This is our shortcut to how we lived before the pandemic: no mask, no physical distance, no barriers. Able to move to restaurants, concerts, theaters, sporting events, cinemas, bars, churches, all without worrying about the proximity of foreigners. Able to shake hands, hug, kiss.
But those days, it’s a magical thought.
This is probably not an exclusive case. Even if COVID is well abolished, we cannot assume that we still have a century left before the next global pandemic. Only in the last 20 years, we have noticed several pathogens that may have taken us to this level: SARS, MERS, Ebola, avian influenza, swine flu (which may be on the way back) and as we continue to expand spaces that put us in contact with remote wildlife species of the past, we can expect coronaviruses to continue to pass from animals to humans and spread to the world population. And others as effective and fatal as this can occur … Or more.
Don’t play the worry maker, but if we need the next one (and the next and the next), then we have to think about how we do it, how we live in a way that helps support us. ready for a pathogen before it reaches us, a way that does its best to protect us from the kind of forest chimney spread we see with this coronavirus. Right now we’re learning the hard way, the painful, the tragic, that the “normal” won’t.
So if we don’t get back to normal, where are we going?
It’s funny, you ask.
This same factor is now being studied through architects and designers around the world, not the way you and I do. Answering this query is your job. When you hire to create a building, area, or development, it’s not just about creating an aesthetic (or daring) design; It’s about running on each and every detail of this design: how other people will cross it, what they will do there, how it will have compatibility with the area around it, its infrastructure, its materials, its signage, its effect on the environment. Thus, as new projects begin in a post-COVID world, designers and architects will be able to lead the way towards this new way of life, towards a new normal.
This is nothing new. Past pandemics have fostered primary adjustments in architecture, design and urban planning. Modernized sewer systems, boulevards, wide sidewalks and parks, as well as New York’s Central Park, go back to efforts to prevent devastating cholera epidemics in the 19th century. In the twentieth century, the TB remedy promoted the design of sanatoriums that gave patients greater access to healing air and sunlight: giant windows in the patient’s room; balconies and terraces; whitewashed walls; even flat ceilings for sunbathing. These qualities were so aligned with the principles of modernists that followed for the design of houses, apartment buildings, offices, almost everything, and as the century progressed, they have become almost ubiquitous. With a pandemic that affects the global as deeply as the existing crisis, it’s less a question of whether it will lead to design adjustments than when.
And it looks like “when” is now.
Right next to South First in Monroe, in the area formerly occupied through the grayDUCK gallery, a small business is seriously thinking about how we live after the pandemic. Forge Craft Architecture – Design, founded seven years ago by administrators Rommel Sulit and Scott Ginder, has been involved in several impressive projects: Bluebonnet Studios of Foundation Communities and Waterloo Terrace, the award-winning Walmart Technologies area in Colorado, Cheatham Street Flats student housing complex in San Marcos, and filled with more when the city closed in March. “All the paintings dried up overnight,” sulit says. The construction of the projects under structure was halted and without a transparent concept of the direction of the economy, the projects on the drawing board stopped advancing. As for the new projects, they just stopped.
Not knowing how long the quarantine would last, Sulit and Ginder knew they had to keep their staff busy and their design skills sharp. “We had to make sure that when things started to get better, we had a business,” Says Sulit. Hence they proposed a conceptual commission rooted in the concepts with which their team had worked this year – design and modular structure – and adapted to the crisis of the moment. The task: expand a cellular hospital with autonomous patient rooms that can be deployed to other sites and organized into configurations.
This turns out to be a challenge that the rest of the pandemic can take to solve it, however, Sulit said of the company: “We have a sure reputation because we are thin and unpleasant, and we are the guys you go through when you have a really complicated task and no one knows what to do with it. We say to ourselves, “Bring it.” It’s not our philosophy written, but it’s a kind of tacit philosophy: give us a hairy task “The furry, the biggest” and we’re passing through to locate.” Perhaps that’s why it only took the company until the end of April to complete and make public its solution, called Care-Craft. The fundamental unit of the assignment is a module consisting of two standardized rooms of 12 to 16 that porcent a wall, but with a room that has its own CVC formula (which adjusts the air in both one and one and both in five minutes); Formula for bathrooms and plumbing that complies with the ADA with toilet, sink and shower; windows and skylights; Wifi; and non-public monitor. Modules can be grouped into 12-bedroom rooms, and rooms can be changed to larger units, which eventually serve a large number of patients. The white paper describing Care-Craft illustrates one and both facets and also details the imaginable structure and deployment of classic floor transport. (For more information, scale in www.carexcraft.com).
While the Forge Craft team designed their modular hospital, the assignment seemed very timely. But eventually they finished it, not so much. The number of new COVID instances in the United States peaked in early April and, although it is still close to 30,000 consistent with the day, had a stable downward trend. There was an explanation as to why the country’s efforts to control the coronavirus were working. The company began to think that it would complete the task and that the pandemic would refer, leaving, in Sulit’s words, “just an old marker of what we did during the month we were quarantined.”
June would tell the story, but this prospect of the demise of the pandemic has taken Forge Craft in a new direction: towards the future.
Fellow architects and designers, as well as scientists, sociologists, hounds and other forecasters, had been analyzing the effect of the pandemic on society since early March, and more than 3 months had already produced an abundant framework of literature on adjustments in a post-COVID. World. When Ginder, Sulit and his team started reading articles and reports, they wondered: how can we design the places where we live/work/play so that they don’t have to block the next time a pandemic occurs? Through their research, led by his spouse Clayton Holmes and assignment designer Carey Alcott, they met thirteen spaces where existing responses to the coronavirus advised long-term adjustments in society and culture. Based on these answers and adding its own interpretations of dominant trends, Forge Craft has condensed the post-pandemic life literature framework into a fleshy but playful package of singles.
The COVID Companion: A Field Guide to the Post-COVID World looks a bit like the Bible from a sci-fi series set in the not-too-distant future. No characters, no script, just essential facts about how this world works and how it differs from the one we live in. A real virtual vacation instead of physical trips to faraway places. Personal 3D scans of the total structure to buy traditional garments online. Mobile department stores that arrive where consumers are. One-way streets with one car lane and one for buses, and other remodeled lanes in green areas for bike and pedestrian traffic and extended sidewalks for cafes. Animal healing robots for elderly villagers. Remedies from telehealth organizations for patients with similar diseases. Self-service motels reserved by application. The airfare is based on the weight of the visitor, as is the luggage.
Most of these concepts are not as exaggerated and, in fact, Sulit observes, some “predictions” in the Companion “have already materialized”. The concept of the car limited-area road transport segment “was based on the general concept that roads would be blocked, and behold, Bouldin Heights has already done so.” A few blocks south of Forge Craft’s office, a street limited traffic to pedestrians, bicycles and cars that passed through residents. The film segment predicts a resurgence of the popularity of film parks and, as anyone who has visited the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In in recent years can tell you, this is happening. And telehealth is already one thing. It is not so much that the COVID pandemic will lead to a radical innovation in our lives. (Hey, we still have the flying cars they promised us!) After all, villages had sewers and parks before cholera and houses had windows before tuberculosis. But this pandemic, like those, will bring small adjustments in our lives that will go up to something bigger.
In COVID Companion’s opinion, anything can be a “hyperlocal” society. It’s a new word for an old concept: live where you are. Instead of traveling miles and miles to get what you want (groceries, clothes, electronics, parts for your bed, bathroom and more), you place it in your netpaintings or welcome you at home. Instead of fighting traffic to get to the pictures elsewhere, you have a committed work area in your home. Your branch library becomes less of a book source and more into a networked painting center, where you take classes, attend city corridor meetings, vote. You live with a circle of family members from other generations. You connect with your neighbors. For others who already do such things, it would possibly seem simplistic, however, COVID’s quarantine forced many other people to do them for the first time, and if they continued to do them by choice, it can also be a real problem. extensive replacement in the Array culture as was mass migration to the suburbs in the 1950s.
However, the driving force behind the hyperlocal lifestyle will be coverage: coverage opposite the next wave of coronavirus or any other communicable pathogen that touches our doors. We create secure domains, incorporating as many computers as we imagined to restrict our exposure to infections. That’s why, says the partner, we’ll go back to copper, an old and intelligent antimicrobial copper, like the popular curtain for the accessories we touch. And we’re going to touch the least imaginable, expanding our use of motion sensors, voice activation and cell phones to make everything perfect, from soft switches to elevators, hotel doors, hospitals and senior care centers. And since we’ll have many more packages delivered, the houses will be designed with secure domains for your deposit. In fact, the houses will be designed for the quarantine option and the changes that this requires, the ones we have all made at the foundation of a garbage trap in recent months: designated rooms for workplace paintings and homeschooling; Separate wings for adults and young people that improve the privacy of both; A guest suite that can be used for someone who wants to isolate themselves; A wardrobe that serves as a safe transition domain from outside to inside and, because the remedy for tuberculosis was not wrong in the benefits of all-new air and sun, a benefactor outer domain. Hyperlocality would possibly even allow quarantine locks in the neighborhood, with access to businesses in an express domain allowed only with a QR code assigned to the citizens of that neighborhood.
The trick to creating this new popular protection and hyperlocality zones is not to update constant and rigid designs from before with equally rigid designs. Spaces want to be able to adapt to new circumstances, which we probably didn’t expect at this time. Life, as the saying goes, comes quickly, and an architecture too giant and too heavy to move will stay in the dust, or worse, abandoned by irrelevant. This point was noted through Liz Diller of the New York design studio Diller Scofidio-Renfro in a July article in The Washington Post. “The way to think about architecture to avoid obsolescence,” he said, “is to focus on things like lightness, adaptability, flexibility, the ability to think about updating the program, the ability to think about sudden economic adjustments, and population growth. Economic, environmental and political updating is critical to making the field important, dynamic and connected to what is happening.”
“How can we design the places where we live /work/we entertain so that they don’t have to block the next time a pandemic occurs?” Looking for answers to this question, the Forge Craft team showed that they are connected to what’s going on, and not just in a smart way for architecture. It is a solution that also suits all of us who are not in the design of the construction. They have also gone through the COVID nightmare and perceive the negative consequences that this represents for our lives. Your partner provides us with a long term with area: non-public area, own area, area and, yes, social area. At a time when we can’t back down, that’s a way forward.
The COVID pair can be seen in www.issuu.com/forgexcraft/docs/covid_significant other_final.
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