SUMMARY

In this Interview Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, discussed the relationship between his political development and his architectural work. As a student in Stuttgart in the mid-1980s, he identified as a Marxist and Communist, writing a detailed critique of Archigram and Superstudio that he hoped to publish. After moving to London, he became a Trotskyist and engaged in debate, organizing, and political action, studying Das Kapital in Marxist reading groups held in pubs.

During this period, Schumacher also explored market socialism and became critical of state planning. In Kevin Rhowbotham’s studio, he encountered Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus, which influenced his interest in distributed, networked, and dynamic models of organization. By the late 1990s, he was engaging with post-Fordist discourse, integrating ideas about self-directedness from corporate management and social theory, including the work of Niklas Luhmann.

These organizational ideas informed his involvement with the Design Research Laboratory at the AA, founded in 1995 by Brett Steele. Projects at the DRL helped shape the computational and parametric methods later employed at Zaha Hadid Architects, where DRL students were often recruited. Schumacher described the office’s parametric design language as expressive of broader social and economic forces. He noted that while he no longer identifies as a Marxist or Communist, the theoretical frameworks developed during his political engagement continue to influence the office’s architectural approach.