The Big Disaggregation: Has COVID-19 Forever Changed the Nature of Architecture?
Kim Tanzer, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
Tom Fisher, Professor, University of Minnesota
The COVID-19 pandemic has not just revealed several structural flaws in American society’s systems and safety net. It has also accelerated the disaggregation of business sectors that were formerly centralized economically, politically, and spatially, which may dramatically reshape the environments in which we live and work.
Consider the recent news that some of the country’s meat packing plants have become COVID hot spots. Centralized production facilities force large groups of people to work in close quarters for efficiency, causing low paid but now “essential” workers to put themselves at increased physical risk every time they go to work. The food system’s dependence on large processing plants, responsible for so much of the country’s meat product, has meant that their failures disproportionately affect the country’s food supply (for meat eaters). Because these factories draw their raw “product” from large catchment areas, the nation’s supply chain has also been disrupted, leading to the unnecessary slaughter of animals. And because the large meat-processing plants supply other centralized entities such as restaurant chains, the latter have precipitously lost their major buyers.
The meat-packing industry is one of many shaped by the premises of the Industrial Revolution, which promoted repetitive, assembly line actions and single purpose buildings in the name of efficiency, as increasingly large production facilities achieved economies of scale — reducing the capital and labor costs per unit — to drive costs down and profits up. The factory model, applied also to schools, hospitals, and prisons, led to the development of specialized building types, described by Anthony Vidler¹ and critiqued by Michel Foucault.²
Over time, the factory model has led many industry sectors to consolidate: banks, airlines, telecommunication companies, retailers, prisons, and hospitals, have merged, reducing variety and local control, while centralizing wealth and influence. A robust balance of competition and local collaboration has been replaced by a global “winner takes all” outcome, resulting in what is often described as a new Gilded Age.
The architectural profession has widely accommodated this model and complied with its demands, creating ever larger and more efficient facilities for ever fewer and more powerful organizations and institutions. Bigness, as Rem Koolhaas calls it³, has been the dominant characteristic of late capitalism, driving the growth and merger of design firms to match the reach and requirements of their clients. Yet, as we have seen during the pandemic, those same clients and their industries have faced some of the greatest effects as supply chains have been disrupted and customers have disappeared.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has propelled a counter-narrative of disaggregation. Major record companies that once controlled which artists would become stars and how profits would be distributed, have fallen on hard times as technologies changed, independent recording grew in quality, and online distribution platforms flourished. Where consumers a generation ago bought records or CDs, they now stream or purchase individual songs. The music industry, formerly concentrated in a few companies and built on experts’ decisions about what music to bundle and promote, has transformed into thousands of vibrant, new creative expressions. It has disaggregated.
The same has occurred in the media world, with major television networks replaced by a plethora of focused cable channels. More recently, even the system of media delivery, via hard-wired cable services, has been challenged by streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, among many others. The relationship of Uber to the taxi industry, or AirBnB to the hotel industry, are other examples. In these cases, transformative new technologies emerged as consumers’ frustrations with limited choices grew, creating large-scale economic disruptions that provoked significant shifts in global business practices.
This disaggregation has also begun to disrupt design practice. Rather than have a stable of well-off clients able to pay designers’ fees, practitioners increasingly have clients with less money and smaller projects. This has raised the possibility, now pushed into high gear by the pandemic, that traditional fee-based practice as it has existed for centuries may disaggregate into myriad, small, socially entrepreneurial firms that pursue system change and paradigm shifts as much as design projects.
Disaggregation has modified spatial practices in subtle ways as well. While we now have “hotels” in every neighborhood, and “recording studios” in every den, the widespread disaggregation of spatial centers has received relatively little recognition in the design fields and been described merely as new “live/work” opportunities. In fact, our homes now contain microcosms of the zoning categories of many cities, with residential, office, business, light industrial, agricultural, and educational activities all in one. This is but one dramatic form of decentralization currently underway.
Which raises the question of what kinds of buildings we will need in an increasingly disaggregated future. Has the era of specialized building types designed to accommodate single-uses come to an end? Have we, instead, moved toward a digitally enabled version of pre-modern buildings in which most activities — living, working, making, and learning — largely happened in or around homes and homesteads? What form might such multi-purpose buildings take? And what restrictions on their use and location might or might not apply, as every building or group of buildings becomes its own mixed-use district? What building types might disappear as people increasingly buy, sell, and deliver goods and services directly with each other? How might the many, vast, single-purpose buildings abandoned during the transition be repurposed? And what other types might start to appear almost everywhere as buildings increasingly acquire a much more diverse set of functions, becoming in some sense, cities unto themselves?
We may not know the answers to such questions for some time. But COVID-19 has brought them to the fore as hundreds of millions of people around the world have become home workers, learners, and makers in a matter of weeks and as specialized buildings of almost every type now stand nearly empty, with few people wanting — or maybe even needing — to go to them again. “A virus can change the fate of the world,” observes the Turkish writer Mehmet Murat IIdan, and in the case of COVID-19, it already has.
1. Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1987
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, New York, 1995.
3. Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, OMA S,M,L, XL. Monacelli Press, New York, 1995.
