The ensuing melee in the comments section of the Patrik Schumacher parametricism follow-up makes for decent (albeit nerdy) entertainment. While it isn’t necessarily informative, it does provide the following telling response from Patrik himself:

….to make the claim that an epochal style is in the making requires me to define the challenge that compares, in terms of urgency and universality, to the industrial revolution which spawned Modernsim. …The stable, homogenized society of fordist mass production has given way to the dynamic, multi-cultual network society of today. (Contributing factors: globalisation, micro-electronic revolution a.o).

This confirms what I had suspected before – that one of the goals here is to cast Parametricism as a global, hegemonic style, grown organically out of a cultural and technological zeitgeist. This is fundamentally wrongheaded, for the reasons (beyond the usual it-will-leak claptrap) I will outline below.

1. Post-Fordistnonlinear. This is the most basic and often repeated argument. Representing a “dynamic, multi-cultural network society of today” so literally with t-splines and doubly curved surfaces, is a somewhat simplistic way to claim the expression of the zeitgeist. It smacks of the dumbed-down, literalist “reading” of deconstructionist authors a decade ago. For something so multifaceted and dynamic, this methodology is awfully simplistic and rigid.

2. Hearts and minds. As many a kitchen appliance ad will attest, modernism tapped into a popular, collective need for order and control in the postwar western world. This providential dovetail between academic thought and popular opinion helped push a particular modern mindset towards dominance over other contenders for the title. I might be wrong, but I have seen nothing to suggest any kind of popular will that might lend a hand towards a hegemonic Parametricism.

3. Bean Counters. Modernism had, as a rearguard, arguments for efficiency –and, well, modernity– that provided a rational aura that played well with planners and CEOs. Parametricism has… the Bilbao effect?

4. $$$$. Modernism had a symbiotic relationship with concurrent factory production that made it easy to disseminate and reproduce (often with dubious quality). In a sense modernist construction methods have only reached maturity in the last 20 years, after the declared death of the movement. Parametricism is unlikely to connect naturally with industrial capabilities, except those associated with expensive consumer goods (furniture and automobiles, to be precise.) It will take a ground-up rethinking of our methods of production to make this kind of architecture within the realm of possibility for 99.9% of projects. Industrial revolutions tend to be led by industrialists, not by artists. See #3 above.

5. There won’t be another Beatles, either. Modernism’s brief mid-century hegemony was an anomoly – an architectural monoculture in an age of monocultures. If every other artistic field is currently undergoing fragmentation and localization, what chance does architecture have to unify under a common flag, particularly one lacking emotional and practical ties to the majority, as evidenced above?

Even if the aim is not to dominate but simply gather forces as one style among many, the chances of Parametricism evolving beyond boutique projects with high budgets and “enlightened” clients seem slim, even as other parametric methods are likely to come to the fore in the near future. The more likely outcome is that parametrics will become an integral part of design and construction – occasionally with Parametricist stylistic effect – but under a different name with different end goals. It is equivalent to Gordon Bunshaft writing a manifest for “Curtainwallism,” or perhaps more accuratly equating Le Corbusier’s Five Points with the modernist project as a whole. Perhaps Patrik is doing everyone a favor by lobbing the inital volley in a game that will be played out in the next half century; in any case I am afraid that this movement may do more harm than good, by constraining the future to a single stylistic interpretation.

I recently came across Patrik Schumacher’s 2008 manifesto “Parametricism as Style,” and the subsequent recent article in The Architect’s Journal, and while initially excited at the prospect of a bold declaration, a closer reading makes me take issue with the framing of the argument as a whole.

While I appreciate the attempt to harness the disparate threads that compose this loose yet ubiquitous movement, it seems to me that his idea of “Parametricisim” is too limited, and smacks more of a post-rationalization for previous work than a declaration on what is to come. For one, the primary association of parametrics is with form, and a limited range of forms at that. Any quick look around the country at the range of art and architecture being produced using parametric methods reveals that the use of parametric systems is not limited to attractors and sub-d surfaces. This manifesto therefore is more in line with the MoMA “International Style” show of 1932, than, say, Futurism – curatorial and reductionist. Any work that does not fit the bounds defined by this manifesto is not “Parametricist” and therefore not parametric.

It is my conviction that the true future of parametrics lies not in the simplistic application of ruled fields to form, and more in a complex, unpredictable and powerful relationship between designer, idea and object – the invention of new tools and methodologies that will allow architects and artists to design and construct increasingly complex works with unprecedented freedom and ease. In order for this future to have a real impact, these new tools and methods must not prescribe a form, or it will never grow beyond the small circle of current practitioners and acolytes.

I am not against the idea of proscribed style; coherent discussion of architecture is becoming increasingly reliant on the invocation of form and style, which is altogether a good thing. Frank discussion of style not only democratizes architectural criticism, but focuses it more tightly on what is present, not what is intended. Mr. Shumacher’s declaration and description of this finally “mature” style is adept and appropriate. I just wish he had chosen a different name. What he is describing is part of parametrics, but it is not Parametricism.

It’s official – in one year I will be graduating (hopefully) from the MDes program at the Harvard GSD. The MDes program is a short (2 semester) research-based program, which is a great match for my interests and ambitions but unbelieveably short. It’s daunting to imagine producing a thesis is 9 months. What this means is that, essentially, I’ll have to know what I want to do before I walk in the door. This blog, over the next few months, is going to have to become a public sounding board for my (brief) future in academia.

So, without further ado, my first salvo: the admission essay that got me there in the first place, which I’m still about 90% enthusiastic about.

As 21st Century cities shift and grow, the distinction between urban and rural is being blurred by zones of interaction that go beyond our traditional understanding of suburban typology. There is enormous variety of these peri-urban environments – ex-urban centers, urban farms, favelas, panelak cities, bidonvilles, or entirely new agglomerations that have yet to be categorized.

Even as cities are shifting and evolving across the globe, our understanding of the possibilities of communal space seems to have stagnated, or in some cases even regressed. While there is significant experimentation in the fields of public landscape and architectural design, in very few of these cases has the exploration included real consideration of alternative ways of engaging the spaces, ways to help the populace create a lasting connection and truly claim ownership over new communal spaces. The dominant understanding of public or common space has changed very little in the last century and a half, in which time societal norms around the globe have evolved tremendously. In addition, many cities and urban designers are interpreting interest in pre-modernist forms of zoning and planning, or new systems based upon these ideas (such as “form based” codes), as simple nostalgia. The result is parks completed with vestigial bandstands or purely decorative fountains as program, instead of amenities that can foster a true relationship between a space and its inhabitants.

At best, this ignorance is merely overridden as a population “rewrites” a new place to fit their purposes. At worst, it can lead to the impression that a place has been imposed rather than given, that it is without use and therefore without value. The end result is that many public arenas like public parks are seen primarily as spaces for peripheral activities – a place to take your children, have a picnic, etc. Contrast this with the deep social and business interaction that takes place at coffee shops and shopping malls every day, a set of activities that goes far beyond simple retail. These places have become the new second living space for most people, not because of some deep seated love for commerce but because they have changed to fit our lives and needs. To put it simply, if a space meets the (often unconscious) requirements of a home, one will use it as a home.

New forms of media are the lifeblood of today’s public society. The technology that runs and fuels this media is becoming increasingly mobile, which, instead of making place less important, has made it paramount. To trace the evolution of digital social networking is to see it become more and more local, to the point where the most recent forms of online social interaction are based almost solely on real-world activity – the constant updating of one’s “status.” The clear extrapolation of this is to a world in which technology and media is tied intimately with place, not as a separate other layer but as another aspect in constant interplay with physical attributes. There has been a great deal of research into how technology and physical space can interact, but I feel not enough attention has been given to how the physical world might be an active contributor – the “push back” of the real onto the mobile/ephemeral/perceived. In ten years of new mobile technology, what might home feel like? And how might public space become a second home?

One other important component of a solution is parametric design and construction. Parametrics in architecture has more often than not been used as a tool to explore form, but it is even more important in this instance to see is as a way to analyze and explore the possibilities of space in all its dimensions, physical and ephemeral. A parametric model allows for the potentials of a place to be combined the potentials of a technology, to explore new models of urban organization, and their potential impacts. What if electrical and communications infrastructure was a vital component of park design? Or if street furniture was reconfigured to promote the capture and projection of video? The most difficult aspect of this sort of design study will be to discover an effective and fecund synthesis, and avoid single-use or limited implementations. To use an analogy, I’m not looking to design skate parks, but rather agglomerations of stairs, benches and curbs that serve both as a place to propose to your future wife and also pull a sweet nosegrind.

These sorts of places will undoubtedly be (to a degree) ad-hoc, mutable, upgradeable, and dependent upon the creative input and direction of users, in order to have the proper affect. I hope that the study I’ve outlined above will lead to solutions for new forms of communal space that are somewhere between architecture and technology, infrastructure and shelter. This kind of approach is vital, as it not only allows for a ground-up, flexible and collaborative design strategy, but is exportable, sharable, and customizable to any of the urban situations described above. Every citizen is an expert of their own milieu – the difficult thing is to design the right tools to help them realize the potentials of their world.