When we were facing the first COVID-19 wave (ah, we were so young and innocent), I joined countless other critics and self-proclaimed seers in speculating what changes the pandemic would bring to world of architecture and design. Now that we may have crested the last wave and are learning to live with the endemic threat (I will never be able to look at the cute deer in my backyard the same way, or at least without wearing a mask), it is worth checking what is left of those predictions.
In a September 2020 column, I foresaw an intensification of “the many waves of standardized forms of organization, materials, and shapes that have been created as much by global flows of finance and culture, as well as by similarities in methods of production and standards, as they have been by the aesthetic preferences of any architects.” I suggested then that the pandemic would only increase our aversion to difference and risk-taking in the making of forms, while also increasing our reliance on standardized components and ways of making.
I stand by that prediction, especially since in the meantime we have seen the rise of other factors that promote these tendencies to sameness: the Chinese government’s campaign against “weird” architecture; the need for offices that are more “touchdown” spaces than daily environments; and the rise of contactless forms of security and access. Not only the virus, but the physical distance of remote working and contactless access will create and streamlining will become endemic.
On the other hand, the pandemic also led people to flee inward to self-made interiors, and outward to more far-flung locations. DIY is a big thing, but it rarely involves architects. On the other hand, plenty of designers now have plenty of work creating structures for the many who have realized that they could be anywhere and still be part of a global economy. The rise of exurban communities, already evident many years before 2020, has taken a noticeable flight. Whether that brings with it a true appreciation of the local landscape, both natural and human-made, or whether it just means inserting Starbucks and video conferencing rooms in every holler in Tennessee and log cabin in the Rockies remains to be seen.
The same can be said of the spatial and architectural inventions of the last two years, such as the semi-enclosed food stalls that have proliferated along sidewalks. Right now, they are charming and kludged together, but I wonder whether the only way they will survive is to meet codes yet to be developed (beyond the rather lax current ones) and to be value engineered into the same kind of sameness that dominates restaurant design now.
What I can say is that the New International Style to which I referred is even more specific than I thought. Its preferred building material, as I noted in a blog a few weeks ago, is metal panels for office and public buildings, some form of fake stucco over Tyvek for residential buildings (whether single-family homes or Type 3 monstrosities), and componentized concrete panels for just about everything else. The sameness that we already knew in our suburban developments and those storage units for aspiring yuppies and defeated wage earners, the Type 3 buildings filling in the “donut” around every downtown in the United States, have now hit the office market, where it turns out that slick, curved, and shiny is the only way to build.
What is also evident is the distance we are building between ourselves and our buildings. On a recent trip to New York after several years absence, I noted the fact that to use the subway I didn’t even have to slide my card through a stile, let alone insert a token: all I had to do is hover my phone over a sensor. The same is true in museums, hotels, and office buildings; you also often have to show your vaccination pass to get into the building, creating what is meant to be an invisible cocoon of RNA-based safety within the spaces.
Much of this is familiar to me from my experiences in one particular place: Singapore. That island-state-city perfected both the embedding of security and control devices (a sensor in your car not only tracks and charges you for being on the road, but also notes your presence in a parking garage), but also the generic look and feel of every structure, whether it was an office building, a government structure, or a greenhouse arboretum. Public buildings are big blobs, while on private structures, as I noted in my discussion of structures on the new La Guardia terminal or is evident in many new streamlined skyscrapers, only the edges are rounded.
The physical appearance of what human beings have made in Singapore ties into the climate, which is soft enough to give you the sense that there are few distinctions between inside and outside, while the fact that you are on an island which is city, suburb, exurb, and international hub all rolled into one, and mixed with vegetation, both offers an idealized version of sprawl and makes the sense of living in a controlled state, both Eden and Brave New World, all the more evident. It has also led Singapore to be a leader in “green” buildings of a certain type, where the difference between landscape and structure, between inside and outside, dissolves.
Where this pleasant sameness all breaks down is in the large housing estates and the barracks where foreign workers are housed. These have a very different and more old-fashioned materiality of brick, concrete, and tile, and a crowded arrangement, and became hotbeds of COVID infection. There are limits to any capitalist state’s ability to control reality.
Still, I think our future is to be like Singapore, even with the weather of Buffalo or Miami; we will find ways to enhance the heat lamps and air refreshers that the pandemic has helped spread way beyond their uses in a few upscale bars with terraces. If we have enough money, we will never touch a surface, and we will glide through our lives effortlessly, moving from one similar building and interior to another. Our buildings will be designed by BIG and Thomas Heatherwick, as interpreted by the alphabet soup of large firms: smooth, swoopy, and global in their aesthetic.
What will counteract these tendencies, which were already so strong in the last decade and have only intensified? A counterforce may be the realization that we cannot continue to use up resources we cannot replenish and thus cannot build new structures, and instead must reuse old ones, including all their quirky properties and different materials and spaces. Another might be the rise of craft and DIY, although I am not sure I would prefer an Etsy Style over a New International Style.
That New International Style of slick and contactless gliding and sliding, along with the openness and ease it brings, is of course not all bad. There is a generic good taste to these buildings, but also an openness and lack of hierarchy in many of the interiors, and a logic and safeness that we can welcome. Good design, which I am still hoping to find, will be the ability to use those rules and generic components to figure out a way to make them not what you expect, specific to a place, time, and people, and open to different interpretations and uses. Perhaps we will have to hope for a New Postmodernism on the horizon beyond the Modernism of the New International Style.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
