In the four years since The Right Angle Journal last looked at this topic (Accommodation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 2020), the world has changed. In 2020, many of us were quarantined by the COVID pandemic, stuck in our homes and trying to make them not just homes, but everything: workplace, recreational space, educational space, and with the help of online conferencing, social space. We were all trying hard to reach some sort of “accommodation” with our accommodations.

In retrospect, we were much more efficient with our architectural spaces. Instead of reserving an expensive downtown office that was empty 16 hours a day, we camped out in our homes for the whole day, letting our dining room table double as an office desk plus eating surface—sometimes both, at once. Our significant others sometimes got a little testy, but our pets loved it.

Those days seem a distant memory, but many of the COVID lifestyle changes have lingered. A lot of us still work at home, spend far too much time meeting with friends two-dimensionally on a digital screen, and we are either making up for lost time by attending every possible concert, conference and social event (and savoring the experience), or we are perpetuating the calm isolation of our sequestered lives (and savoring that experience, instead).

At the very least, we have been forced to reevaluate what “home” means to us.