3835 Campus Drive
Architecture Building (145 ARC)
College Park, MD 20742
United States
This Colden Florance-Thomas Eichbaum Lecture is part of the SPRING 2025 Architecture Lecture + Event Series. This event is open to the public.
Space, Structures, and Design in a Post-Pandemic World
Lecture by Tom Fisher, DPACSA, Associate AIA,
University of Minnesota
Reception to follow
About the lecture
Pandemics have historically had enormous effects on cities and on the built environment and civil society more broadly. While most pandemics end within a year or two, their impacts go on for decades, affecting everything from how we interact and communicate and to how we design buildings and layout cities and infrastructure. This talk, based on the book Space, Structures, and Design in a Post-Pandemic World (Routledge, 2022), will look at the physical and societal effects of some major pandemics of the past and what we might anticipate in the future, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The presentation will also look at the unprecedented nature of the most recent pandemic, where, for the first time in human history, we learned that anyone with a digital device and an internet connection could have almost any good or service delivered to our doors. While that realization highlighted the inequities that people without such connections faced, it also highlighted the challenge facing the built environment going forward, with the question: What do we need to do in-person and in physical space, and what we can do better remotely, almost anywhere in the world?
About the speaker
Thomas Fisher is a Professor in the School of Architecture, Director of the Minnesota Design Center, and former Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Prior to those roles, he served as the Editorial Director of Progressive Architecture magazine. The recipient of the 2025 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, he has served on the AIA, NAAB, and ACSA boards and is the incoming Chancellor of the ACSA’s College of Distinguished Professors. He has written or co-authored 12 books, over 80 book chapters and introductions, and over 640 articles in major publications. His most recent book - Space, Structures and Design in a Post-Pandemic World – was published by Routledge in 2022. His scholarship has focused on ethical issues involving the built environment, including public health, equity, and sustainability, and his funded research has looked at how those issues pertain to the future of under-served communities in the U.S. as well to the needs of under-served nations around the world. Most recently, he has led a Global Climate Geodesign Challenge that has developed carbon-assessment tools to measure the impacts on the global climate of our land use and infrastructure decisions.