LA Forum's publication Delirious LA interviews BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh on the quarantine as a possible enabler to change in architecture and other conjectures it may bring to architecture and urban design.

"For me, as someone who writes about architecture, it was the idea that there was a way of dealing with disease—which, from a modern point of view, I would associate with vaccines, pills, or surgery—instead you can design a building in such a way that you can prevent the spread of a disease from one person to the next. It seemed like a way to instrumentalize architecture beyond just aesthetics, or beyond just everyday use value such as, you know, this is a restaurant or this is a home. It gives architecture – and the very fundamentals of architecture, including questions of circulation and sequence, and where walls and doors might be placed – a medical effect. And it helps to avoid the need for a vaccine or avoid the need for medical treatment later.

There was something fascinating about that for me. Quarantine seems, on one level, like a very simple practice – let’s just put one person in this room and another person in that room. But, actually, it’s a really sophisticated and strange way of giving architecture a medical purpose that is larger than just a building or a building design. And then it was also just the idea that something that interesting is now just a ruin, and it’s just been turned into a hotel, and in many cases has just been erased entirely. Most quarantine stations are missing now. They’re gone. What does it say about the state of quarantine today that something that fascinating and that interesting architecturally is just totally overlooked?"