Penny Hardy’s newly published photography collection offers a devastatingly urgent retrospective on the makeshift restaurant sheds of 2020, elevating the hasty assembly of two-by-fours and frosted plastic into the pantheon of the built environment.
Penny Hardy’s newly published monograph, Pandemic Architecture, offers a devastatingly urgent retrospective on the makeshift restaurant sheds of 2020, elevating the hasty municipal assembly of two-by-fours and frosted plastic into the pantheon of the built environment. The volume, which spans three hundred pages of stark monochromatic plates, forces the viewer to confront the profound spatial legacy of the streatery; an architectural form birthed not of high-minded urban planning, but of a desperate, localized panic to legally serve a warm branzino in the bicycle lane.
Just as Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project located the fractured soul of nineteenth-century Parisian modernity in its glass-canopied shopping corridors, and much in the way that Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition Architecture Without Architects challenged the hegemony of the credentialed designer, Hardy’s lens demands we afford the same rigorous aesthetic analysis to a tarp-covered box of freezing patrons; though one might equally observe the structural ethos of the 2001 cinematic text The Fast and the Furious, wherein the frantic assembly of aftermarket parts yields a fleeting, precarious triumph just inches from the roaring asphalt. The lay reader, naturally, will struggle to synthesize these competing vernaculars, but the tragedy of the uneducated eye has never been Hardy’s concern.
What the artist captures so masterfully is the structural devolution of the form, tracking the sheds’ inevitable slide from airy, open-sided health barricades into fully enclosed, unventilated saunas that functioned identically to the forbidden indoor dining rooms they ostensibly replaced. Her wide-angle compositions emphasize the rich, tactile patina of street grime coating the clear vinyl windows, drawing the eye toward the agonizing engineering compromises necessary to wedge a romantic anniversary dinner between a leaking fire hydrant and an idling Department of Sanitation truck.
We must understand these enclosures not as mere dining appendages, but as violent spatial interventions that fundamentally redefined the boundaries of civic endurance.
Only a fraction of these majestic, rat-adjacent pavilions remain standing today, having been systematically dismantled by a city government that lacks the foresight to preserve its most authentic ruins. Ultimately, Hardy’s masterwork ensures that while the physical structures may be lost to the landfill, history will permanently record our collective willingness to consume an eighteen-dollar Negroni while actively dodging the side mirror of a passing M15 bus.