Less space is inversely proportional to density and even more inversely proportional to pandemics, plagues, and disasters. In such drastic events, space implodes. Life as it is intensified to a greater degree -new bodily muscles ache, new thoughts erupt and sometimes ache the mind, new desires and intentions get formulated, new routines are produced, more time is spent with water, with the floor, with groceries, sometimes even a deer may fall through your roof, new restraints are self-imposed, new homes remain incomplete, incomes get restrained, newborns need excessive precautions. The oscillation between desire and restraint is heightened by this implosion of space -for less is no longer desired; less has become our condition.
We are all pushed into the ascetic form of life. However, in this ascetic life we are reduced to monads but without the possibility of a shared life -we are only left with a shared condition.
We have all become archipelagos in a perilous ocean -we cannot really hope to alter the ocean, can we? Yet at the same time, every creature in the ocean is an archipelago, piercing through the ‘atmosphere’ of the ocean.
Less is more intense for some than for some others. In any case, everything has imploded into something less than whatever everything was beforein this moment -and that less-ness has produced an excessive implosion of everything. However, in that act of implosion, more space is produced for other things -both within and without.
More space is produced for the concretizing online communications, learning and trade. More space for visual and literal content, for other surface species to untangle from human activities, for atmosphere to be bluer, for frauds to capitalize on the crisis, for the medical discipline to move into a new stage and to enter a new symbiosis with better understand ‘viral’ infections, for the industry of medicine to get the ‘real’ taste of the ‘future’ and also the grow into a new symbiosis oriented around increasing occurrences of ‘pandemics’; More space for rivers to swell, smaller cities and countryside to thrive as the new centers of hope and desire, for all professions and practices to reorient and reorganize themselves; more space for ghosts of the pasts to haunt us, ghosts of personal and social angst and othering to resurface in various forms and squeeze the already ‘minimal’ space that we have pushed ourselves inside -including that imaginary and constructed ‘mental’ space.
Our finitude is never as severely revealed as in the unexpected experience of the squeezing of space (crisis).
room for architecture 