IN THE NEW YORKER: “HOW THE CORONOVIRUS WILL RESHAPE ARCHITECTURE”

". . . Holl’s buildings are intensely responsive to their settings; they run on solar and geothermal power, and their windows track the path of the sun. At the right time of day, in winter, rays bounce off the snow and cast white light on the ceiling of Little Tesseract. His work suggests one possible path forward for architecture, away from the orthodoxy of modernism and toward a more colorful, holistic sustainability. . .

In a brief pandemic-era manifesto that he circulated among colleagues and friends, Holl wrote that architecture “should embrace our codependence.” Buildings can make us more aware of the ways in which we are globally connected—the pathways that spread the coronavirus but can also help us fight it, collectively. The earth’s health is inextricable from humanity’s; connections between the two can be cultivated in the design of a large-scale apartment building—like Holl’s Linked Hybrid, in Beijing, which interweaves public and private space—just as much as in that of a cabin. . ."

Illustration by Emma Roulette
Kyle Chayka writes about how Architecture will be reshaped by Coronavirus, and asks what kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now? Full text in the New Yorker, here.