Weekly Review No. 20 | The Power of Spaces - Part 2

“How do spaces shape the human experience? In what ways do rooms, homes, and buildings give us meaning and purpose?”[1] This review has been broken down into several parts, which I’ll be posting over the coming weeks.

This podcast is an insightful listen, particularly for an architect or lover of spaces. From the spaces of a home, to hospitals, theatres and stages, sculptural structures, places of worship, and the space a country occupies. To “explore the power of the spaces we make and inhabit.”[2] And what reveals to us, the meaning of a space.

Part 2 of The Power of Spaces continues to follow the words of architect, Michael Murphy, who featured in Part 1 of this review.

A hospital is an essential institution, providing health care; nursing care, medical, and surgical treatment. | (BroStudio, n.d.)

The Power of Spaces by TED Radio Hour

Review

“Where are the architects?”[3]

Since the pandemic hit last year, our thinking of public spaces has been reshaped. Hospitals, an essential space, became a vital emergency treatment area, as well as a source of worry and concern for medical staff and patients who had to share the same space as people were being rushed in for treatment, and as vaccines and medical equipment had to simultaneously be rushed in.

The way we think of shared spaces may never be the same, as spaces now hold the risk of spreading a virus and contamination. We are also rethinking what the design of healthcare institutions mean to us, as places of healing and hope.

Attending a lecture, architect Michael Murphy was surprised to hear Dr. Paul Farmer, a leading health activist, talking about architecture. “Buildings are making people sicker”,[4] said [Farmer]. “And for the poorest in the world this is causing epidemic-level problems. In a hospital in South Africa, patients who came in with a broken leg, [who had to] wait in [an] unventilated hallway, walked out with a multidrug-resistant strand of tuberculosis. Simple designs for infection control had not been thought [of], and people had died because of it.”[5]

“Where are the architects?, Paul said.”[6]

“If hospitals are making people sicker, where are the architects and designers to help us build and design hospitals that allow us to heal?”[7] Together with Murphy, we realise that the architectural and design professions contribute to a basic human right. “Without being able to live in a place that protects you”,[8] or that offers you protection, a person’s life expectancy becomes restricted and is in danger of being cut short.

Joining Dr. Farmer and his team in Rwanda, Murphy worked together with their head engineer. “Airborne diseases are mitigated by moving more air through the room, [and as a solution, Murphy, Bruce and the latter’s team] came up with a design whose primary goal was to reduce [the] transmission of infections. To create all the waiting areas in the exterior, to think about airflow, basically to remove all hallways. To increase the height of the wards, so that [there was] both sun and air movement as WHO [the World Health Organisation] prescribed, but also have [enough] space for patients to walk around.”[9]

Murphy goes on to continue, that their “precedents were TB sanatoriums, designed in the [1920s and 1930s, and] medical facilities designed in the 19th century, [as of] Florence Nightingale and Alvar Aalto, [who were] incredible designers who were thinking about airflow before the advent of HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] mechanical ventilation. Of how a building is sited and oriented to capture, maintain, and control as much air as possible in order to make people healthier.”[10]

Thinking about airflow is a major factor with COVID-19 now, more than ever, whether it be schools, hospitals, affordable housing, senior homes, and airflow’s connection to architecture. In “realising that a built environment could really threaten us, or in thinking that hospitals are designed to think about the mitigation of disease: The apartment building you live in is not designed that way, the restaurant you go to is not designed to manage disease transfer, and suddenly [we are now in a] moment where all buildings could threaten our health.”[11] It has all come down to the airflow a built space allows for or blocks off. The ways “built spaces have the potential” to protect us, has to now be taken much more seriously.

The right for space, is consequently, the right to breathe.

Murphy sees “buildings as breathing machines, as lungs. If we acknowledge that buildings allow us to breathe freely, then it [does] become a question of rights. That we have the basic human right to breathe. So that housing is designed better, and so that prisons are not designed the way they are. Under the rubric of the right to clean air, institutional buildings [require rethinking]; for the right to breathe freely. Although, it is certainly challenging and difficult [to change institutional architecture], and ask for accountability of the built world around us. That buildings could, not in the literal sense, collapse around us. And that the right for space, is consequently, the right to breathe.

The reason I value this podcast is that it educates everyone. As a lay person, I can rethink my feelings of breathing in a public space. What is my municipality doing to improve my experience of civic architecture? Are there management systems in place at my closest supermarket, park, and pharmacy? So far, several of the decisions we have seen have been unstable, and at the same time, blatantly clear in their efficacy.

Pop in later this week for Part 3 of The Power of Spaces where I’ll be continuing this review. Part 3 delves into the building of musical spaces; stages and theatres which bring together bands and their audience all under one roof or skyline. In the words of musician David Byrne, the review starts off with his days performing at CBGB’s, New York City.

---

Reference

[1] TED Radio Hour. 2020. “The Power Of Spaces.” National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/23/894580784/the-power-of-spaces.

[2] to [11] "Ibid." [1]

Image

BroStudio. n.d. “Sign symbol health logo hospital red cross vector image.” VectorStock. https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/sign-symbol-health-logo-hospital-red-cross-vector-35679588.