We have rightly become concerned, if not obsessed, with matters of public health. We have become familiar with statistics, as we listened to the 1pm COVID data and understood that it was not just the daily score that we needed to understand but the trend – that the shape of data curves might reveal more than simple numbers in measuring our success in stemming the bug’s advance. We have learned to compare numbers of infected against those cured and are wise to the critical importance of the number of tests undertaken in assessing a country’s infection rate.

More recently, we have begun to focus on other figures, those that measure the injury to our economy and the wellbeing of those whose livelihoods have been obliterated in the drastic measures undertaken to cleanse us of the virus. The announcements of escalating unemployment within hitherto booming industries like air transport have a brute, singular quality and an uncomfortable upward sloping trajectory in comparison with the flattened COVID curve of late May. We are acutely aware that we are in a time of extraordinary flux, where the accepted wisdoms of economic orthodoxy are being set aside as governments broadcast recovery funds in a scale not seen since the post-World War II Marshall Plan. 

If the battle of the bug has been tracked in graphs, infection, death and recovery rates, the consequences are spatial, as we learn to circumvent those coming our way on the pavement, distance ourselves from fellow drinkers and get used to inflatable dummies at a restaurant table. It has been a while since spatial determinism held such sway and though the manipulations of pavements to facilitate giving one’s fellow citizens a wide berth have the unassailable authority of the Health Ministry’s Ashley Bloomfield, this is surely our moment.

Who better to consider the complex reconfiguring of public buildings in the light of social distancing, the necessary adjustments to the domestic hearth if working from home is not to lead to familial discord and, perhaps, the reuse of office blocks abandoned in the rush to the suburbs by legions of laptop-toting workers?

It is not unexpected that it is a pandemic that has offered a way for our craft to do something valued by more than a handful of architectural cognoscenti. Though the celebration of composition, materials, textures and spatial manipulation seems to have enjoyed greater prominence in the last few decades, judging by the mass of column inches awarded them in the architectural press, there have been times when the relationship between health, wellbeing and the built form has had greater prominence.

Our own state houses were born of a central government’s desire to replace unsanitary and unhealthy housing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with dry, robustly built houses flooded with sunlight to burn away pestilence and disease. Though it is easily overlooked in the welter of standards and codes that bedevil our daily labours, they, too, are founded on the belief that it is not only the rapacious and witless who need to be coerced into making half-pie decent buildings, a point of some gravitas after a singular awful failure like the Grenfell tower block fire, or a systemic failure such as our own leaky building crisis.

The regulatory organisation of the building industry is a complex hydra, an uncountable number of committees discussing the performance of almost every aspect of contemporary life, and certainly of every stick of wood, slither of steel, glass or aluminium that comprise the architect’s palette. The codification of building activity is symptomatic of contemporary society, which has little truck with the renegade, the empiricist, the unconventional or the unfettered, yet those very monocular constraints occlude the consideration of issues that might illuminate our current condition.

The relationship between public health and architecture is deeply embedded, yet rarely given voice, in our profession. I don’t think this is true of the medical profession, where those researching the causes of disease and ill-health have no qualms in identifying many issues as the consequence of poor planning controls and worse building practices.

The awful deaths of children run over while playing on a driveway linking street and planning-mandated rear garages or from poorly constructed, insulated and maintained housing seems absurd in a country with surplus enough to be awash in consumer goods. For all the numerical evidence of the shortcomings of our housing stock, we, as both architects and a society, are slow in response. I am certain that, in the exercise of our craft, the preservation of our clients’ health and wellbeing is an unspoken a priori. Yet, as a collective presence, we architects are largely silent.  

If the immediate threats to fellow citizens are ignored by our profession, such indolence pales into insignificance when confronted by a threat of a wildly greater magnitude. If the fast arriving disruptions of a warming planet are not enough to shake our collective presence into action, what hope for the child born into cold, damp housing?

I don’t think this reflects well on our profession. As individual practitioners, or gathered together in practice, we are invariably focussed on keeping the doors open; maintaining payroll, meeting rent and the expectations of clients and, perhaps, contributing to the architectural discourse. For some, that daily challenge is just the beginning, as hours are stolen from practice and family to contribute to the collective wisdom of the profession. These are hours spent writing contracts, practice notes and the web of documents that order our activities. We are all the beneficiaries of those individuals’ commitment to our collective wealth, be it better conditions of contract, a more considered city plan or a building saved from the wrecker’s ball.

These are valuable endeavours at the best of times and we rightly honour them, but these are not the best of times. The COVID pandemic presents an opportunity, indeed, a necessity, to reconsider the most pressing of issues that confront us. Rod Oram, writing in Newsroom, has challenged the government not to “squander this chance for transformation” and urged it not to build back to ‘normal’ but to leverage the glimpse we have had of cleaner air, lesser vehicular traffic and changed working arrangements and to use the investment in rebuilding to make an economy “higher value and more sustainable, while creating new jobs for people displaced from sectors such as tourism…”

We have a choice as a profession. Shall we put our heads down and do our best to aid and abet our clients’ reconfigurations of space to better accommodate the needs of their post-COVID worlds or shall we seize the day and use this time of upheaval to speak out and be agents of change? Diane Brand writing in the same edition of Newsroom discusses Wright’s Broadacre City as a prototypical alternative to some of the shortcomings of post-COVID cities. In this, Brand reopens the debate occasioned by Auckland’s Unitary Plan in which the resilience of increased urban density was contrasted with that of a dispersed conurbation.

It seems a desperately short time ago that Auckland’s architectural community volunteered thousands of hours authoring submissions and poring over drafts of the city’s combined planning documents to ensure the new supercity’s development controls were as good as they could be. Yet, it seems now that some of the assumptions of increased urban density upon which much of the resultant plan rests may need to be reviewed and, this time, with a national, if not trans-national, scope.

I hope that our profession will have poked its head above the ramparts of self-protection within which we are so often seen to operate and spoken out by the time you read this. I hope that in doing so we are making a robust contribution to the transformation of the economy that Oram has called for. The committees and acronyms of Wellington can wait a while – now is the hour for architects to have a robust and clear voice in the remaking of our country.