Towards the New Normal: A Times Square Pavilion That Builds Social Distance Out of Negative Space

Most pandemic-era design answered distance with paint on the floor and plexiglass between bodies. Towards the New Normal takes a harder and more interesting route: it asks what happens if separation is carved into the architecture itself. The proposal is a speculative pavilion built from curved surfaces, openings, voids and pockets. Here, emptiness is not what remains after the walls go up. It is the primary material, and the space between things carries as much weight as the things themselves.

Designed by Jannatun Nayeem Nowshin, Naorin Tabassum Chowdhury, asif elahirocky and Prianka Das, the project was a Shortlisted entry in Public Architecture '20. It is framed around Times Square and the COVID-19 pandemic, and it poses a question that has outlived its moment: how can public space stay vital while people renegotiate proximity, boundaries and what it means to gather?

A Pavilion Without a Room

The defining move is a refusal. The designers do not enclose a conventional interior or offer a simple shelter. They instead set out a sequence of twisting surfaces that blur the line between inside and outside. Visitors do not arrive and settle into a fixed space. They move around, beneath, between and through the form, and each shift in position reframes the surrounding city.

This puts the pavilion closer to urban design than to object-making. A city's public realm is never defined by a single building. It emerges from streets, edges, setbacks and the paths people take. The pavilion compresses that logic into one structure: there is no dominant room, only a set of conditions whose meaning changes depending on where a person stands, pauses or looks.

Mapping the Shift From Crowd to Distance

The boards trace a clear conceptual arc. Pre-COVID social norms are associated with density, spontaneous gathering and unrestricted movement. Post-COVID norms are shaped by distancing and a heightened awareness of personal space. The diagrams end at a crossroads that points toward a new normal, and the designers translate this progression into a continuous, evolving form.

The strength of the narrative is that it does not stop at the technical requirement. The team treats distancing as a psychological and spatial condition, a society becoming newly conscious of the gaps between people, rather than a rule to be enforced. That reading gives the geometry a purpose beyond novelty: the form exists to make distance perceptible.

Curves That Separate Bodies but Keep Sightlines Open

In practice, the curved surfaces divide movement without cutting off visual contact. Openings let light and views pass through, large voids provide breathing room, and multiple pockets let people occupy the pavilion without collecting in one dense central crowd. The result is separation that does not read as isolation; people remain aware of each other across the form even as their paths are pulled apart.

This is where the project goes furthest. Floor markings and barriers communicate distance as prohibition. These surfaces communicate it as choreography. The architecture steers bodies, spaces them out and gives them places to linger, and it does so through shape rather than signage.

Negative Space at the Scale of the City

Seen against the city, the pavilion's ambition becomes clear. It stages a series of abstract visual and spatial experiences that sharpen attention to the voids between solids, the same voids that shape a plaza or a street. Enclosure and openness exist together, and the twisting geometry turns an ordinary walk into a running reframing of the urban surroundings.

Why This Project Matters

Many pandemic proposals have dated quickly because they treated the crisis as a list of constraints. Towards the New Normal holds up better because it treats the crisis as a lens. Its argument, that distance can be designed as a spatial quality rather than imposed as a barrier, applies to any public space that has to balance gathering with comfort, density with breathing room.

For young designers, the lesson is in the method. The team began with an abstract concept, negative space, linked it to a real social shift, and allowed that link to generate form. The pavilion's curves, voids and pockets are not decoration but the idea made physical, and that discipline is what makes a speculative entry worth returning to.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Jannatun Nayeem Nowshin, Naorin Tabassum Chowdhury, asif elahirocky, Prianka Das

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Project credits: Towards the New Normal by Jannatun Nayeem Nowshin, Naorin Tabassum Chowdhury, asif elahirocky, Prianka Das Public Architecture '20 (uni.xyz).