How COVID will affect Architecture - Work from Home

As always, Architects like to speculate what the built environment would be owing to the COVID pandemic that is happening right. Quite frankly, not much.

You see, it does not make sense to demolish the buildings for sure and it cost a lot of money to adjust the space. The most affordable way is to adjust our habits. We already know these habit may change :

a. working from home
b. schooling from home
c. less and short transit
d. lost of budget air travel
e. more home cooking
f. waste disposal minimization
g. tenancy habit change
h. foreign work hire

For this post I will just be writing about Working from Home.

As you already know, not all work can be done from home especially if you need to make things.

Working from home will mean staff will eventually become subcontractors. This would be a good thing and a bad one. This is because your subcontractor if treated as a regular staff then has access to all your business information which you shore up over the years. Your subcontractor is already an independent business entity then becomes an entity that can exploit your past portfolio and knowledge. The information you share with subcontractors would be very limited and on a "need to know basis". Looking it in a more positive way, perhaps by clustering your competitors, all of you in a collective manner become a hot bed of the business you are in. Imagine choosing which flea market to go to, you would rather choose one that has more vendors and large spectrum of goods to offer. This way your trip down and market competition will give you a better bargaining ability.

Subcontractor relationship means that you don't pay a salary, you pay when work is done. This means your manpower expenditure is more efficient. Your subcontractor will also have a discipline to finish their work to get paid unlike certain employee who would exploit the salary way.

Now that your staff are subcontractors, you also don't pay CPF. As you know, CPF has a negative effect on local staff as a big part of their money is taken away into a governmental reserve.  They feel a lost of empowerment but worse a lost of aspiration and ability. The employer is also seen as an agent to the cause of dis-empowering them thereby they see the employer in a negative light.

So the french invented debrouillard (it means resourceful entity), a subcontractor.

The catch is this, your subcontractor has to be a local. You can still have a subcontractor who is not located in Singapore doing your work just like FIVERR, but if the work done requires compliance to the local requirements that is something you need to manage. (eg. doing BIM drawings for submission to Singapore Authorities, and local construction know how).

TYPICAL HDB 4 ROOM APARTMENT WHAT COULD HAPPEN?

Work from Home which is already vastly happening in Singapore will enlarge the gig economy.

INEVITABLY AD HOC RETAIL SPACE WILL SPROUT IN THIS GIG ECONOMY

The lack of CPF contribution will then motivate the government to increase taxes in other areas namely Goods and Service Tax.

Still, what has this got to do with architecture ? It means office space use is either for collaborative work or for employees that you can't have accessible from their home. Location of work needs to be more strategic (eg. closer to where the bank is, close to where the fabricators are, close to complimentary communities).

INTERIOR LAYOUT WILL CHANGE TO SUIT THE REQUIRMENTS

We are likely to have office district becoming more residential and residential district having more work place. Industrial places will also demand to be more residential in nature force the industrial work to be more community and environmentally friendly.

The architecture looks the same for now. Perhaps the function in the existing block might bring work closer to home.

JUST MAYBE, IF WE WANTED LESS VEHICULAR TRANSIT WHILE THE POPULATION DEMOGRAPHICS CHANGES, THE HOUSING BLOCK COULD BECOME MORE DUAL USE

There is also a whole host of issues of the home environment that may change over time which will be discussed in another article.

To summarize:

EMPLOYEES BECOME SUBCONTRACTORS

CLUSTERING ONESELF WITH COMPLIMENTARY
COMMUNITY IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT

A MORE MOTIVATED LOCAL WORKFORCE

CPF IS A THING OF THE PAST

GST WILL INCREASE

BUILDINGS WILL BECOME MORE MIXED USE

BUILDING WITH LESS UNITS REDUCES YOUR EXPOSURE TO INFECTION

Read about a follow up article on where to find this urban condition in Geylang here !