Interior urbanism

I’m a big Patrik Schumacher fan. He was the late great Zaha Hadid’s partner and is a principal at the firm she left behind.

He thinks about cities like I think about cities, as large labour markets teeming with opportunities to collaborate, innovate, and build. He’s also very outspoken in his opinions, many of which go against the architecture and urban planning orthodoxy.

He just released a new essay on what he calls interior urbanism, the exploration of new typologies and philosophies to guide the design of highrise towers. I’ll post some excerpts below but you should really read the whole thing here.

“What is the point of agglomerating thousands of people within a headquarters tower, if not the facilitation of cooperation, planned and unplanned?”

“As workers become creative-knowledge workers they must become self-directed nodes in a continuous process of network self-organisation. There is no way that this can be planned from above. The leadership is busy building open platforms that might allow this self-organisation to flourish. Buildings are one important type of platform that can make a difference.”

“This too is in architecture’s power: delivering a stimulating affective charge that heightens our state of alertness and sense of curiosity, ie the architecture catalyses a state of mind that increases our receptiveness for new knowledge and allows for the intensification of our communicative interactions.”