This new building in Miami looks like your typical luxury skyscraper. Swanky apartments, 55-storeys,
lots of glass and an infinity pool.
But Legacy Hotel and Residences is far from being a normal high-rise building.
Equipped with a state-of-the-art medical facility, hospital-grade ventilation systems, touchless entry
and even a fleet of disinfection robots, it’s been labelled the world’s first pandemic-ready skyscraper.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, we feel obligated to say that the pandemic
has had a pretty huge effect on our cities and the buildings in them.
Even now, with vaccines rolling out and many countries relaxing restrictions, some offices,
hotels and public venues are struggling to entice workers and customers back inside.
For a lot of places, stocking up on hand sanitiser, encouraging social distancing and opening
a few windows is all they’ve been able to do to ensure safety when they were given
so little time to prepare.
But new structures have had the opportunity to integrate protective features from the
beginning - and that’s exactly what’s happening at Legacy Hotel and Residences in
Miami, albeit on a scale that no one quite anticipated.
Alongside its 300 residences and 200 hotel rooms, the USD $500 million skyscraper will
have ten floors of advanced medical equipment and an array of high-tech safety kit throughout
the building - including a ventilation system fit for a hospital, ‘germ-zapping’ UV
robots, voice-activated elevators, antimicrobial material on all the furniture and loads more.
The medical centre isn’t just big - and expensive, at $100 million - it’ll be the
most technologically advanced health and well-being facility in the world - that's according to the CEO
of the developer Royal Palm Companies.
There will be ventilators, teams of physicians, everything that you need should there be an
outbreak - even those requiring urgent care shouldn't really have to leave the building.
The tower’s tech goes beyond health - there’ll also be a fancy robotic parking system, because
for the target clientele having to park their own car is a bit of a hassle.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that it all feels a bit dystopian: in the next pandemic
some wealthy elites could pull-up their drawbridge, bunker down in their own tower of paradise
and wait for things to pass.
But there are plans for the health centre to “serve the wider Miami community” as well.
We just don’t know the full details of what that means yet.
Of course, with the current pandemic causing so much disruption all over the world, this isn’t
the only example of a new building that’s taking preparations for the next one seriously.
Described as the first of its kind, this new school in Peru is designed to be pandemic-proof,
with a focus on outdoor learning.
The building at Markham College in Lima will have an open layout for natural air ventilation,
moveable elements and foldable walls for creating flexible spaces, with children spread out
rather than packed into crowded classrooms.
While not everywhere has a climate like Peru, providing outside space or at least good ventilation
is one of the best ways to make buildings safer against airborne viruses, and it’s
becoming increasingly important for offices.
Taking things up a gear, an entire pandemic-proof city has been put forward near Beijing.
Similar to Miami Legacy, the idea is that the community has everything it needs in the
event of further lockdowns - but here, people would be entirely self-sufficient.
Greenhouses and indoor farms for growing food, roofs that produce energy and recycle water
and apartments with dedicated spaces for remote working are all part of the plan,
with cross-laminated timber used throughout.
Residents would also be able to 3D-print everyday objects such as missing or broken parts
that could end up in short supply.
These are just some of the ways that building and city planners are making sure their creations
are able to keep functioning should things flare up again in the future.
While the project in Miami perhaps shows the extreme end of what can be done, even those
with smaller budgets can potentially learn lessons from it.
If there’s one good thing to come out of the pandemic, it’s the chance to build in
a way that puts people’s health and wellbeing first - we just need to make sure it reaches
all parts of our societies.
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