“Harvard has been taken over by the whole Me Too thing. The George Floyd thing was massive,” Patrik Schumacher recently told a room of noticeably bored Baylor University students in a class for something called the Free Enterprise Forum. “Woke concerns affected the architecture discipline quite a lot,” he said over Zoom. “We get work these days in Eastern Europe. They’re hungry. But not in the Western heartland. We’re not brought in there anymore. … Thank god India eventually opened up.”
India has “opened up” indeed, with a cash injection dedicated to infrastructure projects like the new Navi Mumbai International Airport, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), where Schumacher is a principal. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said he wants his country to be self-reliant by 2047. But this “opening up”—as Mr. Schumacher so casually calls it—has also happened under a government Arundhati Roy and other scholars have characterized as “Hindutva fascism,” where “political thinkers in Modi’s party openly worshipped Hitler and Mussolini,” Roy said in a 2023 interview with Le Monde. Sound familiar?
Earlier this year, similar to screeds he posts on his Facebook account, Schumacher published “The End of Architecture” in the academic journal Khōrein. It began with more whining: “Academic institutions, biennals [sic], and professional critiques have abandoned their roles as incubators of architectural thought, instead engaging with tangential sociopolitical issues that stray from architecture’s core competency.” Since then, Schumacher has been invited to lecture at all sorts of places outside of the academic circuit he decries as “woke” and “elite,” similar in tone to the populist demagogues who occupy the White House today. One night during the Venice vernissage, he presided over a conclave of “grumpy old white men” who “all complained they were never invited to curate major architecture events anymore,” per Architectural Record.
How did Schumacher land in Texas? Peter Klein, a Baylor University professor, said he met Schumacher at a conference last year and read his essay about how architecture “as an autonomous, theory-led discipline, has ceased to exist” and invited him to present as a part of the John F. Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise programming. Schumacher’s lecture was in step with the center’s libertarian mission: “When I once questioned subsidizing social housing in London, there were demonstrations outside my office,” Schumacher giddily told the Baylor students, anticipating rounds of applause that never came. “They made posters of me with a Hitler mustache.”
On screen, Schumacher, a self-described former Marxist, detailed his Dionysian rebirth as an “anarcho-capitalist” after the 2008 financial crash, when he began crusades against horrors like political correctness, planners, the Venice Biennale, you name it. He embarked on an unfinished, unintelligible tangent about his “trickle-down theory” of urbanism, the virtues of what he called “total freedom,” and how “zoning is an infringement of creativity for developers and entrepreneurs.” The whole thing seemed less like a lecture and more like an hour-long ploy to attract Peter Thiel’s attention.
The big question: Is this all a bit to get work? Did Patrik seemingly dress like a ketamine-dosed tech bro in a 2023 lecture at the AA to impress potential clients in Silicon Valley? Or does he actually believe this stuff? One Redditor asked: “A fascist approach to architecture brewing? Or just marketing?”
So: Is it working as a business strategy? Last winter, Architects’ Journal reported that profits were slightly up at ZHA in 2023, largely due to steep increases in Middle East billings, but turnover rates are double what they were in 2013, three years before Zaha Hadid’s untimely death. Hadid’s own human rights track record was bad: Hundreds of Indian and Nepalese construction workers reportedly died in Qatar building her World Cup stadium, a fact that she described as “a serious problem,” but one for the Qatari government: “I have nothing to do with the workers,” she told The Guardian in 2014.
Beyond employee satisfaction and business development, ZHA has other limitations. Today, it pays 6 percent of its annual income to the Zaha Hadid Foundation to use the trademark name “Zaha Hadid.” Only time will tell how much longer Patrik continues to navigate under Hadid’s memorable flag before he unfurls his own and sets sail to Liberland.
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