Patrik Schumacher

Dr Patrik Schumacher is the principal of London-based Zaha Hadid Architects, with a track record of award-winning projects worldwide. He teaches at architectural schools across Europe and the US, including Harvard, and has worked on master plans such as Singapore’s one-north.

He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988 and has led the practice since her death in 2016. In 2008 he launched parametricism at the Venice Biennale, arguing that computational design had produced a genuine successor to modernism rather than another style.

In 2016 he set out an eight-point urban policy manifesto at the World Architecture Festival: scrap social housing, abolish land use planning, privatise streets, squares and parks. His argument was that there is no real market in housing and so no market has yet been allowed to solve the shortage. It was widely reported and heavily criticised, and it is also why a Free City interests him, since a project that starts without an inherited planning code is the only setting in which the proposition could be tried rather than argued about.

His contribution to contemporary architectural discourse includes the concept of a market-based urban order, which he advocates applying to the planning and design of Free Cities.