Keynote Speakers

Patrik Schumacher

  • Partner Zaha Hadid Architects
  • Keynote Lecture: Formfinding and Tectonic Articulation - Making Performative Logics Speak

Dr. Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects and the co-author of most key projects. He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988 and has been seminal in developing Zaha Hadid Architects to become a 400 strong global architecture and design brand. In 1996 he founded the "Design Research Laboratory" at the Architectural Association in London and continues to teach in what has become one of the world’s most prestigious architecture programs. He is lecturing worldwide and has been a guest professor in many prestigious schools of architecture, and recently held the John Portman Chair in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Over the years he has contributed over 80 articles to architectural journals and anthologies. In 2008 he coined the phrase Parametricism and has since published a series of manifestos promoting Parametricism as the new epochal style for the 21st century. In 2010/2012 he published his two-volume theoretical opus magnum “The Autopoiesis of Architecture”. His writings are available on www.patrikschumacher.com.

Keynote Lecture: Formfinding and Tectonic Articulation – Making Performative Logics Speak

The demarcation between architecture and engineering rests on the distinction of the built environment’s social functioning from its technical functioning. While the technical functioning considers the physical integrity, fabrication constraints, on site constructability and physical performance of the building in relation to its users understood as physical-biological bodies, architecture must take into consideration that a building’s social function, i.e. its function as ordering and guiding communicative frame, is functioning via its appearance and legibility. The core competency of architecture is thus the task of articulation. The use of structural form-finding logics disciplines the spatial morphologies in ways that are advantageous for the task of articulation, i.e. the task of elaborating a systematic spatial language. Tectonic articulation is here proposed as the concept for the strategic articulatory utilization of the morphological differentiations that emerge from engineering logics like structural engineering, environmental engineering and façade engineering.