PANDEMIC SOCIETY COMPETITION SERIES

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN RESPONDS

Competition series developed by Non Architecture to discover changes in life and society from a design point of view as the result of the COVID19 outbreak. Framed in three competitions:
COVID19 Supermarket
Social Distancing Housing Block
HEALING: Alternative Designs for Quarantine Cities

PROJECT: (Non) Architectural Contest
YEAR: 2020
DURATION: 6 months
ORGANIZER: Non Architecture
MEDIA PARTNERS: KoozArch, Show it better, beta architecture, ArchiBoom, ActOfMapping, Supra Order

The outbreak of COVID-19 has turned out to be one of the biggest global emergencies in our recent history and the dramatic numbers of victims will not be the only major consequence as we move forwards. The world population has been forced into quarantine and social distancing, with an incredibly heavy load on healthcare systems and on the horizon there is an economic crisis ahead. It seems to be clear to all that there will be no easy fix for this emergency. Considering the current developments in China, Hong Kong and South Korea, we are likely to transition through different degrees of isolation, while waiting for a vaccine, effective treatment or herd immunity to be achieved. This could take months, if not years.

The word quarantine means restricting the movement of people or goods, but quarantine is a spatial and a temporal buffer. Space, as it relates to infectious disease epidemics, isn’t just about quarantine; it’s also a design problem. If you look around most neighborhoods today, in cities and suburbs, you’ll see evidence of how humans have responded to infectious diseases by redesigning their physical spaces, from the creation of the sanitary reform movement, which created drinking water and sewage infrastructure, to the creation of open spaces to become the lungs of the city, which was due to the belief in the medicinal qualities of green spaces, which were viewed as a healthier alternative to city life.