Architecture innovation in a health emergency
Pandemic Minute: Another way to learn from from the Public Health Emergency
I like to think of the economy in COVID-19 like a shallow bowl of water. The pandemic sort of grabbed this bowl and sloshed the water around. Demand sloshed away from some things, such as in-person sporting events, and spilled over to others, like intensive care hospital beds. This led to shortages in medical goods which were hard to stretch quickly. The Public Health Emergency (PHE) allowed us to stretch medical providers across geography, but it also opened opportunities for innovation in architecture.
Architecture was the recipient of great creativity in the pandemic. At home, we created offices, schoolrooms, or gyms, out of guest rooms, kitchens, and closets. In the medical sector, the PHE loosened regulations to reimagine many of the spaces where demand had sloshed away, such as stadiums and hotels. Prominent examples were convention centers turned into hospitals – the 2,900-bed emergency hospital in the New York Javits Center or the 3,000-bed hospital in the New Orleans Convention Center. Here in Winston-Salem, we turned local hotels into university quarantine centers and the basketball arena into a vaccination clinic.
If you look around, this creative adaptive reuse of buildings is an inspiring part of ordinary economic activity. Bike on your favorite “Rails-to-Trails” greenway or, my personal ironic favorite, wander the light-filled loft offices of the Wake Forest Med School Division of Public Health Sciences in downtown Winston-Salem – housed in former tobacco warehouses!