A short text by the partner of Zaha Hadid proposing that computational design had produced a new, unified style, Parametricism, defined by rules that all elements be malleable, differentiated and correlated with one another.
Schumacher presented the manifesto at the Venice Biennale in 2008 and developed it at length in The Autopoiesis of Architecture (2011–12). His claim is that the spread of scripting and parametric modelling since the 1990s had matured into a style in the full sense, comparable to the Renaissance or Modernism, with its own repertoire and its own rules.
He states the rules as heuristics. The negative ones forbid rigid, platonic forms, simple repetition and the collage of unrelated elements. The positive ones require that every form be soft and parametrically variable, that systems be differentiated gradually (by rates of change and gradients) and that different subsystems (structure, skin, circulation) be correlated so that a change in one produces a change in the others. The goal, in his account, is an architecture that can organise and articulate the complexity of contemporary society.
The book, part by part
I The heuristics
Avoid rigid forms, repetition and collage; make forms malleable, differentiate gradually, correlate systems.
Rules: Vary everything by rule · The attractor