, in her own mind and in the mind of her peers and teachers. This was definitely a sense we had, and we, including me personally, come to the office due to her being a star in the academic world.
From the beginning, although we didn’t have much built work, all our efforts – lost competitions – were published in one way or another. We had a lot of publishing and exhibitions, for example the ICA show, early MOMA show, Aedes Berlin… Whatever we did, we felt that it had the attention of the architectural discipline, which kept us motivated.
Initially, me as a young student and young architect, this was enough satisfaction. I didn’t have that much of a killer drive to build, I just wanted to help making a dent in the discipline. I think Zaha suffered much more in the Cardiff loss and the Dusseldorf loss – she really wanted to build and these were large signature projects on waterfronts which were to be realised. She had that killer instinct at the time. I developed it much later, in the late 90’s after having lost a series of major competitions.
I had started DRL8 in ‘96 and had taught at a number of studios, first in Columbia and then Harvard, in Chicago also, in the early to mid 90’s. That was my world, the world of peers. For me it didn’t make much of a difference if something was built or just drawings and renderings that were pushing the discipline further. Only towards the end of the 90’s I somehow changed track and really wanted to win a competition.
That was the point when we slightly scaled back our ambitions, became more more conscientious, and we started aiming to win.
We nailed three major competitions: the Rome competition9, the Cincinnati10 competition and the Bergisel11 competition; shortly after also nailing the Salerno12 competition (which, by the way, is now opening 16 years later). This was a conscious effort to bring home all this research and flamboyance into compelling winning schemes, which happened in ‘98/’99.
H: So Patrik, you mentioned you being more concerned with the ideas aspect of the practice, with Zaha having the killer drive. I’m wondering how that balance between the two of you got translated into your collaborative relationship later on.
P: We incorporated in 1999 as a limited company with us being the two directors of the company from that time on. About the same time when we started to build.
H: Within the office, how would your collaborative relationship work?
I think from the very beginning, even before the Peak, perhaps from the Irish Prime Minister’s house13, which was our first signature design where Zaha came out with a unique voice in the field, circa 1979/80, what I see reflecting back is that there was always a very collaborative and collective effort. A lot of energy. Of course also controlling, but always encouraging a flow and flourish of alternatives.
That kept going. Perhaps this is different form some of the other star architects, and is maybe why the work is more diverse and proliferous, than compared to somebody like Daniel Libeskind or Frank, let’s say. With them, I have the feeling they are more themselves authoring their design. That wasn’t Zaha’s way.
Zaha’s way was that there was an overall repertoire, set of values and references combined with parallel sketching, model making, rendering, where the design could pop out form anywhere. Always a lot of collective debating about everything. I think that made it stimulating, and allowed us all to be so involved and engaged – literally for a decade I rarely went home before midnight. And not just me, that applied to a large group of people. That’s been her style.
H: Patrik, I think it’s safe to say that Zaha was a very strong person. I mean, nobody can achieve the sort of success that she did without a lot of strength and focus in her work. I think a lot of people in the architecture discipline may have considered her to be invincible to criticism. How did she take failure, such as when your office did not win a competition that you were really going for?
P: She didn’t take it so lightly. She was hit hard by negative criticism all the way through, in particular the loss of a project like Cardiff was very hard. She felt misunderstood and it really was a downer.
I’m very different. It never touched me – I have very thick skin, which maybe allowed me to bear the intensity inside the office. Which also meant that my role was also frequently to somehow turn the corner on all the ever changing ideas, diagrams and options and at a certain point merely funnel the work and make selections and decisions into a submission. Zaha’s perfectionism and anxiety about doing something truly unique sometimes meant that she was at the verge of not submitting.
What I found interesting when we worked together was that me, who is a quiet person when working, could never create the pressure cooker atmosphere, but could help in channelling the energy. It was a good personality match.
Zaha also had an incredible innovative force. I believe the originality of her repertoire expansions were truly monumental.
You have to remember what architecture was. Architects would have usually been sketching with a kind of jittery line trying to trace an imagined trajectory, create a rectangle or an axis – these kind of typical architectural drawings. Her drawings were always a super rapid hand movement which generates spline-line accelerations and decelerations continuously shifting curvature. They create a completely new kind of curvilinearity. She would also work with fading effects and gradients in a way through pointillistic techniques of painting or washing painting. These features gave a whole new morphology into architecture and a whole new ordering concept.
H: Is her design technique and artistic approach to designing unique to her in the office? Did other people in the office learn this technique from her? Did she continue working with her hands up until the end?
P: We were all invited into the process. She was sketching away with ink brush or pen and fading, working in an incredibly sure and fast line, but she would shy away from from three dimensional projections (although she could do them), as there you have to have amore careful approach.
She rarely did renders, usually working in a 2D indication of a certain compositional or spacial recipe and aesthetic approach, and then the team would elaborate this into 3D, models and perspectives… We would also hardline it.
This is quite interesting as usually when you hardline, the intention is to rationalise something back into straights, arcs, rectangles cylinders and circles. When we did it, it was with the intention of translating them with the utmost literalness, maintaining the tension and dynamism present in the lines. We worked with a huge array of French curves and ship curves, we had whole sets of tools made for us. The sketch almost delivers a physics with centrifugal forces of the rapid movement of Zaha’s hand gave it a law and logic, pushing splines to be as if coming out of elastic bending.
I don’t think anybody has ever done this. Even Neimeyer who is maybe one of the few precursors we looked at closely, in the end of you look at his work everything is rationalised into straights and arcs, while we were doing double curved surfaces already – all under the headline of the so-called Deconstructivist phase. We actually already pointed far beyond that into what I now call Parametricism, which was called Folding in the early 90’s.
We picked up computers quite early. I had experience with computers from my university days, and we brought in a Mac to do 3D modeling - not plans yet. We used the Xerox machine to distort plans into isometric drawings or to smear and distort them before we went into software tools in the early 90’s.
H: You said something earlier when you were talking about Zaha’s hand sketches that I thought was particularly beautiful about the acceleration and deceleration in her curvature. When you started talking about her hand and how she crafted lines it reminded me, in a strong sense, of her and her presence in the firm and the architectural world. It always struck me that when Zaha walked into the room, the room would stop.
Given the nature of her has a presence with your current and future clients, how are you managing the situation to reassure projects, how do you go about managing the expectation that one day she was going to be there, when one day she is not?
P: So far the response has been positive. Of course the projects currently under constructions, of which there are over 25, will continue.
We have another 20 projects in late stages, and even for the projects in early stages we had no clients fall off. They were all willing to commit to the ambitions to the initial sketches that we have in some of those projects.
Clearly, no project beyond the planning permit stage would stop, but it was very encouraging to see that all the early projects stayed as well. Also, since Zaha’s passing, there were a number of pending competitions and short lists, and we’ve won many.
Of course the big test will be totally new projects without Zaha’s presence. The question is if we can maintain that artistic credibility that has been attributed to her in the world at large. If we can still aim for buildings of cultural significance? I think we have to, as our organisation is almost only geared towards that.
We are not geared up to address a bread and butter market, so we have to make it credible that we are a collective with an artistic and intellectual DNA. It is something that I’ve already established internally, and it must now be established in the mass media plane as well.
I believe that any major reputation out in the world is initially built within the field, which was Zaha’s case as well as mine, through lectures, publications, academia, exhibitions and the like. What is positive is that there I have a strong wave of support from friends, peers and critics who would not like to see us disintegrate.
H:I’d like to ask a little bit about the notion of the DNA that Zaha. I’d like to ask how she mentored young architects in the firm. In particular I am interested in how she mentored women, although I know that she never wanted to make a big deal out of that. There was a beautiful article in the New York Times by Tegan Bukowski, where she talked about how Zaha was always encouraging. Could you talk a little more about that?
P: She’s been a teacher all her life. She was teaching with Rem and Illia and then took over the unit, going straight from student into teacher mode. She taught from the early 80’s at the AA, then she was invited to Columbia. Afterwards we did studios together in America. For the last 15 years she was a professor in Vienna. We frequently taught together.
Teaching was the main arena where we drew our staff because that’s the training ground for people and a talent search for us. We hired extensively her students from Yale, Harvard, Vienna… as well as my students from the DLR at the AA, where I’ve been teaching for 20 years.
In schools is where you have a direct line to young architects to the star of Zaha Hadid, which was a direct and close relationship which continued in the office. Her students were a group of people she kept wanting to work with.
In the firm we have three profit centres led by major long-standing staff leaders. These three clusters hold contracts and projects.
We also have what is called the ZH cluster, which is myself and Zaha together with students and ex-students creating a front-end design milieu with us mentoring the design. She didn’t make any difference between male and female students, the group is roughly 50/50. I don’t think there was a particular interest in mentoring women. We were always oriented towards what we can achieve, not pedagogy. Even my teaching was never pedagogy, it was a research oriented venture.
H: Question about what Zaha was like in private, outside of the public image.
I won’t transcribe this answer, as it is personal and deserves listening to. Starts at minute 31. It covers her love of art, fashion, and her broad network of friends who she was very loyal and intimate with.
H: Moving forward, knowing that Zaha was closely involved with all the projects, can you talk a little bit about how Zaha Hadid Architects will work moving forwards, and mention some of the expansions in to other cities that we read about today in the New York Times?
P: I’m looking at a historical trajectory. We have to look at the nearly 50 years of modernism which changed the physiognomy of this planet, which started in 1919/20 perhaps, at the Bauhaus and with Le Corbusier. We have all these heroes that created a new paradigm or style that ranged from urbanism to architecture through interiors deign and product design. It resulted in a total make over after decades of work. For me, this is a paradigm that ground to a halt in the late 70’s, perhaps even earlier through post-modernism and deconstructions.
The searching of post-modernism, the richness of architectural form and making it speak and the re-inhabitation of cities after decades of spreading out into suburbs is also the problematic of deconstruction, with its layering, making complex and intensification. Out of this evolved what we now call Parametricism.
There is a trajectory form fundamentally new repertoires in a new condition which I call post-XXX?-network society. You start with this avant-garde searching, in an almost art-space and you tease out first manifesto projects which aren’t deliverable but still point to new possibilities. We did that for a decade, just like Modernism in the 20’s which was first just sketches, then evolved to small pavilions (Barcelona Pavilion), and only then it started to scale up with larger buildings and really ripped across the globe. That’s my ambition and vision. We’ve matured the work from a manifesto building like Vitra and all these exhibition spaces pavilions into large scale mature projects which deliver a new degree of fluidity, complexity and dynamism into major cultural centres, airports, train stations… This a real attempt to roll out and with that maturing from avant-garde into mainstream comes a disciplining of the work which also needs to be aestheticised as a sort of artistic refinement where these kind of new complex and information rich and resonating forms which are inter-articulating and communicating in our discipline through engineering logics, structural logics. In the last years we moved away from the relative arbitrariness of nurb-surfaces of and blob-figures into, let’s say, more disciplined (but still in the same spacial mode) compositions: arrays of shells, tensile structures. When we come to towers we have façades whose shells are driven by a structural logic of window perforations and maybe shading elements which radiate around and represent the various environmental conditions, internal logics of social processes, flows of people, gatherings and dispersals that we are now modelling with crowd simulations.
It’s a maturing that you can feel. In a sense it loses some of that sketchy, nearly cartoon like wilfulness which is a necessity for when initially attempting to state how you can imagine a form to how you can build a form, but not yet with rationalising logics which put an economic and pragmatic constraints that are now flowing in. You feel and see it in the work, and that’s what I’m pushing for. The push into the mainstream, along with new computations, simulations, form-finding techniques. This will proliferate the range of formal characters we are going to generate.
It also means that we will have to leave behind the initial Zaha signature which came out the particular constraints of her kind of working. I feel that a signature recognisability is always in fact some kind of a limitation. It’s not that one desires to have that, and Zaha was always fighting this, but it is unavoidable. You have certain routines and you can’t jump out of your skin. It makes your product recognisable in ways that are self-limiting. Sometimes clients would like to see that, but we don’t. We would like to suffuse into a great paradigm where we don’t need to distinguish our project from another parametric project. That’s the way I am driving. That’s the way Zaha was driving. Often times we have to rule by general principles, to bracket and channel, but also by taboos. No more tilted walls, no more linear light-lines, no more series of things which became clichés within the firm. Don’t rely any more only on white, especially glossy white. We went through that.
There really is the urge to innovate and enrich the work so that it becomes not that recognisable anymore as a Zaha Hadid project. She also felt like that, she was worried about the recognisability because it meant that it wasn’t principled and innovative enough but was locked in our particular methodological constraints. We are trying to break through. We established CODE, Computation Group, where we have a number of people doing pure research into geometry, application logic, we read scientific papers, we collaborate with engineers and other disciplines. That is the way forward in ensuring the repertoire is made into a global best practice paradigm. We want to win projects (such as the recent Beijing Airport win) where you don’t only have to point towards future potentials, but realising lightness, legibility, productivity and competing not with a promise but delivering a global best practice.
That’s where we are going, which means we are also building a professional organisation. We head-hunted a few people, but are concentrating on growing our own people.
H: Question about how Parik is handling the loss personally, after knowing Zaha for almost 30 years, how he is working through it.
Similarly to above, not transcribing the personal section of the response. Starts at 41:30.
P: … In the office there is a sense that you have to break through in the next few months … We see ourselves as a mother ship of a whole movement. There are so many co-evolving, co-protagonists in the new paradigm of computationally empowered design inteligence. For the past 20 years there has been a feeling of being submerged in a collective movement, and we are close to the co-protagonists. The tie will become even closer, and maybe we can establish collaboration with some of these figures who have pushed forward with research but haven’t established their own office yet.
I always felt a mentor of a larger movement, something like a group of 400 who should now reach out to more collaborators. I have visions of a generous open house and platform, perhaps evolving into a new kind of organisation that allows for internal stars and protagonists. Bringing in some of the co-protagonists would would allow their ideas to form quicker than if they had to go through the whole trajectory of them going form a small to a medium and large firm.
I like the idea of a supergroup or an umbrella organisation, as I’ve always had felt regret when looking at what happened at a firm like OMA, which has lost so many of it’s great protagonists who then had to step back and establish themselves from scratch to build a similar size to OMA14. With several of these firms, I sometimes wonder how it would have been if they had all stayed together and not lost the time.
I’ve always been a great admirer of firms like Foster+Partners as well as Richard Rogers, with their incredible intricacy of detail and perfection of products. We have to set ourselves against that, but also with a differentiation. The idea of Foster is that you have a global design brand that delivers into nearly major city of the world the top address, the top leading edge institution or building, is where I see our avant-garde into mainstream heading.
If we manage go through what might be a very very tough 6 to 12 months, the ambition is to grow this firm into a whole new type of firm with an expansionary spirit. We very lucky in what might have been a slightly delusional period between 2004 to 2008, when we grew from a firm of 70 people to 450. That had a lot to do with my nearly reckless optimism and making-things-happen attitude. If there is another wave of normalisation after our current climate, my ambition is to make an insanely great larger umbrella firm.
The 1988 MoMA Deconstructivist Show curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. ↩
The Vitra Frie Statsion. ↩
The Zollhof Meida Park ↩
The Digital Research Laboratory at the AA. ↩
The MAXXI Museum ↩
The Maritime Terminal Salerno, completed in 2016 ↩
OMA is a well known breeding ground for future success. The founders of firms like BIG, REX, Foreign Office Architects, MVRDV, Studio Gang, etc, etc, are all OMA alumnus. ↩