-The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way
we move through space, and some architects say
these changes are creating a new normal.
-What this moment brings to us
is a possibility to rethink everything.
-People are experiencing a heightened awareness
of their surroundings
and how they interact with their surroundings.
-The hope would be that we never go back
to pre-COVID understanding of the relationship
between human health and architecture.
-For most people, this heightened awareness is new,
but many architects have been focusing on it for a long time.
Caitlin Taylor is an architect
with a background in agriculture,
and she lives on an organic farm in Connecticut.
-You know, in our 12-, 13-year history as a firm,
we've built our entire model of practice
around an understanding of the ways in which buildings
can make people sick or that can make people healthy.
-In 2011, Taylor's firm designed a hospital in Butare, Rwanda.
One of their goals was to reduce
the transmission of airborne disease.
Taylor says the design solutions they developed were simple,
but profound.
-Understanding how people travel through the hospital
and separating people as best you can
when you know they're sick,
when you know they're contagious with something
involved moving the hallways from a single interior
double-loaded corridor with bad airflow
and no natural light to the outside of the building.
Every patient has a view of the landscape,
has an open window,
and the relationship between the windows
on one side of the building and the other side
were very specifically calibrated
to maximize cross-ventilation.
-The Butare District Hospital was effective in part
because it was specifically designed
for the environment where it was built.
Taylor says this is a design strategy
that should be practiced more widely,
especially as architects consider the impact of diseases
like COVID-19.
-We need to get way better as an industry
and as a profession at designing in open dialogue
with the climate and the ecosystem
in which our projects are embedded.
So that is going to look and behave very differently
in the Southwest than it is in Washington State
or in the Everglades in Florida or here in Connecticut.
-Another architect, Steven Holl,
who's currently based in upstate New York,
says that one of the key lessons of the pandemic
is the importance of our reliance on the natural world.
-Nature and humanity are co-dependent,
and I think that this situation that we're in,
like the great composer,
Arvo Part, what he said about it,
it sends us all back to the first grade.
And that's something which I think is a positive
because we've spent the last few decades
basically wrecking the Earth.
I'm working on a project in Bogotá
for the Doctorate's College.
It's about a 100,000-square-foot building,
but it's only two floors and it's all outside.
And Bogotá, of course, has that kind of good climate,
but it embraces a garden courtyard,
so it's really about embracing nature.
It's shaping a green space.
And all cross-ventilation, all open air.
It's a perfect, let's say, example of what would be future
post-COVID campus architecture.
So, then one adjustment we're doing is we're taking out
50% of the seats in the auditorium, spacing them,
and having a simulcast projection in the portico
so people can be involved in a lecture
if a lot of people came, but they're outside.
-Some of the things being changed by the pandemic
are how and where we work,
and these might be changes that are here to stay.
-Working at home becomes a real focus
because people have realized they can work at home.
They don't need to be in a big office building.
You know, the fact is a small house like this,
which is geothermally heated and cooled, solar-powered,
an incredible ecological example
of a little rural house can be a workspace.
-Office spaces have taken many forms, and for decades,
the architectural giant Gensler
has been designing them for a wide range of clients,
including corporations, banks,
and even newsrooms like "The Washington Post."
Amanda Carroll says a post-COVID new normal
might mean the workplace is designed
to be a destination for creative collaborations
rather than daily tasks.
-We believe that there will start to be solutions
that are much more adaptable by the individual.
So, solutions that include walls that pivot,
that eliminate the typical, everyday desk,
because the individual doesn't actually maybe come to work
to do most of their focus work anymore.
We'll find people who work five days a month in the office
or five days a year in the office.
What we see in the future is that more priority and more area
will be dedicated to spaces for teams,
spaces for teams to come together that aren't permanent,
spaces that aren't assigned.
Those space types would be full of furniture
and almost a kit of tools
and parts that can be manipulated by the individual
and in many cases might even be reliant
upon a bring-your-own-device policy
so that you aren't even touching anything.
You're simply bringing what you already have on hand
because it's supplied by your employer,
and you're unlocking the potential of different
screens or whiteboards
or cameras through an app that's on your phone.
And you have a choice of working at a bigger table to draw
or write or exchange thoughts with colleagues or on a couch.
-COVID-19 has been devastating,
but architects say there's also some hope,
hope that this tragedy wakes people up to the changes
that were needed long before the pandemic.
-If we take one thing from this crisis,
I hope that it is a very deep
and profound understanding of the way
in which we are all connected to each other
and we are all connected to everything around us.
-I'm very hopeful, by the way, that this is all gonna pass,
and we need to find a way
that the future isn't something negative coming at us.
We need to reverse that, and that's a fundamental change.
And we can make it.