Parametricism with Social Parameters

Patrik Schumacher, London 2015

Published in: exhibition book ‘The Human (Parameter)’ Parametric Approach in
Israeli Architecture’, curated/edited by Ionathan Lazovski & Yuval Kahlon for
ZEZEZE Architecture Gallery, Tel-Aviv

That parametricism “goes social” is not a concession to the prevailing winds of

political correctness (that divert and dissolve the innovative thrust of architectural
discourse). Rather, it is a sign of parametricism’s maturity, confidence and readiness
to take on the full societal tasks of architecture, i.e. it implies the inauguration of
Parametricism 2.0. Parametricism 1.0 was foregrounding computational design
techniques, new formal repertoires and digital fabrication technologies. After 15 years
of muscle flexing it is high time to put these innovations to more serious work.
Parametricism 2.0 can take the evolved techniques, repertoires and technologies for
granted and foreground the newly challenging societal tasks of architecture, and
finally gear up to make a real impact.

The exhibition and book ‘The Human Parameter’ is a very welcome occasion for me
to emphasize what I consider to be the unifying and distinctive purpose of all design
disciplines in distinction to engineering efforts: the spatial framing and ordering of
social communication processes.
Design is thus concerned with the social (rather than technical) functionality of
artefacts (including the build environment). This does not mean that technical
requirements are irrelevant to architecture. Rather, they are (mere) constraints (rather
than ultimate aims) that need to be taken into consideration via the ongoing dialogue
with engineers. (The dialog has to intensify in periods of rapid technological
innovation.) Social functionality presupposes technical functionality and adds the
interdependent concerns of organisation1, articulation and signification as dimensions
of architecture’s crucial social ordering capacity.
In accordance with my general theory of architecture – elaborated within the
framework of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory – I prefer to refer to “social”
rather than “human” parameters as the decisive parameters that are relevant to
contemporary architecture’s advancement. To upgrade architecture’s human/social
functionality the historically specific character of contemporary social systems are
more relevant than general human parameters, i.e. it is the requirements of advanced
contemporary social systems and life processes that provide the relevant data for
architectural innovation. This does not imply that invariant human parameters (like
physiological parameters) are not relevant to architecture. (However, the effects and
thus architectural implications of the invariant human parameters change with social
and urban development.) One set of those invariant parameters that assume a unique
relevance within contemporary conditions is the set of human perceptual capacities
that has been investigated by Gestalt psychology. Under conditions of contemporary
social complexity these constraints – the limits of human cognitive capacities - posit
an unprecedented level of architectural concern for the task of phenomenological
articulation. The perceptual tractability of complex forms/scenes is a necessary
condition of architecture’s contemporary communicative capacity. However, in this
short paper I am rather focussing on the semiological conditions of architecture’s
communicative capacity2. In particular, I am trying to outline an architectural design
methodology that allows architects to sketch, develop and refine their (semiological)
designs in tandem with the design’s meaning, i.e. in tandem with the agent based
simulation of the social life processes which the design is meant to frame and
facilitate.

All my recent writings – including all what follows here – start from the premise that
the unifying and distinctive societal function of architecture (and all the other design
disciplines) is the communicative framing and ordering of social-communicative
interaction. This way of positing architecture’s primary purpose builds on the insight
that all social life processes can be conceptualized as communication processes. The
relevant analysis of life focusses on communications embedded within systems of
communication. The key concept of communication is by no means restricted to
verbal communications.3 It includes all signs, signifying artefacts, gestures and
intentional behaviours. Accordingly both a designed space and the act of entering the
space are communications. The door, the constellation of furniture (together with
carpet and chandelier) communicate an invitation to enter and participate within a
particular social situation or communicative interaction scenario. The designed
space frames the ensuing social scenario as a communicated premise that defines the
situation and is presupposed in all further communicative acts by all participants.
When we enter a space, we usually know or quickly recognize where we are and what
is to be expected within the space and what is accordingly expected of us upon entry.
To enter the space is thus to accept the spatial communication and to communicate
one’s preparedness to participate within the framed/defined situation.

The author has argued for (and experimented with) a new compelling design
methodology and design agenda that should be able to tackle the societal function of
architecture head on: agent based parametric semiology.4 This new methodology
generalizes the technique of crowd modelling – so far mostly restricted to problems of
circulation - to simulate all forms and patterns of user behaviour across all the
variously designated spaces that comprise contemporary urban institutions. The
simulation of the framed interaction scenarios can be integrated into the design
process from the abstract beginnings using particles configuring within bubble
diagrams, all the way to the nuanced modulation of agent interactions in response to
semiologically encoded architectural thresholds and territorial articulations. This
methodology unmistakeably re-focusses the design effort onto what design should be
all about: the facilitation of the societal life process. At the level of density,
complexity and interaction intensity desired within post-fordist network society, this is
no longer a trivial matter.

The dynamic coordination of myriad specific, simultaneous communication situations

requires that the relevant participants can navigate a dense, information rich, legible
environment to find each other, moment by moment, in specifically structured
constellations with compatible expectations. The agent based methodology tries to
generate the desired event patters bottom up, from individual behaviours and
interactions according to environmentally encode rules. Society is a complex web of
social institutions. Institutions are the rules or scripts that coordinate interactions to
allow for the emergence of the productive cooperative processes that reproduce and
advance society. The orchestration of society’s panoply of social interactions is the
(always precarious) achievement of our semiologically charged built environment. As
the spatio-morphological ordering substrate that orients and coordinates all desired
life processes, the city (and each building within it) is a matrix of embodied
interaction protocols or scripts. It is at the same time a permanent broadcast presenting
itself as this matrix. Each space within it is a stage and invitation to join the specific
interaction scenario offered within its territory. Each territory embodies an institution
and we city dwellers each carry a subset of societies scripts within ourselves, ready
for retrieval according to the environmental clues we encounter. This is how the built
environment makes its indispensable, specific contribution to society’s functioning.
This can be modelled via agent modelling whereby the encounter of an environmental
clue or the crossing of a significant threshold selects and modulates the correlated
behavioural scripts of the scripted agents. All behaviour is environmentally dependent.
However, these dependencies are mostly learned – due to an environmentally encoded
and learned language – rather than due to invariant human instincts. This opens up the
task to design the built environment as (an increasingly complex and information
rich) system of signification that can be operationalized, explored, tested and
calibrated via a generalized, agent-based crowd modelling.

The explicit re-focusing of the design effort along those lines comes with new relevant
values like communicative capacity (involving information density and perceptual
tractability) and with new ultimate criteria of design success like encounter frequency,
interaction diversity, communicative depth etc. that measure the success of the framed
life process as the ultimate purpose of all design efforts.
1 Organisation is specific to urban and architectural design in distinction to product
and fashion design.

2 Semiology deals with social system parameters rather than with human parameters.

3 According to Luhmann’s theoretical sociology social systems are made up of

communications rather than human beings.

4 Patrik Schumacher, Parametric Semiology – The Design of Information Rich

Environments, in: Architecture In Formation, edited by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and
Aaron Sprecher, Routledge, New York, 2013; Parametric Order – Architectural
Order via an Agent Based Parametric Semiology, in: Adaptive Ecologies – Correlated
Systems of Living by Theodore Spyropoulos, AA Publications, London 2013;
Architecture’s Next Ontological Innovation, in: Not Nature, tarp – Architectural
Manual, Pratt Institute, New York, spring 2012; see also: Patrik Schumacher, The
Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 2, A New Agenda for Architecture, John Wiley &
Sons, 2012, Section: 6.10 The Semiological Project and the General Project of
Architectural Order.