Choreography as an underpinning system in architecture has always had the power of defining the relationship between the built environment and the inhabitant. It is more complex than just a formula between the humans and rules of a system, and not merely the arrangement of the spaces, or the planning of the circulation paths. It could be a poetically guided sequence of the spatial experiences in a delicate architectural composition.
Architectural choreography has been implicitly embedded within the inhabitants' interaction with the space, but the pandemic has surfaced the system by augmenting a completely new layer of interaction rules, shown as the markings left by the pandemic.
The movement of physical bodies in the public spaces rely on a number of factors including the stationary "safe" zones and the dynamic relation of one body to another. The ongoing interbody negotiations between the human bodies, and between the bodies of the new spatial system, is the choreography.
The principle of scale in a built environment is not only directly applied to the human bodies, but also to the bodies of health and the intrabodies. It injects a constructed, coordinated human scale onto the vitruvian human figure. The human bodies are no longer the only measurement we use when entering a space. Rather, the interbody distances become the additional metric to experience the space. The uncanniness of the interbody distances, therefore, reflects the fear and the risk.
Much like the situation is in ballroom dance, the individual becomes very conscious of the other partners within the system. As a result of social distancing rules, individuals in the public realm are more likely to be conscious of one another as they seek to self-maintain and enforce these rules. After the pandemic, gut reactions in public will be a habitual and constant checking of inter-distance between groups. The interventions that create a visual guide for this movement create a rigid system that sets the restrictions for intentional movement and familiar groups dance throughout the space in an effort to avoid strangers, property lines, and other belongings strewn across the ground.
COVID-19 now can be seen as the momentum that leads to a coherent pathway to a change in design principles, in the way architecture is experienced and measured and the way people interact in a public space. Several projects included in this section have designed various distancing metrics. Many, hoping to instill a unique and playful design language that may ease the public into a smoother, perhaps even enjoyable adjustment into a socially-distanced world.
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Examples of post-covid choreographed architectural designs from the book Architectural Prescriptions that my friends and I created:
