Learning from COVID-19: The Role of Architecture in the Experience of Urban Landscapes

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns and mobility restrictions, has created an atmosphere of global reflection towards contemporary urban landscapes. Architecture is an essential component in them and determines, to a large extent, how building users perceive, interpret, and value the surrounding environment. From an experiential and phenomenological perspective, and taking into account the situations lived in 2020, the paper invites to examine the existing relations between architecture and urban landscape at three levels: first, the experience of the environment from the architectural space —namely, the home—; second, the experience of the “interior urban landscape” at street level; and finally, the experience of the “exterior urban landscape” from the city fringe or vantage points that provide vast prospects. The article advocates a holistic understanding of landscapes from the architectural and planning practice and proposes this integrating issue as the guiding axis of new urban policies.