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COMMENT
Seeing a smart future beyond the pandemic
Neil McSporran of NSG Group discusses how ‘smart’ antimicrobial glass for tackling infections beyond the pandemic, and how smarter building materials will help designers to create safer environments
urbing the transmission of diseases will be a priority for those who design and manage buildings for many years to come. Covid-19 has exposed many countries to the human and economic cost that harmful new infections are capable of. And society has responded by throwing all of its ingenuity behind defeating this foe, with innovation stretching beyond the race for a vaccine.
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The next crucial step will be ‘pandemic proofing’ many points in our everyday lives. We’ve already made great ground, with technology facilitating an unprecedented shift in digital transformation – laying the digital infrastructure required to keep the world moving without physical interaction when needed. But physical infrastructure and the built environment has an important role to play too. Architects, developers and the supply chain can each be influential in driving effective change.
Architecture ultimately shapes how we interact with materials and one another, and inadvertently, it can affect the risk of infections being passed on. Managing this risk stems from simple retrofits specifying innovative building materials, to the proliferation of post-Covid urban design and development.
Smarter materials ‘Pandemic-proof’ cities are already taking shape in China, where entire neighbourhoods are being built with the aim of helping residents to live comfortably under lockdown and confinement.
Large balconies that give residents more outdoor space, and which are also accessible for deliveries via drones, form part of the plans of Barcelona-based Guallart Architects behind the Xiong’an New Area – a ‘Covid-proof’ city. The practice’s founder Vicente
ADF FEBRUARY 2021
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