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!”
A few days later, sitting at a transparent acrylic table in the firm’s Clerkenwell gallery, surrounded by plinths displaying experimental furniture and daring cutlery, the 55-year-old German architect seems a little more sheepish than he did while booming on stage. “I’m not yet regretting it fully,” he says. “But I didn’t realise the lecture would be live-streamed. I must emphasise that these comments are made wearing my hat as an intellectual, theorist and polemicist, which needs to be distinguished from what the practice is doing. I wouldn’t want to tar the firm with the same brush.”
Juggling the demands of leading a 400-strong global architecture firm with being a political agitator is new territory for Schumacher, and you sense that the practice might not be too keen on his increasingly vocal role as a self-styled contrarian. He has only unleashed the full tar-laden potential of his brush since the untimely death of Hadid, who would often poke fun at his propensity to drift off into the realms of arcane theorising and mock his political earnestness.
Hadid, who died in March, jokingly dismissed his theories (set out in the two-volume, Bible-thick Autopoiesis of Architecture and in essays with such titles as Advancing Social Functionality via Agent-Based Parametric Semiology) as “Patrik-metricism”. Never politically outspoken, Hadid was happy to work for regimes of all different shades. But did she share Schumacher’s extreme views? “No,” he laughs. “She was a Guardian reader all her life. Even if the articles about our work did sometimes make her cry.”
When Schumacher joined the firm in the 1980s, the two were closer politically. Like a number of fellow rightwing libertarians, he was a former Marxist who had become disillusioned. He was finally jolted out of his “mainstream political slumber” by the 2008 financial crisis, when he discovered the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, the godfathers of neoliberalism, along with Murray Rothbard’s ideas of anarcho-capitalism.
“It’s about loosening the reins and rolling back the nanny state,” he says. “We must unleash entrepreneurial creativity and individual empowerment for greater prosperity and freedom for all.” Since his recent awakening, he has devoured a heady cocktail of writers from the Austrian school of economic thought (based on individualism and limiting state interference in the market), including Meltdown author Thomas Woods, Republican stockbroker Peter Schiff and ex-Reagan budget director David Stockman – recently indicted on six counts of fraud.
Schumacher refuses labels, but his position is founded on a fundamental faith in the power of the pure unbridled market to solve everything, from housing provision to employment regulation, imagining a world where privatisation is extended to streets, city management and possibly even legal systems. “Instead of calling for the state with every problem,” he says, “why not see it as an entrepreneurial opportunity?”
In his mind, only entrepreneurs can discover and invent the “co-locational synergies” of the city, while urban vitality cannot be determined by “faceless bureaucrats” in planning offices. He sees glimmers of hope in ventures like Pocket Living, a London-based development company run by a former investment banker that exploits a loophole to offer smaller flats than the usual minimum standard.
He is also a fan of the Collective, a “co-living” developer that provides tiny bedrooms (10 sq m) with access to big communal living spaces. Both are justified on grounds of affordability, but they have also been criticised as paving the way for ever-smaller dwellings in a country that already has the meanest-sized homes in Europe. Schumacher is in discussions with both companies about potential projects.
“They are a response to market demand,” he says, “a welcome rebuke to the stifling one-fits-all approach. Loopholes allow the invention of new products. If we did away with space standards, we could let a thousand flowers bloom.” He is full of praise for Airbnb, the “productivity engine” of Google and the potentials of blockchain, identifying with the free-spirited Silicon Valley mindset, the “post-hippy milieu”, for which he thinks his fluid, networked conception of architecture is the true representative style. (Sadly, Google didn’t agree, awarding the design of its new campus to BIG and Thomas Heatherwick instead).
Schumacher’s stance might be anathema to the generally centre-left-leaning architecture world, but he is not a lone voice. He has found plenty of allies in the Institute of Ideas, a thinktank run by Claire Fox, former publisher of Living Marxism, which spawned a network of agitators who, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot puts it, have drifted from “the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate, libertarian right”.
They have long been embedded in the architectural arena, from the Future Cities Project, to the British Council to the former incarnation of Blueprint magazine. Through these circles, Schumacher has become involved with plans for the experimental libertarian state of Liberland, helping to run and judge an (unrealised) architectural competition for a sliver of land on the west bank of the Danube, and he is currently excited by the idea of “free private cities”.
The brainchild of Monaco-based entrepreneur Titus Gebel, it envisages a world of micro-states run by private companies, where citizens pay a corporate service provider to provide a utopian world of “guaranteed security, limitless innovation and no more social strife”. Schumacher says: “I think governance as a business offering is an interesting idea to pursue.” He cites the privately run Indian city of Gurgaon as a promising example – a place where residents prosper at the expense of the surrounding area, their sewage dumped in rivers, the groundwater depleted by private boreholes, with citizens segregated in elite colonies and high-rise ghettos. “Equality is an aspiration,” he adds, “but it should not be a priority over economic progress.”
Throughout our conversation, and the various lectures of his I have attended, it is often hard to tell whether he actually believes in what he is saying, or if he is merely playing the provocateur. There are occasional glimmers of humility, as if he can see the absurdity of some of his pronouncements, which he sometimes suggests are merely “thought experiments”.
Another Facebook post appears the morning after our conversation, reassuring his followers that Zaha Hadid Architects would not refuse a social housing project; that he accepts the current political framework in which their projects must operate; that his comments do not reflect the position of the firm. But the two cannot be so neatly separated. He is actively pursing avenues of work with like-minded clients and is using his position as the figurehead of a globally recognised firm to propagate his personal views, sounding off on topics of which he often appears to have little grasp. “I am on a steep learning curve,” he admits. “I’m not certain about what I’m saying, but I think these arguments are worth floating.”
It is healthy for the left to be given a shake, to be wrenched from the fuzzy echo-chamber, but much of Schumacher’s rhetoric verges on “post-truth” territory. When challenged on specifics, he fumbles and flounders, with no answer to why Britain’s housebuilders are sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission while their profits soar, no appreciation that the housing market doesn’t simply behave according to the pure logic of supply and demand.
Let his ideas be thrashed out and interrogated, but I’m inclined to agree with Noam Chomsky’s take on anarcho-capitalism: “A sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar … but nowhere else.” It is a doctrine, Chomsky concludes, that “if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history”.
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