Architecture after Pandemic

(PART - I)

 

Everyone is concerned about how will they survive this pandemic and how life of everyone will change after. One thing is so true that after all this pandemic thing over, our way of living will change for sure. Also the architecture of our building will change.

One thing we learned from our past that every major pandemic have made our thinking more concerned about health & architecture. We can take an example of cholera pandemic, dengue pandemic, plague pandemic, global warming. All these pandemic have made us to think about how can we improve the way we are living. Because of it we have developed modern sanitation, open public spaces, green building concept, modern concept of urban designs.

 

In London, a connection between cholera infection and leaking sewage was made by physician John Snow in 1854. The isolation of the cholera-causing bacterium accomplished by Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini was not widely trusted for decades. 19,000 Parisians died as the result of a 1848 outbreak the year Emperor Napoleon III came to power. "Under the direction of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, French authorities tore down 12,000 buildings, built tree-lined boulevards and parks, erected fountains and installed an elaborate sewage system," writes Klein.

While cholera took the lives of tens of thousands of people worldwide, responses to the disease resulted in discoveries in public sanitation and urban design interventions with a lasting impact on the built environment in some of the most famous cities in the world.

The concept of modern sanitation is come in light. People tends to switch to the more hygiene way in sanitation also. New public sewer system was design in every major city in that time, slowly whole world have adopted it beacuse they have seen the era in which their loved ones died.

Lets see an another example,  

 

In 1933, the Finnish architect and designer Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto, along with his first wife, Aino, designed the Paimio Sanatorium, a facility for the treatment of tuberculosis in southwest Finland. The building is purely geometric having long walls of expansive windows on its face, light-colored rooms and a wide roof terrace with railings like the ones on cruise ships. These all are now part of what we know as modern architecture, which emerged in the twenties from the work of the Bauhaus, in Germany, and Le Corbusier, in France. But the Aaltos’ choices of material and design weren’t just aesthetically fashionable.

 

“The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument,” Hugo would later write. Tuberculosis was one of the early twentieth century’s most pressing health concerns; each element of the Paimio was conceived to promote recovery from the disease. “The room design is determined by the depleted strength of the patient, reclining in his bed,” Aalto explained.

So, I believe that each and every pandemic have made life better than before, architects have always contributed in making lifestyle of people more safer after pandemic, as a human race we have always survived in worst scenario. We have always overcome the problems that shook the world. So, after covid we will also rise up. We will adjust with the new normal.

 

 

 

People have already started to accept new normal. Work from home is new idea specially for IT Industry, they have realized in this pandemic that there is no need to have invest in office for small scale companies, they can save money in infra-structure and invest in technology and talent. Also for the employee it is easy to work from home because they can save time in travelling to office. Also women can manage home & work both from staying home only.

 

 

 

Reference:

a. https://www.dailynews.lk/2021/09/17/tc/259514/how-coronavirus-will-reshape-architecture

b. https://www.planetizen.com/news/2020/05/109286-design-time-cholera-how-pandemics-reshaped-built-environment