{"id":278382,"date":"2025-11-08T01:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T01:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/278382\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T01:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T01:57:10","slug":"patrik-schumacher-lectures-virtually-in-waco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/278382\/","title":{"rendered":"Patrik Schumacher lectures virtually in Waco"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHarvard has been taken over by the whole Me Too thing. The George Floyd thing was massive,\u201d Patrik Schumacher<\/a> recently told a room of noticeably bored Baylor University students<\/a> in a class for something called the Free Enterprise Forum. \u201cWoke concerns affected the architecture discipline quite a lot,\u201d he said over Zoom. \u201cWe get work these days in Eastern Europe. They\u2019re hungry. But not in the Western heartland. We\u2019re not brought in there anymore. \u2026 Thank god India eventually opened up.\u201d<\/p>\n

India has \u201copened up\u201d indeed, with a cash injection dedicated to infrastructure projects like the new Navi Mumbai International Airport<\/a>, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA<\/a>), where Schumacher is a principal. India\u2019s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said<\/a> he wants his country to be self-reliant by 2047. But this \u201copening up\u201d\u2014as Mr. Schumacher so casually calls it\u2014has also happened under a government Arundhati Roy and other scholars have characterized as \u201cHindutva fascism<\/a>,\u201d where \u201cpolitical thinkers in Modi\u2019s party openly worshipped Hitler and Mussolini<\/a>,\u201d Roy said in a 2023 interview with Le Monde. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, similar to screeds he posts on his Facebook account, Schumacher published \u201cThe End of Architecture<\/a>\u201d in the academic journal Kh\u014drein. It began with more whining: \u201cAcademic 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\u2019s core competency.\u201d Since then, Schumacher has been invited to lecture at all sorts of places outside of the academic circuit he decries as \u201cwoke\u201d and \u201celite,\u201d 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 \u201cgrumpy old white men\u201d who \u201call complained they were never invited to curate major architecture events anymore,\u201d per Architectural Record<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cas an autonomous, theory-led discipline, has ceased to exist\u201d and invited him to present as a part of the John F. Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise programming. Schumacher\u2019s lecture was in step with the center\u2019s libertarian mission: \u201cWhen I once questioned subsidizing social housing in London, there were demonstrations outside my office,\u201d Schumacher giddily told the Baylor students, anticipating rounds of applause that never came. \u201cThey made posters of me with a Hitler mustache.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

On screen, Schumacher, a self-described former Marxist, detailed his Dionysian rebirth as an \u201canarcho-capitalist\u201d 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 \u201ctrickle-down theory\u201d of urbanism, the virtues of what he called \u201ctotal freedom,\u201d and how \u201czoning is an infringement of creativity for developers and entrepreneurs.\u201d The whole thing seemed less like a lecture and more like an hour-long ploy to attract Peter Thiel\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to impress potential clients in Silicon Valley? Or does he actually believe this stuff? One Redditor<\/a> asked: \u201cA fascist approach to architecture brewing? Or just marketing?\u201d<\/p>\n

So: Is it working as a business strategy? Last winter, Architects\u2019 Journal reported<\/a> 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\u2019s untimely death. Hadid\u2019s own human rights track record<\/a> was bad: Hundreds of Indian and Nepalese construction workers reportedly died in Qatar building her World Cup stadium, a fact that she described as \u201ca serious problem,\u201d but one for the Qatari government: \u201cI have nothing to do with the workers<\/a>,\u201d she told The Guardian in 2014.<\/p>\n

Beyond employee satisfaction and business development, ZHA has other limitations. Today, it pays 6 percent of its annual income to the Zaha Hadid Foundation<\/a> to use the trademark name \u201cZaha Hadid.\u201d Only time will tell how much longer Patrik continues to navigate under Hadid\u2019s memorable flag before he unfurls his own and sets sail to Liberland<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHarvard has been taken over by the whole Me Too thing. The George Floyd thing was massive,\u201d Patrik…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-278382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}