Parametricism: The Architecture of Neoliberalism or the Future of Design?

Parametricism has been billed by its originator as the defining architecture style of the 21st century. Owen Hopkins provides an overview of this controversial and famously complex theory.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called architecture "frozen music." Although the German polymath was apparently referring to the Baroque, it's an analogy that has haunted architecture ever since. At its root is a decidedly 19th-century view of architecture as a set of styles to be deployed according to certain aesthetic principles – and today it's red meat to traditionalists and the "beauty" brigade.

Yet, paradoxically, it's this analogy that always comes to mind when thinking about a style that claims the advanced technological mantle, sees all other forms of architecture as obsolete, and aims to channel the chaos and disorder of the contemporary world into its own formal and structural complexity. That style is, of course, parametricism.

Most architectural styles emerge through the advent of new building technologies. With parametricism, it's not the technology of building from which it emerges – as with modernism, for example – but how its designs are modelled. Rather than a design being determined directly by an architect, with parametric design, it is formulated by an algorithm working from a set of input parameters. As those parameters are manipulated, the design itself changes in response.

Parametric design constitutes a fundamental shift in how buildings can be designed. It has several antecedents, among them the tensile structures of Frei Otto and Antoni Gaudí, who apparently used a kind of analogue parametric modelling. But it was the deconstructivism of the late 1980s and 90s that directly spawned parametricism, with its experiments in fragmented forms and early computer-assisted 3D modelling.

So if this is parametric design, then what makes it an "-ism"? Parametricism is indelibly associated with its chief proponent, Patrik Schumacher, and the work he did with Zaha Hadid from the early 2000s. The advent of parametricism is usually seen in the shift in ZHA's work from angular projects like the Vitra Fire Station to fluid forms like the Heydar Aliyev Center.

Schumacher sought to codify a design philosophy, launching parametricism to the world at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale. He declared that architecture is retooling for the socio-economic era of post-Fordism, addressing a "demand for an increased level of articulated complexity." He concluded: "Parametricism is the great new style after modernism."

The timing was significant, as the global financial system imploded. In retrospect, parametricism appears as the architecture of the pre-crash boom years – indeed, of neoliberalism itself. Douglas Spencer argued that parametricism wasn't just remote from labour conditions but actively served to widen the gap.

Despite notable parametricist buildings being unveiled in the 2010s, it did not become the "hegemonic" style Schumacher hoped. He announced Parametricism 2.0, promoting a radical libertarian political agenda and becoming architecture's bête noire. His involvement in Liberland – a libertarian micro-nation – only hardened this position.

Parametricism has its critics. There is its association with morally dubious clients and the paradox that while it gets vitality from fluid modelling, it is "frozen" when built. It's well-suited to transport infrastructure but next to useless when things get messy. An ever-more complex society requires architectures that reflect variability, not convergence around a single master style. Parametricism can create great buildings, but I wouldn't want to live in a parametric world.