A Spatial Awakening
What is design's role in times of crisis? Communities and individuals come together to aid each other, push for change, and create new spaces, objects, and services. Epidemics—both in the past and in the present—have triggered the discovery of new ways to treat and prevent disease while exposing systemic gaps and failures.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum announces "Design & Healing; Creative Responses to Epidemics," December 10, 2021-August 14, 2022
Michael Murphy, Co-Founder of the not-for-profit firm MASS Design, made it onto 60 Minutes last night. Leslie Stahl was enthralled, and who can blame her? This young, competent, forward thinking, altruistic architect is an inspiration. When Covid hit—not long after his firm completed assignments in Haiti and Rwanda—he offered the expertise and services of his company to address the structural violence of our most vulnerable built spaces such as hospitals, housing projects, tightly sealed office buildings, and nursing homes, among so many others in the United States, a so-called developed and enlightened country where only the affluent live well. Infrastructure issues? You aren't kidding. Look around at home, close to home, on your way to and from home. Do our shelters heal or hurt? Make a list of your observations. Then try to make some changes, or ask for changes, or vote for changes.
Within minutes of hearing Murphy speak, I became fixated on air flow and the inadequate ventilation in every indoor space I'd been in for the past week. Murphy calls this a "spatial awakening." I'd gone to vote in the Student Union on the SUNY New Paltz campus, for example, a state university with limited endowment compared to the private universities, and found myself on line in a small, completely enclosed room, no ventilation ducts in sight. And though I was masked and boostered, I was still uncomfortable; this was not a safe space. When one of the poll workers rushed around sanitizing surfaces with a rag and spray, and then offered me a pair of gloves, I wanted to shout, "AIRBORNE!" or, alternatively, "ARE YOU INSANE?"
I remembered my doctor mother constantly opening windows in the winter months and in the summer, too, in air conditioned rooms where air does not circulate well. In medical school, she'd learned about the rampant transmission of both TB and influenza in the hospital wards where wounded WW I soldiers were recovering from their wounds. My mother never forgot that lesson. Windows remained open in our apartment even in the coldest weather. I wore layers and sat close to the steamy radiators running on gallons and gallons of fossil fuel. But I digress. So, here's a question: Why did it take such a long time for the experts to figure out that Covid was airborne? And why didn't the word "ventilation" come up in the conversation right away? Or did it?
Take a look at MASS Design's website, click the photo above. And then take a trip to the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York after December 10 for a special exhibition on creative responses to epidemics. Design has a role in a time of crisis, and so do we, each and every one of us.