Well….designing a building to be good for pandemics also means making it be good for respiratory viruses in general.

You do, in fact, want to have 100 year water systems that would work in a cholera epidemic. Designing buildings for good airflow will probably not go out of style either.

The reason old NYC buildings have radiators that are so hot, you need to open a window to let in the winter air, is because they were purposely designed that way. Because of the 1918 flu pandemic.[0]

Also, there are a bunch of things that we consider normal that were born of crisis: [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/war-famine-pestilence...

I'll wait for the medical profession to tell me the cure for a major ailment is a windowless, tightly enclosed space with limited circulation.

I view it as exactly the other way around: if you're building barracks in any normal year, sure, don't care about pandemics.

But for any long-lived building, thinking how it will work in various disaster scenarios is crucial, as your design will affect the life or death of thousands living there, even if it's "just" for one-two years. And given everything we know about the recurrence of pandemics, it's virtually certain that at least another one will come around within 100 years.