Parametricism as Style - Parametricist Manifesto

Patrik Schumacher, London 2008

Presented and discussed at the Dark Side Club1 , 11th Architecture Biennale, Venice
2008

We pursue the parametric design paradigm all the way, penetrating into all corners of
the discipline. Systematic, adaptive variation, continuous differentiation (rather than
mere variety), and dynamic, parametric figuration concerns all design tasks from
urbanism to the level of tectonic detail, interior furnishings and the world of products.

Architecture finds itself at the mid-point of an ongoing cycle of innovative adaptation

– retooling the discipline and adapting the architectural and urban environment to the
socio-economic era of post-fordism. The mass society that was characterized by a
single, nearly universal consumption standard has evolved into the heterogenous
society of the multitude.
The key issues that avant-garde architecture and urbanism should be addressing can
be summarized in the slogan: organising and articulating the increased complexity of
post-fordist society. The task is to develop an architectural and urban repertoire that is
geared up to create complex, polycentric urban and architectural fields which are
densely layered and continuously differentiated.

Contemporary avant-garde architecture is addressing the demand for an increased

level of articulated complexity by means of retooling its methods on the basis of
parametric design systems. The contemporary architectural style that has achieved
pervasive hegemony within the contemporary architectural avant-garde can be best
understood as a research programme based upon the parametric paradigma. We
propose to call this style: Parametricism.
Parametricism is the great new style after modernism. Postmodernism and
Deconstructivism have been transitional episodes that ushered in this new, long wave
of research and innovation.

Avant-garde styles might be interpreted and evaluated in analogy to new scientific

paradigms, affording a new conceptual framework, and formulating new aims,
methods and values. Thus a new direction for concerted research work is
established.2 My thesis is therefore: Styles are design research programmes.3
Innovation in architecture proceeds via the progression of styles so understood. This
implies the alternation between periods of cumulative advancement within a style and
revolutionary periods of transition between styles. Styles represent cycles of
innovation, gathering the design research efforts into a collective endeavor. Stable
self-identity is here as much a necessary precondition of evolution as it is in the case
of organic life. To hold on to the new principles in the face of difficulties is crucial for
the chance of eventual success. This tenacity - abundantly evident within the
contemporary avant-garde - might at times appear as dogmatic obstinacy. For
instance, the obstinate insistence of solving everything with a folding single surface -
project upon project, slowly wrenching the plausible from the implausible – might be
compared to the Newtonian insistence to explain everything from planets to bullets to
atoms in terms of the same principles.
“Newton’s theory of gravitation, Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics,
Marxism, Freudianism, are all research programmes, each with a characteristic hard
core stubbornly defended, … each with its elaborate problem solving machinery. Each
of them, at any stage of its development, has unsolved problems and undigested
anomalies. All theories, in this sense, are born refuted and die refuted.”4 The same
can be said of styles: Each style has its hard core of principles and a characteristic way
of tackling design problems/tasks. Avant-garde architecture produces manifestos:
paradigmatic expositions of a new style’s unique potential, not buildings that are
balanced to function in all respects. There can be neither verification, nor final
refutation merely on the basis of its built results.5
The programme/style consists of methodological rules: some tell us what paths of
research to avoid (negative heuristics), and others what paths to pursue (positive
heuristics). The negative heuristics formulates strictures that prevent the relapse into
old patterns that are not fully consistent with the core, and the positive
heuristics offers guiding principles and preferred techniques that allow the work to
fast-forward in one direction. The defining heuristics of parametricism are fully
reflected in the taboos and dogmas of contemporary avant-gared design culture:
Negative heuristics: avoid familiar typologies, avoid platonic/hermetic objects, avoid
clear-cut zones/territories, avoid repetition, avoid straight lines, avoid right angles,
avoid corners, …, and most importantly: do not add or subtract without elaborate
interarticulations.
Positive heuristics: interarticulate, hyberdize, morph, deterritorialize, deform, iterate,
use splines, nurbs, generative components, script rather than model, …

Parametricism is a mature style. That the parametric paradigm is becoming pervasive

in contemporary architecture and design is evident for quite some time. There has
been talk about versioning, iteration and mass customization etc. for quite a while
within the architectural avant-garde discourse.
The fundamental desire that has come to the fore in this tendency had already been
formulated at the beginning of the 1990s with the key slogan of “continuous
differentiation”6. Since then there has been both a widespread, even hegemonic
dissemination of this tendency as well as a cumulative build up of virtuosity,
resolution and refinement within it. This development was facilitated by the attendant
development of parametric design tools and scripts that allow the precise formulation
and execution of intricate correlations between elements and subsystems. The shared
concepts, computational techniques, formal repertoires, and tectonic logics that
characterize this work are crystallizing into a solid new hegemonic paradigm for
architecture. One of the most pervasive current techniques involves populating
modulated surfaces with adaptive components.Components might be constructed from
multiple elements constrained/cohered by associative relations so that the overall
component might sensibly adapt to various local conditions. As they populate a
differentiated surface their adaptation should accentuate and amplify this
differentiation. This relationship between the base component and its various
instantiations at different points of insertion in the “environment” is analogous to the
way a single geno-type might produce a differentiated population of pheno-types in
response to divers environmental conditions.

The current stage of advancement within parametricism relates as much to the

continuous advancement of the attendant computational dresign technologies as it is
due to the designer’s realization of the unique formal and organizational opportunities
that are afforded. Parametricism can only exist via sophisticated parametric
techniques. Finally, computationally advanced design techniques like scripting (in
Mel-script or Rhino-script) and parametric modeling (with tools like GC or DP) are
becoming a pervasive reality. Today it is impossible to compete within the
contemporary avant-garde scene without mastering these techniques.
Parametricism emerges from the creative exploitation of parametric design systems in
view of articulating increasingly complex social processes and institutions. The
parametric design tools by themselves cannot account for this drastic stylistic shift
from modernism to parametricism. This is evidenced by the fact that late modernist
architects are employing parametric tools in ways which result in the maintenance of a
modernist aesthetics, i.e. using parametric modelling to inconspicuously absorb
complexity. Our parametricist sensibility pushes in the opposite direction and aims for
a maximal emphasis on conspicuous differentiation.
It is the sense of organized (law-governed) complexity that assimilates parametricist
works to natural systems, where all forms are the result of lawfully interacting forces.
Just like natural systems, parametricist compositions are so highly integrated that they
cannot be easily decomposed into independent subsystems – a major point of
difference in comparison with the modern design paradigm of clear separation of
functional subsystems.

The following 5 agendas might be proposed here to inject new aspects into the
parametric paradigm and to push the development of parametricism further:
1.Inter-articulation of sub-systems:
The ambition is to move from single system differentiation – e.g. a swarm of façade
components - to the scripted association of multiple subsystems – envelope, structure,
internal subdivision, navigation void. The differentiation in any one systems is
correlated with differentions in the other systems.
2. Parametric Accentuation:
The ambition is to enhance the overall sense of organic integration through intricate
correlations that favour deviation amplification rather than compensatory or
ameliorating adaptations. For instance, when generative components populate a
surface with a subtle curvature modulation the lawful component correlation should
accentuate and amplify the initial differentiation. This might include the deliberate
setting of accentuating thresholds or singularities. Thus a far richer articulation can be
achieved and thus more orienting visual information can be made available.
3. Parametric Figuration7:
We propose that complex configurations that are latent with multiple readings can be
constructed as a parametric model. The parametric model might be set up so that the
variables are extremely Gestalt-sensitive. Parametric variations trigger gestalt-
catastrophes, i.e. the quantitative modification of these parameters trigger qualitative
shifts in the perceived order of the configuration. This notion of parametric figuration
implies an expansion in the types of parameters considered within parametric design.
Beyond the usual geometric object parameters, ambient parameters (variable lights)
and observer parameters (variable cameras) have to considered and integrated into the
parametric system.
4. Parametric Responsiveness8:
We propose that urban and architectural (interior) environments can be designed with
an inbuilt kinetic capacity that allows those environments to reconfigure and adapt
themselves in response to the prevalent patterns of use and occupation. The real time
registration of use-patterns produces the parameters that drive the real time kinetic
adaptation process. Cumulative registration of use patterns result in semi-permanent
morphological transformations. The built environment acquires responsive agency at
different time scales.
5. Parametric Urbanism9:
The assumption is that the urban massing describes a swarm-formation of many
buildings. These buildings form a continuously changing field, whereby lawful
continuities cohere this manifold of buildings. Parametric urbanism implies that the
systematic modulation of the buildings’ morphologies produces powerful urban
effects and facilitates field orientation. Parametric Urbanism might involve parametric
accentuation, parametric figuration, and parametric responsivess.

Modernism was founded on the concept of space. Parametricism differentiates

fields. Fields are full, as if filled with a fluid medium. We might think of liquids in
motion, structured by radiating waves, laminal flows, and spiraling eddies. Swarms
have also served as paradigmatic analogues for the field-concept. We would like to
think of swarms of buildings that drift across the landscape. Or we might think of
large continuous interiors like open office landscapes or big exhibition halls of the
kind used for trade fairs. Such interiors are visually infinitely deep and contain various
swarms of furniture coalescing with the dynamic swarms of human bodies. There are
no platonic, discrete figures with sharp outlines. Within fields only the global and
regional field qualities matter: biases, drifts, gradients, and perhaps even conspicuous
singularities like radiating centres. Deformation does no longer spell the breakdown of
order but the lawful inscription of information. Orientation in a complex, lawfully
differentiated field affords navigation along vectors of transformation .The
contemporary condition of arriving in a metropolis for the first time, without prior
hotel arrangements, without a map, might instigate this kind of field-
navigation. Imagine there are no more landmarks to hold on, no axis to follow and no
more boundaries to cross. Contemporary architecture aims to construct new logics –
the logic of fields – that gear up to organize and articulate the new level of dynamism
and complexity of contemporary society.

Furniture and product design fully participates in the parametricist agenda we are
pursuing. We consider furniture not in terms of isolated objects but as a pre-eminent
space-making substance. Our design efforts need to encompass the domains of interior
design, furniture design, and even product design. We can orchestrate all those
registers to advance the design of integrated, immersive worlds. Our handling of
interior furnishings as dynamic swarm formations, or sometimes as a continuous
surface/fluid mass, is geared towards the detailed elaboration of the continuously
differentiated fields described above.

NOTES:

1 The Dark Side Club is a critical salon initiated and organized by Robert White to
coincide with the Architecture Biennale. Three successive events were onceived as a
critical salon to debate some of the themes Aaron Betsky had set for this year’s
Biennale. Three curators have been invited to each put forward a proposition for
debate: Patrik Schumacher, Greg Lynn, and Gregor Eichinger. Each invited young
architects and thinkers to debate the direction architecture is taking.
The first session – curated and introduced by Patrik Schumacher was
titled: Parametricism as New Style. The following 8 architectural studios were
presenting: MAD, f-u-r, UFO, Plasma Studio, Minimaforms, Aranda/Lasch, AltN
Research+Design, MOH. Jeff Kipnis acted as moderator.

2 This interpretation of styles is valid only with respect to the avant-garde phase of
any style.

3 It is important to distinguish between research programmes in the literal sense of

institutional research plans from the meta-scientific conception of research
programmes that has been introduced into the philosophy of science: whole new
research traditions that are directed by a new fundamental theoretical framework. It is
this latter concept that is utilized here for the reinterpretation of the concept of style.
See: Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge
1978

4 Lakatos, Imre, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge

1978, p.5

5 The final reckoning takes place later, in the arena of the mainstream adoption which
only indirectly feeds back into the central, discursive arena of the discipline.

6 The credit for coining this key slogan goes to Greg Lynn and Jeff Kipnis.

7 “Parametric Figuration” featured in our teachings at Yale and at the University of

Applied Arts, Vienna. It also featured in my studio at the AADRL.

8 Parametric Responsiveness was at the heart of our 3 year design research agenda
“Responsive Environments” at the AADRL in London from 2001-2004.

9 “Parametric Urbanism” is the title of our recently completed design research cycle
at the AADRL, from 2005 – 2008.