Pub. 1 2020-2021 Issue 1

26 REFLEXION | 2020 | AIA Utah  — continued from page 25 warehouses and schools? They could save lives where occupants don’t have a choice about social distance: prisons, homeless shelters and refugee facilities,” writes Lubell. “Perhaps they could be complemented by germ-resistant strategies like antimicrobial polymer surfaces, copper alloy surfaces (which naturally kill germs and viruses) and flexible spatial designs to accommodate social distancing.” If you are regularly involved in specifying materials and products for your 15-person firm, this should strike a chord. If you’re responsible for new business development for your 200-person firm, this should also strike a chord. In either case, you know the health, safety, and welfare triad that governs credit hours (and all of the hours in between) as an architect. When you consider that we spend 87% of our lives indoors, in buildings and spaces that someone designed, the new clarity around words like health, safety, and welfare that this pandemic provides is a good place to start with clients. That 87% figure came from a 2001 study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency based on survey data from the mid-1990s collected via telephone interviews with Americans across the 48 contiguous states. A quarter-century later, that figure might be higher, or it might be lower. Still, it is fair to say that employers will scrutinize it, their insurers, lawyers, and lawmakers as social distancing, contact tracing, and hygienics create a new frontier at the intersection of workplace policies and government guidelines. If workplaces are meant to be productive environments, you cannot talk about how they’re successful unless you talk about how they’re designed. The century that passed between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Administration Building for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York, (now demolished) and Norman Foster’s Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, can be defined by the architectural response to labor economics and what the historian Reinhold Martin called “the organizational complex.” We have entered an era when the cubicle versus open-plan debate is about more than taste, comfort, or even happiness. It is about health as well as privacy and safety. Will the six-foot rule for social distancing become a standard for 21st-century design in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man became a standard for the 15th century? Or, as Blair Kamin asked in his recent Chicago Tribune column, “Will the open-plan office make you vulnerable to the coronavirus? Or will the virus crisis force offices to become safer?” Kamin takes hoteling, conference rooms, and plush furniture to task — all hallmarks of the modern office that seem as likely to go away as door handles and break room refrigerators. Preparing clients for shifting standards will assuredly include a discussion about density and separation, which is a spatial gambit as much as it is a programmatic consideration. It will include protocols for isolation, which will be about detection and swift action. It will also include protocols for sterilization, which will be about material durability and virus resistance. In other words, beginning right now, there is a real need for architects to apply their problem-solving skills to the unique and pervasive problem of rethinking entire environments. We need to propose standardized solutions to pathogenic risks and, simultaneously, design to meet the unique needs of clients, owners, occupants, and, indeed, future generations of occupants. b We have entered an era when the cubicle versus open-plan debate is about more than taste, comfort, or even happiness. It is about health as well as privacy and safety. Will the six-foot rule for social distancing become a standard for 21st-century design in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man became a standard for the 15th century?