Q-City

Resilient Medical Response | 서울도시건축비엔날레

Client: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism Program: Medical Response System to Pandemic Location: New York City, U.S.A Team: COL.C, Soyoung Kim, Sungjin Kang, Seongeun Jeong, Youngyoon Kim, Mingyu Lee, Myeongju Ryu, Donghyuk Kang, JaeEun Lee, Hyunsoo Jang Year: 2020

The City is safe as long as the infected are properly quarantined and cared.

As the coronavirus, covid-19, spread around the world, and became a pandemic with devastating effects on national health-care systems, architects found themselves at a crossroads. Reaching 16 million cases and 630K deaths in 188 countries as of July 2020, covid-19 is highly contagious with no sight of a vaccine to this date. As the Black Plague in the 14th century in Europe had transformed the economical and social cityscape, so has covid-19. As the built environment no longer feels safe, the architectural profession needs to rethink how to live during a pandemic era and how cities can be resilient to deal with an outbreak of an unprecedented virus like covid-19.

A Q-pod, designed to be a place for quarantine for the infected individual, is an autonomous vehicle which can travel around the city on existing infrastructure.

When a person feels sick, he can call the Q-pod, which then picks him up without any human contact. After the pick-up, the Q-pod travels to a designated testing center temporarily located at existing hospitals within the city. Like a parasite, a temporary steel structure attached to existing buildings house the pods with the infected individuals.

Our project Q-City proposes an urban and architectural infrastructure, which can help control an outbreak in a city. Implementing the latest development of an autonomous vehicle technology, the self-driving Quarantine Pods (Q-Pod) travel around the city to pick up patients and transport them to health care facilities for treatments. In order to contain the pandemic, some guidelines should be established: 1_prompt quarantine of cases to avoid further spread; 2_extensive testing for early detection; 3_tracking and isolation for the infected and close contacts; 4_constant check-up and medical care for patients.