Architecture this week
08 May 2026
I’ll start this week with the news that Adrian Lahoud has stepped down as dean of the Royal College of Art School of Architecture, after ten years in the role. He is moving to a new position at the college focusing on partnerships with the Middle East, including with the soon to open Riyadh University of Arts.
Glasgow based INCH Architecture + Design is opening a new interiors division focused on the care sector to support those living with dementia; and there is shocking news that a senior partner at multi-disciplinary firm Pellings has been struck off the architects register for inflating subcontractor quotes before passing them on to clients.
There’s a nice article in The Provincetown Independent about a new PASSIVHAUS development in Boston (America not Lincolnshire) and how the design was shaped. I was struck that the response to the penetrations in the walls for tumble dryers (which goes against PH principles) was not to design other ways of drying internally but instead providing communal laundry rooms; not the direction I would have gone in but maybe the culture there is different. It is also notable that during their community consultation process architect Martha Rothman noted that “most of the questions raised in public meetings have been about the need, affordability, and financing, not the design” suggesting that it is not just on this side of the pond that public consultation is a far from definite art!
Staying in the USA the American Institute of Architects has released a statement in response to a federal bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill, (genuinely this is the real bill’s name) where architecture was reclassified from ‘professional’ to ‘graduate’ programme.
By disregarding the clear evidence that accredited architecture degrees meet their own criteria for professional programs, this rule creates unnecessary barriers for students – especially those from lower-income backgrounds – seeking to join and thrive in the architecture profession.”
“This comes at a critical moment when our communities urgently need more architects addressing housing, infrastructure, and climate resilience challenges.”
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Additionally, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act implemented lifetime “caps” on borrowing for students, such as $20,500 annually and a $100,000 lifetime cap for master’s programs, and eliminated the Grad PLUS loan, which covered the full cost of tuition.
“The Department’s narrow implementation reserves higher caps for a short list of fields and leaves architecture under lower graduate caps that often do not cover the cost of education,” said the AIA.
Patrik Schumacher (the head of Zaha Hadid architects since her death) is in dezeen this week complaining that parametricism, the curvaceous digitally enabled architectural style of his practice, is not being adopted at the rate he has hoped:
It's not universal, but it's sufficiently entrenched," he continued. "It's been long-lasting, people still go for it, you still win major competitions and so it is definitely longer lasting than [for example] deconstructivism, which had a run of 10 years and then fully disappeared, or postmodernism, which also disappeared.
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"No, I'm not happy," he said. "I was very happy with it [the rate of adoption] until 2008 actually…By 2015, 16, 17 it had kind of shifted," he said. "There was a lot of retrogression, to some extent less interest in design. There was less opportunity in Europe, Dubai was dead. China kept going. But, overall, it was frustrating…They withdrew and went into this woke kind of territory – anti-capitalism, anti-design, anti-star architecture.
Schumacher in this article also suggests this style is an era-defining style and did acknowledge that early parametricism was mostly about form. Now however it is different, because it is “the most sophisticated style” that “we should wish for”.
Schumacher considers parametricism’s eventual domination of architecture inevitable. The only way he foresees this not coming to fruition is if there is a major shift in how the global population operates.
“I don’t expect any other style, unless there’s another civilisational transformation,” he explained. “There’s nothing new, so we should not expect anything else.”
I do admire his self belief. Though perhaps it’s slightly blinkered to suggest this style is the pinnacle of architectural achievement. I’d be very intrigued to see what a parametric Bovis Homes village extension looks like, if Schumacher is correct it is almost inevitable, time will tell!