The Wall Street Journal looks at what buildings will look like after the Covid crisis:
The New York-based company found that requests for home offices rose from 0.5% of messages pre-pandemic to 3% once the pandemic hit. Private outdoor space requests jumped by 20%, while in-unit laundry (a rarity in New York City) went up 17%. Interest in gyms plummeted. Requests fell by 10% for in-building gyms and by 50% for gyms nearby.
Among the most common design changes made by developers is adding outdoor space or increasing access to those spaces. In a rental project in Quincy, Mass., now in the permit phase, developer LBC Boston is adding balconies to about a quarter of the units, said Margarita Kvacheva, senior vice president. “We are strategically placing the balconies on the south side, because those get the daylight and that’s where people can go out and get vitamin D,” she said.
A non-solution to a non-problem — but it will make some people a great deal of money, for sure.
This reminds of those exciting predictions from half a century ago when we would all have own our personal helicopters. That and a moon base by the year 2000.
I think whatever exciting building plans there are, most people will still prefer to live in one of those old-fashioned, human-scale buildings.
The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that almost all predictions will be wrong.
Gerry Anderson predicted the moon would be blasted out of orbit before 2000.
You have done the impossible, spooks. Congratulations. I now long for the comparative sanity and benignness of TSA gropery and NSA surveillance.
You can’t help but wonder what Ted thinks about all this.
I, for one, welcome my new atomized life, where all the conveniences of modernity are within arms reach and I need not every socialize.
Regardless of one’s opinion on the virus, it’s sickening to see the glee with which the rootless cosmopolitans lick their lips at this.