Looking for a ‘ straw person’ in the high rise
Seismic forces change architecture. COVID- 19 will change the way humans think about buildings — just as those other seismic cultural shifts shaped how architects shaped buildings.
The industrial revolution made new building types simply because they were needed. After World War II, technology overwhelmed factory- centric cities and the massproduced automobile and massmade Eisenhower federal highway system created suburbia.
In the last two generations, world population doubled, and the world has become fully “international.” In 1966, people flew a combined 500 million miles on airplanes, a figure that multiplied 12 times by 2016.
Then “New Urbanism” evolved and offered as a way to undo often disastrous effects of urban renewal, where the buzzword “walkability” invited density. Now density is a leading factor where COVID- 19 is the most devastating.
This unintended consequence has greatly alerted the architecture community. Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture held a cyber meeting in mid- April: “The Great Transformation: Redesigning the World Post COVID- 19,” where professors from all across America held a 90- minute discussion to “suggest seeds for a preferred world.” The topic “Density and Mobility” evolved to “Density and Design” and “Density and Housing.”
“A most unfortunate outcome from the COVID- 19 crisis could be that it may be used as an argument against density and cities,” says Michael Lykoudis, former dean at the Notre Dame School of Architecture. “That is already happening in some discussions regarding how we live together. That argument will be that this ‘ straw person’ is used to further erode what is left of the idea of inseparable connection between civilizations and cities. ... Without cites we will not be able manage the coming deluge resulting from global heating and the collateral disasters that it will bring.”
The urgency of these responses conveys the literally mortal danger that two century’s worth of rising population and exploding cities have facilitated. The desire of architects to vision the largest meanings and consequences of this instant crisis is understandable. International connection, mitigation of carbon creation, energy efficiency and social economics may become the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
COVID- 19’ s impact goes beyond residential architecture. “Companies have found out that their employees can work remotely from home. This no longer justifies paying rents for offices in a glass and steel building. For business that depends on information transfer, the economic benefits of teleworking make skyscrapers obsolete,” says Nikos Salingaros, who teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is both a mathematician and an urban design theorist .
This long range view of full- on social change has an aesthetic aspect to Salingaros. “In the postpandemic economy, what is really important is having emotionally nourishing public spaces for social encounter, where pleasure comes from the geometry of place.”
Humans want to have impact in a crisis. Over 10 years ago, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is famous for saying “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” He was referring to the energy crisis of the 1970s spawning the green movement of the 21st century.
The Industrial Revolution and collapse of the boundaries between cultures may have spawned a century of World’s Fairs and created
“The International School” of Modernist architecture, but better health ( and thus longevity), cheaper transportation and greater density of the world’s population contributed to the explosion of the COVID- 19 pandemic. Our ability to make so much progress also means that preventing the disease from affecting our world is inevitable. But some things revealed will not be changed by COVID- 19’ s cure.
As Salingaros says, there are lessons our enforced sequestration may reveal:
“More radical changes come from stopping energy consumption and associated environmental degradation,” he says. “We finally have clean air after 30 years of pollution. Maybe people don’t want to revert to unbreathable air tied to extractive global consumerism.”
Architecture will have no impact on the pandemic. It is too early to find an aesthetic result, an architectural movement, even a specific outcome of how architecture is affected by COVID- 19, but it is clear that large- order assumptions in every aspect of every part of the world have been called into question, and the basic ways we all live our lives are changing. And that is the way architecture changes.