abandonment and memory

 

The grim title of this post is juxtaposed with a picture of a house that occupies a special place in the pantheon of American architecture. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the 3rd Harrison Otis house is in need of some repairs. A fitting analogy for the state of the country it occupies.

The autumn of the pandemic is shaping up strangely. The president is recovering from the virus and is defiant. His supporters are fervent and enthused. Many of the most vulnerable in the population have died. Winter will bring a new loneliness. 

an idiot darkly

The Covid virus continues to support mathematical rules, which is bad news for a nation that denies objectivity and logic. As of this post, the death toll in the U.S. exceeds 122,00. A grim prediction that I made several months ago was that nursing home populations would be decimated. That prediction has been borne out---and may eventually turn out to be wrong by a factor of 2.

The way forward, in the context of current leadership, continues to be unpredictable. Florida is in trouble, along with a significant number of other Southern states. The Northeast continues the reopening experiment. It will be a long summer.

Qualifications

"Re-opening" continues and it will be hard to predict how this goes. This blog could be wrong about continued supply chain disruptions. Meatpacking operations might decide on an acceptable level of deaths and sickness. Bacon is dwindling in the local supermarket, but toilet paper is making a comeback.

Official White House line is now "They were doomed anyway, because they were sick, because they were black, because it was destiny....."

Death rate implies 150,000 gone by August.

we should have died hereafter

For all intents and purposes, the month of May will mark the end of a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. A political calculus has been made by the Trump administration that an elevated death toll that persists through the rest of the year is economically and morally acceptable. There will be a concentrated push for a return to "business as normal."

This will not work as planned for the following reasons:

-Varying degrees of social distancing will persist among the general population regardless of what business leaders and politicians hope for. Economic disruption for leisure service businesses will continue to be severe.
-Strain on healthcare services will be considerable and elective procedures and preventive medical services will be curtailed for several months.
-Disruptions in supply chains--particularly food production--will be constant because of concentrated outbreaks in plants, worker uprisings, and legal action.
-The rest of the world won't support the U.S.

even the four horseman are practicing social distancing

Some Americans are in the process of discovering that you cannot eat money.

As of this blog post, official U.S. Covid-19 deaths have passed Vietnam.

Meat shortages will prevail across the country for the next several months.

We can hope that this relatively useless piece of media will persist in some server farm for a few more years.

the road behind

The Covid-19 pandemic will hopefully cause a re-assessment of what is truly important. Towers of Ilium will refer to this, with optimism, as the Maslow Revolution. The modern state depends on the following critical activities and systems, roughly in order of importance:

-Industrial food production systems
-Transportation networks---primarily for food
-Fuel systems, including the electric grid
-Shelter (more on this later)
-Trash removal and other sanitation infrastructure
-Electronic communication networks
-Public education systems*
-Emergency Healthcare

Under normal circumstances, what percentage of the economy do all of those add up to?

With respect to the current recession and the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, what economic sectors are going to be well and truly fucked for the next several months or years? Here's a short list:

-Personal air travel--particularly for leisure, and also for business
-Dine-in Restaurants
-Hotels and other temporary lodgings---and nearly all support systems
-Elective healthcare---even if it's very important for survival
-Discretionary energy use associated with all of the above
-Architecture

and through darkness

The death peak for Massachusetts is predicted over the next two weeks. Stress on hospitals will build over the next few days and persist for 3 to 5 weeks.

How will architecture be different after this?