Writers Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley saw this coming. They knew a global pandemic was entirely plausible, even likely. But the couple couldn’t have guessed that they would be wrapping up a book on quarantine architecture in the midst of one.

The writers approach the topic of quarantine from different perspectives. Manaugh is the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City and the long-running BLDGBLOG. (He is also a former Dwell editor.) Twilley contributes to the New Yorker and cohosts the podcast Gastropod. She is currently working on The Birth of Cool, a book about refrigeration.

Their project began in 2009, when they visited a former quarantine facility near Sydney that had been turned into a luxury hotel. It sparked a fascination with how disease outbreaks have shaped our architecture, cities, and societies. It also prompted years of research, an exhibition, and now the book, due out next spring from the MCD Books division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When what they thought was a “probably someday” scenario turned into almost everyone’s reality, the title, of course, had to change; it went from The Coming Quarantine to Until Proven Safe.

We spoke with Manaugh and Twilley about the new book, quarantines throughout history, and how the current pandemic will change our homes.

As you were researching the book, did the idea that much of the country— and the world—would be under lockdown anytime soon cross your minds?

Nicola Twilley: Honestly, until very recently, I think, most American experts would have said, “Oh, no, you wouldn’t be able to do this kind of shutdown.”

Geoff Manaugh: That’s part of what’s so interesting about this book when we started it. We spoke with plenty of experts who were convinced that we were never going to have to face a mass quarantine situation ever again. People told us this was a medieval tool and that there wouldn’t be this situation.

How are modern quarantine practices similar to medieval facilities?

GM: When we think of these gruesome emerging diseases, if we don’t have a vaccine or we don’t have a cure, we’re effectively medically helpless. And so the only thing we have left is architecture. So we can build buildings in a way that increases separation or delays contact between two people or two things. Historic quarantine structures have lots of divisions and small rooms, almost like a prison. Today we can do the same with different air-handling techniques.

NT: Double walls become negative air pressure rooms.

How have epidemics and the practice of quarantine changed societies?

NT: Quarantine hinges on suspicion. You’re dangerous until proven safe. And uncertainty has always been subject to bias. It’s something that we traced through to the present day. The idea that quarantine technologies are a way of controlling and documenting movement with things like health passports goes back to the Black Death.

Often those technologies hardened into normal practices in which governments managed the movement of their populations. You see particular border controls hardening into actual borders. And I think that we’re going to see some of this tracking based on cell phones hardened into regular practice. If that’s not done right, and with a care for privacy and civil liberties, it could end up being a huge problem.

How do you think the current pandemic will change our homes?

GM: I think the two most likely scenarios for the way Covid-19 will affect our homes are material and technological. In terms of technology, smart homes will very likely become more like medical diagnostic environments, able to read our temperatures and even pick up our heartbeats and breathing patterns. This might then enable them to suggest either a quarantine or home social distancing as a healthy option.

If Google sees that you’ve been searching for anti-fever medication while Google’s Nest smart home devices see that you have a temperature, then perhaps a digital front door lock will implement its own quarantine measure, preventing you from leaving the home for a few days. It’s a dystopian but unfortunately realistic scenario.

Meanwhile, new home interiors will continue to trend toward easily cleaned surfaces and even antimicrobial materials in countertops, shelves, wall paints, and so on, so that a stray sneeze or a whole family stumbling back home from Target doesn’t spread germs throughout the house.

Of course, this is just a continuation of modernism itself, dating back to early architectural experiments to help fight tuberculosis with white surfaces and easily cleaned common spaces, but I think we’re only a generation away from our private homes being imperceptibly merged with health care infrastructure. To a very real extent, every new home will be an assisted-living facility.

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