How the pandemic ended 20th century architecture
It is finally January. Vaccines will end the 2020 hangover that warps our lives, but things have already changed. This month a flood of 2021 predictions spew from the media landscape — and those prognostications will include endless lists of how COVID-19 has shaped our lives. Since we live our lives in and around buildings, how has the pandemic changed architecture?
We all live somewhere, in our homes, and those places are as common as they are unique in their manifestation of those who live in them.
The coronavirus is another universality. It is the first existential threat to our culture since World War II. Whether we were shut in, or retreated to safety, or left a place of work, or school, or dining, or entertainment — or not — everyone changed how they used their homes.
How can you instantly find architectural trends in what our homes will be when the way we live is changing so completely, so rapidly?
I think there is one overarching trend that can be predicted: COVID-19 ended the 20th century in architecture, starting with how we think of our homes.
Architecture never leads, it always follows, no matter what architects hope to be true. The 20th century ushered in the broad cultural projection of architecture as expressed in homes.
For a century, national attention was focused by publications like House Beautiful, House & Garden, now Dwell and Houzz. The way homes were presented is centered on designers, and occasionally an inspired owner.
These venues offered a cultural
direction based on architecture as a product derived from its designer.
The way architecture is provided to the public has not changed for the last 100 years. The basis of the architecture “brand” offers a product, like buying a car. But architecture as I and some others practice it is a profession that offers a service, like a psychiatrist or a rabbi does.
I think COVID-19 changes our culture’s expectation of what architects provide from a product to what we need after the pandemic. The COVID-19 year, 2020, ended the 20th century in architecture, because our culture will change what architects provide, from the product that was the profession’s brand to a service that is not focused on “style.”
COVID-19 held up a mirror to
each of us, not just to designers. Homes are not changed by architects, they are changed by homeowners who engage with designers to embody what our culture imposes on our lives, and thus our homes.
Each of us has had our values held back up to us when our social lives and mortality came under question. That new perspective changed us.
The reality of change goes beyond cliches when coping directs design. Susan Ingham, an architect in Seattle, has, like all of us, had her home reinvented, not by her design, but by COVID-19.
“We have a 1911 craftsman bungalow, and each of us now occupies a floor during the day — I’m in the basement, my son has a desk set up in our living room, and my husband is squirreled
away upstairs in our bedroom with the door closed when he is Zoom-meeting with clients.”
The experiences of over 300 million of us living differently for a full year will change our values because our motivations have had scrutiny at a level not seen since all those GIs came home after World War II.
After the war, there was an established system of home marketing: builders built what homeowners wanted, designers designed what would sell, architects often designed for other architects’ approval.
It was a top-down world, where those “in the know” offered consumers options and we chose from those options.
The assumption that homes were made by others and offered to us for our decoration has been in full force since the last pandemic, a century ago. I think this will change, because we have changed.
Each of us has had a year of looking into the mirror and discovering what our values are — and that changes what we expect from our homes.
This change, a reversal from the top-down system of the 20th century, will change the way that homes are created. I have seen this shift in those who have come to me as an architect to think about their homes.
All of us have been forced to think of our lives in terms of our homes. Patrick Pinnell, an architect in Higganum, Conn., works 200 feet from his antique home. “The whole live/work/socialize shape of society — including mores and public and private behaviors — seem sure to change,” he said.
I do not think Houzz or HomeAdviser will change what they offer, but I think the architecture they broker will shift from a product to a service — not at once, but attitudes are shifting.
Warren G. Harding was elected president after the last pandemic, offering “A Return To Normalcy” that did not happen. The cascade from the Roaring ’20s, to the Great Depression, to World War II transformed the world.
No one knew these outcomes a century ago, but at least we can see that normalcy may not be our fate after COVID-19. The 20th century of architecture being offered as a product has ended.
We are now living in a world where motivations matter more, and outcomes are not presumed. Architecture will redefine itself in response to this change. At least in our homes.