Video Presentations: Post-Pandemic Connectivity: Reinventing Tall Buildings to Create Community

Earle Arney
CEO
Arney Fender Katsalidis, London

Cities exist fundamentally for connectivity and exchange. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to see cities and tall buildings through different lenses. Now more than ever, it is important for buildings to provide a scaffold for physical experience, while also placing our safety and wellness, and an elevated care for the planet, at the forefront. But how to adapt existing cities, such as London, to provide great frameworks and spaces that curate and encourage human connectivity in a post-pandemic world? London has reinvented itself over many centuries; can the high-rise also be reimagined to elevate human experience and become a model for the future??

Using London’s 100 Bishopsgate as a case study through a short film and drone footage, parallels between delivering a building after the catastrophic recession in 2008 will be drawn to today’s present crisis, and the rebuilding to take place after. Brookfield’s Adelaide East (BAE) will also be used as a case study in order to investigate how that building was transformed into a destination of collaboration and community, and extract principles to apply to the post-crisis workplace and wider city of London.