When circles are scales: notes on the new “small”

The current pandemic has not, as many commentators have pointed out, forced a whole new social order on the world.

- Lucia Allais

Rather, it has exacerbated existing inequities, accelerated some changes while slowing down others, and made manifest many latent, or hidden, aspects of contemporary life. For architectural observers, one of the more puzzling of these phenomena has been the sudden reappearance of the circle, as a spatial ordering device, in the built environment.

As soon as staying two metres (or six feet) apart became a global norm for avoiding transmission of the virus, images of cities dotted with graphic circles began to proliferate. In Brooklyn (USA), where I live, the white perimeters that were painted on a patch of synthetic grass made the Domino Park instantly famous, as if Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 The Powers of Ten had been annotated with a circular stamp. Everywhere, architects found themselves designing with six-foot diameters as they were hired to retrofit the plans of offices, institutions and public spaces. Prosthetic circles have also appeared: in Rome one man wore a cardboard disk around his waist to the market of Testaccio; in Germany street vendors sold hats affixed with cruciform foam spokes; and in the USA “bumper tables” edged by rubber tubes were designed for drunk patrons in open-air bars.