Pandemic Objects is the book form of a V&A editorial project that treated everyday things — toilet paper, convention centres, parks — as primary documents of the Covid-19 crisis, tracing how use and meaning were upended almost overnight.
About This Book
Initiated by curator Brendan Cormier in April 2020 as a blog on the Victoria and Albert Museum website, Pandemic Objects set out to collect and interpret the charged new meanings that ordinary objects acquired during the pandemic. Four years later, that material has been edited and shaped — in collaboration between the V&A and AA Publications — into a book conceived as an object in its own right: a tangible archive of an extraordinary period. The result sits at the intersection of material culture studies, design history, and social memory, asking what the things we reached for, hoarded, or repurposed reveal about collective behaviour under crisis.
Key Features
- 360 pages of curated essays, case studies, and editorial documentation drawn from the original V&A blog project
- Edited by Brendan Cormier
- Published by Architectural Association Publications, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How toilet paper became a legible symbol of public panic — and what that reveals about scarcity, trust, and social behaviour
- The rapid repurposing of convention centres as field hospitals, and what this adaptive reuse says about architecture's relationship to emergency
- The contested politics of public green space during lockdown, when parks became sites of both refuge and surveillance
- How a digital editorial project can itself become an act of collection — and how that process translates into physical, archival form
About the Author
Brendan Cormier is a curator who initiated the Pandemic Objects project through the Victoria and Albert Museum blog in early April 2020 as a way to document and interpret the shifting meanings of everyday objects during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 360
- Dimensions: 150 x 215 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781919624518
- Publisher: Architectural Association Publications
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Designers, architects, and cultural theorists interested in material culture, design history, and how built and domestic environments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.