Architecture After the Pandemic: How COVID Changed the Shape of Our Homes and Cities

Before COVID home was where we returned, and after it home became the place we could not leave, and this book follows how architecture changed with that reversal. Open plans that had erased interior walls suddenly put everyone in the same space, the neglected balcony became an opening to the sky and a small homeland, and the office moved into the bedroom, raising the question of how to design a room that is a living room in the morning and an office in the afternoon. It recalls Le Corbusier's old search for sun, air and space, and traces the shift from the open plan to the flexible plan, the entrance as a transition zone for shoes and handwashing, the smart home, and healthcare moving onto screens and into the house. Beyond the home it turns to the city: emptied centers, streets reclaimed from cars, tables spilling onto sidewalks in New York, the idea of proximity associated with Carlos Moreno's work in Paris, and new visions for the streets of Milan. Its lesson for the architect is to design a possibility in place of a room and a relationship with the sky in place of a window, and it ends with the value of a tree, a small balcony and a door that can be closed, and with architecture as a shelter for human fragility.