My social distancing started Friday, March 13, when Spacesmith implemented a work from home policy. Now in week six and counting, our lives have changed, normalcy hopelessly altered with only history shedding a light on past health crisis recoveries. How did architecture and construction react during those times?

Leprosy

During the Middle Ages, lepers were forced to live as social outcasts beyond city limits, wearing bells to announce their arrival, and holding a walking stick to enforce social distancing. Yet over 350 monasteries, hospitals, or ‘lazar’ houses were built on outskirts of towns throughout England to care for their wellbeing.

Plague

The bubonic plague ravaged through Asia and Europe, killing millions in cities and villages alike. Venice became one of the first to formalize protective actions by closing the city’s waterways and subjecting travelers and ships to 40 days of isolation – hence the term ‘quarantine.’ Many cities followed suit to slow the spread, and those with delayed reactions suffered the most from the repeated outbreaks. The disease changed the social and economic structure for years to come. 

Influenza

The early 20th century influenza affected 500 million people worldwide from January 1918 till December 1920. This pandemic hit in two waves (the second being the deadly one) with a total death toll of 50 million worldwide and 643,000 in the US. There were no antibiotics, no vaccines, no remedies other than isolation, personal hygiene, and a limitation of public events...seem familiar?

Early Tuberculosis Sanatoriums

Throughout, lifestyles evolved and adapted while attempting to adhere to a new normal. However, nothing affected modern architectural thinking as much as tuberculosis (TB), which raged from late 1870 to 1930, and led to the advent of antibiotics.

The remedy was thought to be rest in fresh air, sunshine, and openness which brought about the first specialty building: the sanatorium (‘sana’ Greek for health). They were designed for the treatment of people convalescing and were mostly located in cold climates, mountain air being thought to be the best treatment for lung disease. An early American sanitarium included the 1885 Adirondack Cottage sanatorium. 

The development of modern architecture parallels social and technological changes characterizing the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and finds itself at the center of economic and political discussions about providing a new, better world with a new way of living. Private residential projects led the charge, their designs an antidote to cluttered traditional designs. Austere white rooms were designed to be easily cleaned while always appearing spotless. Clutter was prohibited, with only practical furniture and pure materials – wood, stone, steel, and tiles. Minimalism was a response to dust and disease. The antibiotics were light, air, and openness, as evidenced in Le Corbusier’s 1922 Ozenfant Studio. 

Ozenfant Studio

Villa Savoye

Le Corbusier’s obsession with daylight, personal hygiene, and openness equally finds its place in the design of his 1927 Villa Savoye, with the hand sink symbolically placed on axis in the middle of the entrance foyer displaying washing as a public function. The master bathroom is no less breathtaking – hygiene and relaxation.

Sanatoriums exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of modern architects and designers as building types and institutional models. The strong designing for the weak was their credo. Among the first to be designed in the ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ style, purpose-built sanatoriums for TB and other chronic diseases were some of the most technologically advanced buildings of the first decades of the 20th century. Combining health, hygiene, cleanliness (and easy-to-cleanness), modernity, and machine-like precision of operation, they were a major influence on architecture and furniture design.

Paimio Sanatorium - Original

Alvar Aalto’s 1929 winning design submission for the Paimio Sanatorium claimed to be a ‘medical instrument,’ a building of healing, and so it was until the 1960s. Patient bedrooms were the focus. They generally held two patients, each with his or her own cupboard and ‘silent’ washbasin designed to avoid disturbing the other roommate. Lamps were placed out of the patients’ line of vision and ceilings were painted a relaxing grayish green to avoid glare. Each patients’ specially designed cupboard was fixed to the wall and off the floor to aid in cleaning. Bedroom wings also incorporated indoor and outdoor spaces. At the end of wing were outdoor sunning balconies where weak patients could be pulled out in their beds. Healthier patients could go and lie on the sun deck on the top floor of the building.

Patients typically stayed several years in the sanatorium, fostering a distinct community atmosphere among staff and patients. Various community facilities, chapel, staff housing, and even promenade routes through the surrounding forest landscape take this into account. The interiors hallways were of yellow linoleum, mimicking sun-filled spaces. Throughout, surfaces were durable and easily washable with no sharp edges, avoiding unnecessary shelves while walls and ceilings were shiny painted surfaces for easy maintenance. In the 1960s and with the advent of available treatments for TB, the sanatorium was renovated into a fully functional hospital.

And now it is our turn to imagine our new world post Covid-19!