Well, who’d a thought it would come this way, some goddam little bug that no one can see, sneaking in and laying waste the party? I thought the end would be apocalyptic, the skies falling, the inexorable flooding of low lying lands, a slow incremental gridlock and descent into torpor. That, for a season or two, we might smugly congratulate ourselves growing grapes in Southland before the land dries and cracks there too. I thought, too, there would be some celestial sign of the heavens falling, not some lightning fast vector hiding in a hug or a handshake, dismantling globalisation at the speed of a trans-Atlantic flight.

I am writing some weeks before you read this and cannot know how the COVID-19 virus will have played out in the interim. I hope that we have ‘flattened the curve’ by handwashing, self-exile and social distancing, allowing our medical facilities time to deal with the expected numbers of patients. The ferocity and spread of the virus’s infection have focussed our attention on matters of public health that few of us have experienced previously.

All media are currently saturated with the grim news of infection rates and deaths, the hospitals and medical staff battening down for an expected onslaught. Closer to home, many of us are spending our days locked in front of the flickering screen, meeting each day for a quiz and a laugh before reworking spreadsheets, trying to find a way to survive a shrinking horizon.

In a brief moment of respite, I sat on the verandah, the sun coming up over the city, in a moment of release from the tsunami of emails, texts and Zoomins. It took a while to appreciate that the calm I felt had a physical rather than psychological cause; not time out from the mounting pressure of a battered business but the absence of the city’s roar, the sound of a neighbour’s guitar down in the valley and tui singing lead vocals. It was a gentle moment to reflect on the shrunk world we now inhabit, a world in which we all, save those heroic souls providing for the necessities of life, are encouraged to hole up, to find the basics of shelter; a bubble to hold out the unseen enemy.

I have just heard of the death of Michael Sorkin from this damned virus and read a beautiful tribute written by Michael Murphy of Mass Design Group. Those around me are sick of me banging on about Sorkin’s Local Code, about its abandonment of the mathematical codification of human endeavour, instead to offer a blueprint for a world made to free and feed the human spirit. His death is a body blow, a loss to the relentless erosion of our culture by the silent assassin, scouring away those whom we most need.

Have you read Local Code? Or any one of his great commentaries? Go do it now, find that obituary, read it and cry for a hole rent in our world, not just in architecture but in a world that sorely needs his acute observations and propositions of a better way to do things.

In crises, the first response is to restore, undo and remake, to get back to normal as if it didn’t happen. At present, we are in enforced enclosure and ordered to sit tight for a while, then, perhaps, we can get back to ‘normal’, though what that might mean after this ravaging of population, economy and society we can only guess at.

Will we do that now, sit tight and hope for normal? Have you done that in the five or six weeks since I shut up the studio? Did you want to? Isn’t the birdsong in the valley sweeter than a motorway hum and the air cleaner without the city’s effluvia?

Well, what might we do? Are we to go back into the fray, toadying around for a slice of the action again, showing our metaphorical leg to attract passers-by in the market place, tugging on the coat-tails of our customers? I am not sure I can do that after feeling so damned useless when presented with a calamitous event to which I had next to no useful skills to offer.

It’s been a rude shock that our stock in trade, the bricks and mortar realisation of our lofty dreams, is of no value when the unseen hand of disease strikes. We had a hint of just how useless we are thought to be a decade ago, when we snookered ourselves after the Christchurch earthquake. We might have made a useful contribution, perhaps the nobility of honest graft, slithering under a dislodged home in Bexley to assess its nether regions and determine its fit for sheltering a shocked family.

Some did this fine work patching, propping and repairing but, as a discipline, we were side-lined by the brute power of central government and its phalanx of ad hoc quangos and our own bigger aspirations of city-making that occluded the common sense and practical support we might have offered. The moment was lost and we were left to scramble for commissions, yet again appearing more concerned with esoteric matters of little importance to the public than the restoration of life’s basic necessities.

We cannot do the same again. Though the repairs required are not those of stacking brick upon brick or squaring up the dislodged, they are perhaps more fundamental to our aspirations. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, I have long felt that architects are, at heart, altruistic and have signed up to the apprenticeship with high hopes of improving the human lot. If one’s concern extends to no more than the correct proportion of a window, surely that implies a concern with betterment, even if it be only that of a minor element in a project down a long right-of-way, off a forgotten street? If even this modest aspiration is beyond your consideration, then God help you.

At the time of writing, we are reduced to the most basic of habitations, in our bubbles, receiving a compressed and digitised facsimile of the world into which we gaze. Though the bubble analogy conjures up Reyner Banham’s bearded hippies sitting in a ‘well-tempered environment’, I imagine the nation’s bubbles run the full gamut, from the abject misery of people jammed together in discomfort and fear to those who have the luxury of sunshine and birdsong in the valley below.

I hope that a smaller horizon may provoke us to reflection and contemplation of the way of things. There are some for whom such reflection will include intimations of their own mortality but perhaps those with a more robust disposition might reflect on how we will order our profession ‘when things return to normal’. Perhaps, as a starter, I might point you to Sorkin’s Two hundred fifty things an architect should know. It may not lay out an agenda for remaking the world, as his Local Code does, but it will at least keep you amused and is a useful reminder that at the heart of our profession lies the full panoply of human experience.