Architecture
Sind Großraumbüros und Bürotürme Vergangenheit? Steuern bald nur noch Smartphones Leuchten und Kaffeeautomaten? OLIVER WAINWRIGHT hat die Architekten getroffen, die an der Gestaltung der Welt nach der Corona-pandemie arbeiten.
Imagining post-pandemic workplaces and cities
From antibacterial brass doorknobs to broad, well-ventilated streets, our cities and buildings have always been shaped by disease. It was cholera that influenced the modern street grid, as 19th-century epidemics brought the introduction of sewage systems that required roads to be wider and straighter, along with new zoning laws to prevent overcrowding. The third bubonic plague pandemic, an outbreak that began in China in 1855, changed the design of everything from drainpipes to building foundations, in the global war against the rat. And the wipe-clean aesthetic of modernism was partly a result of tuberculosis, with light-flooded sanatoriums inspiring white-painted rooms and hygienic tiled bathrooms.
Form has always followed fear of infection as much as it has followed function. With many people living in socially distanced self-isolation, offices abandoned and urban centres reduced to ghost towns, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of lasting impact Covid-19 will have on our cities. Will homes need to adapt to create room for people to work? Will pavements widen so we can keep our distance? Will we no longer want to live so close together and work in open-plan offices?
One design agency has already switched its entire focus to imagining what the post-covid landscape might look like. Founded in 1943, the Design Research Unit (DRU) has a history of thinking big. It shaped the appearance of much of post-war Britain, including London’s street signs. It has now turned its creative energies to imagining the ways buildings could help to limit the spread of future epidemics, including everything from the layout of interiors and public spaces to surface coatings.
“How we think about the workplace will be the biggest change,” says Darren Comber, chief executive of the international design firm Scott Brownrigg, which merged with the DRU in 2004. “We’ve seen a huge boom in co-working spaces. But after this, are companies really going to want to put their entire team in one place, where they’re closely mingling with other businesses?” The co-working dream was sold on the basis of social interaction, the promise that you might communicate with freelance creative types while you’re waiting for your coffee. But this may no longer seem so attractive. “I’m not suggesting we all go back to working in 1950s cellular cubicles,
“Our cities and buildings have always been shaped by disease”
have to touch a surface with their hands to navigate through the building. Lifts can be called from a smartphone, avoiding the need to press a button both outside and in, while office doors will open automatically using motion sensors and facial recognition. “We’ve looked to eliminate direct contact with communal services, right from the street to the workstation,” says Kaicker, adding that the blinds, lighting, ventilation and even ordering a coffee will be controlled from your phone.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, some have been blaming the density of cities for the rapid spread of the disease and seeing the suburbs as the safest place to be. “There is a density level in NYC that is destructive,” tweeted Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York state, at the end of March. “NYC must develop an immediate plan to reduce density.” Across the US, the virus has increased the divide between town and country, with some Republicans blaming those who live in cities, who are more often Democrats, for spreading the disease.
“Density is still a very fraught subject in the US,” says Sara Jensen Carr, an architecture professor at Northeastern University, in Boston, and author of the book The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape. “The pandemic is already giving ammunition to people who are naturally sceptical of density and want to promote the car-centric suburbs. They’re making the same arguments that were made over 100 years ago.” Such positions risk losing sight of the obesity epidemic and the climate crisis, made worse by sprawl rather than dense, walkable cities. “People tend to put the blame on personal choice,” Carr adds, “but the built environment shapes those choices.”
Carr’s book describes a history of urban responses to public health crises, beginning with the work of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who served as a sanitary officer during the US Civil War (1861–65), and went on to design New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace parks, identifying “the occasional contemplation of natural scenes” as being “favourable to the health and vigour of men”.
After living indoors for months, might we all take more interest in the value of urban green space and the public infrastructure
of toilets, drinking fountains and hand-washing facilities? Much 19th-century public health theory may have been misguided, based on the evils of imaginary fumes, but it had benefits, too.
Since the times of ancient Greece, it was widely thought that disease came from the earth and was spread through noxious vapours, or miasmas. “Miasma theory had a huge influence on cities, specifically building materials,” says Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, and co-author of Plague and the City. “The craze for paving streets with flagstones was largely driven by sanitarian logic and a desire to seal in the earth’s poisonous gases.” As a result, buildings were increasingly coated, clad, plastered and varnished, forming a shield against this invisible enemy. Cracks were great causes of alarm; not only did they suggest structural fatigue, but also the possibility that deadly fumes might come out.
Lynteris’s study of the third plague pandemic shows how the disease caused drastic urban measures to be taken. “Burning down parts of the city was one of the most popular solutions,” he says, citing one extreme attempt in Honolulu in 1900. The plan was to burn down an infected part of the city’s Chinatown (a plan with racial overtones), but the fire ended up destroying most of the city when the wind changed direction.
Other countries experimented with burning down urban blocks, but once the rat was identified as the main carrier, all attention turned to protecting buildings against rodents. “Every city in the world suddenly had committees of engineers trying to devise ways of rat-proofing,” Lynteris says. “It was a global craze, spawning thousands of patents in the 1910s and 1920s, from drainpipe guards to concrete barriers.”
Lynteris is sceptical about how much coronavirus will actually change anything. “Epidemics and pandemics have their own temporality,” he says. “Panic dissipates very quickly and people rarely follow up.” He points to the 2003 SARS outbreak, when it was discovered that one residential block in Hong Kong became a site of “superspreading” because of the way contaminated droplets from sewage pipes could enter people’s bathrooms through dried-up U-bends in the drains. Afterwards, there was no significant change in — or mass-inspection of — plumbing and ventilation systems to stop this happening again.
“A one-off pandemic usually has no impact at all,” says Lynteris. “It has to keep coming back for us to take any notice.” Some are using the current crisis to look again at fundamental assumptions about how cities are structured. “This is the best time ever to think of a walkable city,” says Wouter Vanstiphout, professor of design as politics at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Could coronavirus be a catalyst for decentralization? We have these enormous hospitals and people living on top of each other, but still having to travel long distances across the city to get to them. The pandemic suggests we should distribute smaller units such as hospitals and schools across more of the urban tissue and strengthen local centres.”
The pandemic has also made visible other changes that have been happening under our noses. Vanstiphout says his friends in central Amsterdam have had a rude awakening. “Now that tourism has stopped and the Airbnbs are empty, they have discovered they have no neighbours. There is no neighbourhood. There is no city. If you subtract the tourists, there is nothing.”