Archinect - News

How will COVID-19 impact the design of spaces and places?

2020-04-13T14:15:00-04:00

With each of us now living in socially distanced self-isolation, with shops shuttered, offices abandoned and urban centres reduced to ghost towns, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of lasting impact Covid-19 will have on our cities. Will homes need to adapt to better accommodate work? Will pavements widen so we can keep our distance? Will we no longer want to live so densely packed together, working in open-plan offices and cramming into lifts?

Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright takes a long look at the ways, past and present, that architecture has been shaped by concerns over hygiene, sanitation, and disease.

How an obsession with illness shaped modern architecture, according to Beatriz Colomina

2019-05-06T18:49:00-04:00

Clean lines, white surfaces and indoor-outdoor living epitomise early modern architecture. Contrary to received wisdom, to Colomina this is less a machine aesthetic than a hospital aesthetic. Through the lens of disease, nervous disorders, sexuality and self-expression, Colomina’s fascinating interpretation of modern architecture suggests the motivating factors behind the architectural revolution were the need for health and cleanliness, hygiene and smooth, calming surfaces.

In light of her recently published book X-Ray Architecture, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina talks about the history of how illnesses shaped the clean aesthetics of 20th-century modern architecture.

‘‘In the 20th century architects from Le Corbusier to Mies van der Rohe to Alvar Aalto are all obsessed with illnesses,’’ Colomina tells The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘‘Corb says the old city has to be destroyed and a new architecture should emerge because it produces tuberculosis.’’

Hong Kong death-trap apartments photographed by Benny Lam

2017-06-08T14:20:00-04:00

Photographer Benny Lam has documented the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, recording the lives of these hidden communities.

From a stove-adjacent toilet to walls crammed with knives, scissors, and precariously stacked storage cases, Benny Lam's photographs of illegally subdivided apartments in Hong Kong are like a gorgeously illustrated case study in how major disease epidemics get started. This Guardian article is a showcase of Lam's Prix Pictect 2017 shortlisted photographs; the video below is a literal page-turner of Lam's book, "TRAPPED," documenting the Hong Kong apartments:

ALS-stricken landscape architect designs home controlled by his eyes

2016-12-22T18:46:00-05:00

After being diagnosed with ALS, a disease of the nervous system that gradually takes away motor control, breathing, and speech, 38-year-old landscape architect Steve Saling decided to invent a home that he could control with eye movements. As CNN.com explains:

With a grant of $500,000 from Berman, Saling went to work. He started by designing an electronic automation system called a Promixis Environment Automation Controller, or PEAC. The system uses a wireless signal to allow Saling and other patients to open and close doors, call an elevator, and operate the TV and lights. They carry out these tasks with small movements of their eyes -- or, for some patients, using brain waves.

Saling laid out the facility to maximize social interaction and designed the garden with a reinforced layer so wheelchairs wouldn't damage the lawn. His goal was to create a nursing residence that felt like home.

For the latest on smart-home design:

Mark Zuckerberg unveils a home operating AI app called "Jarvis...

Preventing disease and upholding public health through architecture

2015-08-12T14:12:00-04:00

Archive (“Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments”) proposes “bringing attention to the built environment and how it is a transmission vehicle for the spread and control of a respiratory illness like TB” [...] Archive is starting small, with an as-yet-uninitiated project on respiratory health and indoor pollutants in Ethiopia and projects on TB awareness in London.

More on the intersection of architecture and public health:

The Most Relevant News of 2014 (for Architects)

2014-12-30T14:02:00-05:00

Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth from an image of some distant row of houses hollowed by mortar fire and colored with the blood of a strangers' body. "This is the real of architecture," the news seems to silently implore.

As gravity serves as the counterweight to the feverish, technofuturism fashionable to today's students, news events seem to ground architecture just at the moment it seems like it may finally escape into the vapors of idealism. While it may seem that architecture is increasingly consigned to the building of institutions or expensive residences, the demand for buildings and dwellings simultaneously grows louder and more desperate with every unfolding disaster.

A year-end round-up is as fraught as a ranking. If...

Study Finds NY Rats Have Alarming Diseases

2014-10-15T14:32:00-04:00

Recently, a team of pathogen hunters at Columbia University...conducted a survey of the viruses and bacteria in Manhattan’s rats, the first attempt to use DNA to catalog pathogens in any animal species in New York City [...] Although the scientists examined just 133 rats, they found plenty of pathogens. Some caused food-borne illnesses. Others, like Seoul hantavirus, had never before been found in New York. Others were altogether new to science.

New York's notorious rat problem is just one of the many complex human-animal interactions that can lead to disease outbreaks. Ebola, which has decimated West Africa and is now appearing in the US, likely spread to humans from contact with infected primates. Avian flu (H5N1) spreads from contact with contaminated birds, with the most deadly strains for humans likely coming from exposure to infected domesticated birds. Similarly, swine flu comes from contact with pigs. And the bubonic plague, famously thought to have come from rats, is now thought to have spread from fleas carried by said rats.

All this shows that human habitations are actually within a complex mesh of interactions with other non-human agents, many of which pose grave or even fatal health risks. As Dr. Lipkin, director of the rat study, told the NY Times: “I think people are going to have to start paying attention to this.”

Texas A&M architecture students design portable Ebola treatment clinics

2014-09-23T12:47:00-04:00

Design concepts for portable, rapidly deployable Ebola virus treatment clinics created by Texas A&M Master of Architecture students will be unveiled at a 2 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 24 presentation on the fourth floor of the Langford Architecture Center’s Building A on the Texas A&M campus.

Research Shows How Viruses Quickly Contaminate Buildings

2014-09-09T17:30:00-04:00

Using tracer viruses, researchers found that contamination of just a single doorknob or table top results in the spread of viruses throughout office buildings, hotels, and health care facilities. Within 2 to 4 hours, the virus could be detected on 40 to 60 percent of workers and visitors in the facilities and commonly touched objects.

How concrete floors can prevent child deaths in Bangladesh

2014-08-22T19:34:00-04:00

An initiative from Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments (ARCHIVE) is working to decrease infectious disease rates in Bangladesh through a simple housing intervention: concrete floors. Homes with dirt or mud floors are prime gateways for gastrointestinal and parasitic pathogens, and both are widespread in the country's more vulnerable populations.

Children under five are particularly at risk, who are disproportionally impacted by such diseases to the point of morbidity or death. ARCHIVE's "High Fives" project aims to install concrete floors in 500 Bangladeshi homes by 2015 — a simple adjustment that ARCHIVE estimates would reduce children's risk of contracting parasites by over 75%, severely undercutting disease and mortality rates.

Recycled Water in Urban Parks Could Be Spreading Drug-Resistant Germs

2014-07-31T20:04:00-04:00

Sprinkling city parks with recycled water may create a breeding ground for hard-to-treat microbes [...] Even after the recycled water is treated in a sewage plant, it may carry microbes, drug-resistance genes and antibiotics that had washed down the drain. Sprayed into the environment, that water can spread microbes that could cause difficult-to-treat infections, the researchers say.