In 1931, in the midst of the polio epidemic, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier finished his famous Villa Savoye, on the outskirts of Paris. When you walk into the building, the first thing you see is a stand-alone ceramic sink. Todd Heiser has been thinking about that sink a lot lately.
“It encouraged people to have good hygiene,” he says. “Moving forward from this pandemic, I think we’re really going to see a refocus on zoning and what happens when we come into a space.”
Heiser is a co–managing director of the Chicago office of Gensler, a global architecture firm that has created a data-driven tool called ReRun to help businesses reimagine their offices to accommodate new social distancing guidelines based on their individual space, staff size, and advice from the CDC and the WHO.