Improbable Furniture appealed to me for its promiscuous take on furniture as the subject, and in some cases what determined the form, of the works on view. As Delehanty writes, furniture “can slip from the mundane to the metaphysical,” from objects that represent the world we inhabit to objects that through their scale, mode of production, and relationship to the body have become a never-ending means of experimentation, especially so in the case of the chair. Architects have throughout history also been drawn to furniture as a practical way to further probe human behavior and question social norms. Take as examples Gerrit Rietveld’s De Stijl chairs and Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand’s chaise longues and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair from the early part of the twentieth century, or Charles and Ray Eames’ plywood versions from the 1940s. These now iconic designs grapple with everything from issues of form, production, lifestyle, an economy of means, and even hygiene. Chairs in particular continue to prove a never-ending source of inspiration, fascination, and fetish that’s hard to shake even in this saturated landscape. It seems there remains much to say.

When, for example, American architect Frank Gehry launched in the 1970s his now well-known line of chairs, ottomans, and chaise longues constructed from laminated cardboard, a utilitarian packing material found across the US, he called attention to his original intent, to create a more affordable, yet refined range. Once described as “paper furniture for penny pinchers” by the New York Times, given their lower price point (a lounge chair and ottoman were reported to be about $80 and under $30, respectively, when they launched in 1972) and availability at department stores such as Bloomingdales in New York and Marshall Field’s in Chicago, they are now coveted by collectors and in museum collections worldwide. More recently, Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye released his Washington series of chairs in 2013 as companions to the building he designed for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. The chair designs excavated references from both Africa and America, including the trade practices of the first African American slaves freed in the Southern states of America, who went on to create the visual iconography of towns such as Charleston and Louisiana. Adjaye’s team retraced the patterns of the architectural detailing of bronze balustrades and screens for homes, employing parametric modeling tools to generate a new articulation of these forms that shifts in density across both the seat and back of the chairs, to accommodate the body.

Since its founding in 2014, MANIERA Gallery has continued to provide opportunities for inventive minds to navigate between the realms of architecture, design, and art. Working to give space for ideas that expand current discourse, they recently invited Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of New York-based architecture studio MOS, to develop some objects for the gallery, with an open brief. The chair, or seating, again became a focus for their explorations. As Sample notes, “We’re interested in making things, not buying things. If we need a seat, we make it. If we need a table, we make it.” Furniture design has long been a part of MOS’s practice. For their design for MANIERA, they determined to investigate American approaches to furniture making. They focused on what they call “a brutal economy of scale,” no doubt in response to the contemporary moment, with the need to conserve resources, be mindful of waste, and treat invention as critical. Turning to Shaker furniture as inspiration, they have designed a number of pieces, including Baskets No. 1–3, multipurpose stools/baskets/seats, sturdy enough to sit on, stand on, and to hold objects.

The Shakers were nineteenth-century America’s largest and most well-known communal utopian society, boasting thousands of Brothers and Sisters in the early 1800s. Today only a handful remain, and yet their legacy is long. Their work ethic, high-quality output, and objects made to last are concerns that continue to have currency today. MOS’s design was also motivated by the exceptional craftsmanship of Shaker objects, especially the baskets that were a staple, made with an open hexagonal weave and sturdy enough to be used to harvest fruit or drain cheese curds. With its utility and stripped-down yet elegant form, Baskets No. 1–3 exemplify the Shaker code of practice to make something useful and necessary, but also beautiful, with any decorative elements part of the design and supporting the function of the piece. The bolts that punctuate them are both functional and are the only decoration, other than color, on the piece. Available in a range of sizes and scales, the baskets/stools can seat one or two people side by side. The only thing missing is two handles, which would have governed a Shaker basket, making it easier for a pair of workers to hoist a heavy load. Rather than wood, MOS’s baskets are made from a latticework of metal strips outsourced from fabricators who send the finished parts to MOS to do the final assembly. “We have the last say,” affirms Sample. Like the Shakers who were also fastidious about quality, they live with their designs, including “failures and mistakes,” which Meredith says they learn from. With an enthusiasm for a hands-on approach that was shared by the Shaker brethren, they test out their work in their studio and home to ensure that it is fit for its purpose.

MOS’s interest in weaving techniques was born a number of years ago when Sample made what she calls tape blankets. Living in the Netherlands, and without the time and access to a loom to weave in the traditional way, she acquired rolls of double-stick colored tape. She would peel off the tape and create blankets by sticking different pieces of tape together in a crisscross formation. “It became like a sort of weaving project,” she recalls. “It was an immediate, precise form of making something, unlike architecture. I liked that.” Sample’s approach speaks to the studio’s current fascination with working with what’s available, whether materials or manufacturing processes.

Object No. 11 (Peg Bench) and Object No. 12 (Peg Chair), also for MANIERA, are other cases in point. They underscore MOS’s satisfaction in finding off the rack components that they can repurpose for new uses. This time they appropriated thick wooden broomstick handles, cutting them down to size for the back and legs to create whimsical, yet practical designs whose material origins are a part of their appeal. Other pieces include Object No. 16 (Peg Rail), a reinterpreted Shaker design, typically hung on the wall and used for hanging up coats, keys, scarves, and other quotidian stuff, as a way to organize their communal homes. Updated by MOS, their wooden design can be screwed together in different arrangements to meet individual and collective needs. Another common object found in Shaker homes is the wood stove, which MOS has rethought with their Wood Stove No.1, made from simple component parts, such as a fire box fitted to a table, for outdoor gatherings. “One of the main values of the Shakers was a precise sense of utility, every object had a specific function” says Sample, “The objects we make typically have multiple uses – legs can be back rests, stoves can be tables, baskets can be stools, or something we haven’t imagined.”

The Objects of One Part, No. 3, like their baskets, are multi-functional objects. The pieces are made from identical perforated metal panels bolted together. The rounded form, reminiscent of a child’s toy, allows many different configurations, such as a stool, chair, table, or bench. Finally, the sectional lounge chair Object No. 17 (Circular Bench) is also made from metal and looks as if it was inspired by pew seating in a Meeting House. Erected from corrugated aluminum panels, it can be aggregated to form a circle or semicircle, making it fitting for congregating indoors or out. What MOS’s collection of works has in common is the rigor with which they approach their designs based on an economy of construction, an attitude that finds an affinity with the work of the late Italian designer Enzo Mari. MOS, like Mari, put emphasis on the value of objects that have become subsumed into our daily lives, their origins forgotten or taken for granted.

Just as artists shift perspectives and open our imaginations, design too has the potential to reinterpret the familiar in ways that not only offer new typologies of objects that prompt us to question and even modify behavior, but also open space in our minds for new thinking about the physical and metaphysical relationships we have with the built environment. As MOS has shown, rather than improbable furniture, their intuitive designs are resolutely probable.

When we started, the world around us seemed to be about progress through technology, data, complexity, animation, fabrication, performance, simulation, mass customization, a newfound control over architecture. Anything other than that seemed regressive. That word neopomo sounded so weird. N-E-O-P-O-M-O. They spelled it out for us. We stared blankly in return, trying to understand if they were right. Maybe they were. Some people want history to repeat itself. We don’t. Although, sometimes it repeats itself regardless. Quote Un-Quote. Cute chubby objects. Axonometrics. Color. Aggregation. Typology. Square Windows. Maybe we thought it was good or beautiful, and not too expensive to build. Maybe we could do it with our own software, open source. Maybe we didn’t think enough. We liked little to no expression. We liked simple drawings and forms and shapes. We liked boredom. It seemed far more exciting than the supposedly exciting stuff. We liked blankness. We liked readymades. We liked vaguely familiar things. We liked economic construction. Pitched roofs don’t mean anything particular to us. They’re cheap. They work. We liked the overlooked beauty of the world around us. We didn’t like the work being about us. We disliked design’s classism and luxury. We liked Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs. We liked non-representation representation. We didn’t like technological expressionism. Too much technology. Technology can only be corporate nowadays. It’s all unseen. The corporate takeover of everything. It requires money, a lot of money. We are afraid of money. We don’t like what money does to the world. We didn’t believe the hyperbolic claims of progress, although we want progress, we want things to get better. It doesn’t seem better. We overheard a professor of public health say, when I hear architects talking about some new thing, or new material, I just think of the future health problems. If you’re thoughtful, nothing is as easy as it seems. We didn’t believe in a single institutional linear narrative for the field. We liked taking things apart. We liked putting things together. We liked buildings. We liked things in the world. We hoped our work offered a way of being in the world to others. We still do. Have you noticed how everything is related to something else. Every object has an infinite web of connections. They’re impossible to control. We don’t want to control them. Buildings just quietly sit there as the world changes around and within them. Perhaps it’s all about personal taste, perhaps it’s just two extremes playing out simultaneously – the incredibly personal and the vast array of references. We wanted a non-style style. We didn’t want fancy or expensive. We wanted to avoid something. We numbered. We repeated. We repeated with slight differences. We wanted to be personal without being expressionist. We weren’t of one mind.

When assembling work for the exhibition, we thought about our work as a sort of spam, spam architecture. As the artist Hito Steyerl writes in “Digital Debris: Spam and Scam,” “Contemporary electronic spam tries to extract an improbable spark of value from an inattentive crowd by means of inundation. But to become spam – that is, to fully identify with its unrealized promise – means to spark an improbable element of commonality between different forms of existence, to become a public thing, a cheerful incarnation of data-based wreckage.” While architecture is obviously different from spam, spam architecture is repetitive, inexpensive, and without signature. It circulates, relying on representation. And once you start looking for it, it is everywhere. The general mode of disciplinary communication as well as protest, theory, commentary, and self-promotion appear similar, as spam. Everything arrives, notifying us of its arrival. Everything tries to hold our attention. And then everything is quickly replaced by the next thing, and the next, ad infinitum. A lot of architectural representations circulating today feel like spam. MOS makes a lot of stuff, all the time, many times without clients, on many platforms, through various media. We ourselves are constantly reaching out, in the hope of finding a common ground within our fragmented attention. We produce spam architecture. And perhaps paradoxically, as much as we spam, architecture’s physicality, collaboration, and use (both functional and cultural) make it unlike spam. Although architecture repeats and circulates, it doesn’t need to constantly notify the world about what it is doing. It usually does this by simply sitting there quietly, sometimes on an office table, at even the smallest scale.

We look at these immense retail vacancies as akin to the loft spaces left as Lower Manhattan deindustrialized in the late 1950s and early ’60s. During this time, light manufacturing such as plastic warehouses, paper recycling facilities, and garment factories, moved from SoHo out of the city or went out of business entirely.1 Manufacturing changed. Vacant lofts transformed into inexpensive live-work spaces. Still zoned for industrial use, these lost apartments were illegal at first. But community groups formed quickly and fought successfully for policy changes. Sometimes solutions to problems are already here, around us, if we rethink our assumptions, if we imagine other possibilities, and if we organize.

This research documents a small portion of the vacant spaces in Manhattan: those that have been reported. We worked with students from Princeton University’s School of Architecture along with our architecture office, MOS, to document and draw the available data. New York City does not keep track of business or residential vacancies, instead relying on private companies to document and provide information. In their 2019 report on retail vacancy between 2007–2017, the City Comptroller contracted a private company, LiveXYZ, to document vacancies in the city. The information is opaque; their sources and methodologies aren’t clear. Larger, corporate real estate holders often report their vacancies as losses, but many others do not. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to understand the extent of vacant spaces in New York. Most data is under-reported. Harlem, where we live, is one neighborhood that is under reported. Our observations do not align with the reported data; we live our daily lives alongside entire blocks of vacant storefronts that are missing from data.

The following document is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as case studies that imagine some possibilities for transforming current vacant spaces into housing or social services. There is also a section on Covid 19, which infiltrated New York during our research. As a whole, this document is not meant to provide specific solutions. The data is incomplete. Case studies are limited. We are not policy experts or data analysts or urban planners. Instead, it is simply meant to show something we have taken for granted, vacant spaces, taking part in a collective process of imagining a better city.

Notes
1 See Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

As such, the point of this book, An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture, is to collect various architects’ representations of life into a single document. We began this project with no strong methodology other than to cast a wide net, scouring both library and Internet to collect drawings by architects we knew to produce significant buildings and drawings or those we simply thought of at the time. Then we deleted the architecture and context of these representations to focus specifically on the humans depicted by various architects or architecture offices. If we found nothing, we noted as much. While compiling all of these images, we were surprised to find that many architects simply do not represent people. Equally surprising, we found that architects who arguably have or claim nothing in common sometimes share an attitude toward scale figures (or lack thereof). Perhaps the absence of such figures is evidence of desires for the so-called posthuman; perhaps including people simply would have obscured representation of the architecture; or perhaps the architects just didn’t get to it. Throughout the Encyclopedia one can find architects who represent the human as inchoate scribbles, draw them by hand, exaggerate features, create a style, emphasize the geometric or mechanical aspects of bodies … And architects who reference other scale figures, collage themselves as scale figures, make political statements, want to portray a mood or attitude, want to make the human as uninteresting as possible, show only backsides or only silhouettes, are eclectic, and so on. One can also see the relationship to media and technology through how architects represent people: in gaussy, transparent Photoshop silhouettes; models collaged from lifestyle glossies and on-the-street fashion blogs; soft charcoal smudge-sketches; watercolors; full-color graphic illustrations; etcetera. We tried to include broad-ranging examples; but, when skimming the Encyclopedia, please accept our apologies for those offices and buildings we have neglected to include. We did what we could to be as inclusive as possible within the relatively narrow medium of architectural publications. After all, the point was never to be complete – an impossibility nowadays – but rather to be as broad as could be managed within our given resources. And we tried. We collected over 1,000 figures produced by over 250 architects, and (with a few exceptions) we present every figure at the same scale. Scale figures are a fundamental part of any professional’s arsenal; we architects have all amassed folders upon folders on our servers filled with these fictional people. And although scale figures are only of those things that most of us take for granted in day-to-day practice, they are no doubt a disciplinary problem, a fact which became increasingly evident as we assembled the Encyclopedia. It might seem naively absurd, but as we stared at the countless figures in this book it became hard to see them as anything but a kind of global citizenry. They are Architecture’s refugees. They travel the world, popping up from time to time on reviews, and in student work. And the more we looked at them, the more we thought about both the architecture offices that created them and the wonderfully diverse world we all live in – a world which seems ever more intolerant of difference and increasingly inhuman.

We are grateful to both Corraini Edizioni and the Canadian Centre for Architecture for their encouragement, particularly Giovanna Borasi, without whom this book would have never happened. She was a constant source of advice, tirelessly challenging and encouraging us. To Mirko Zardini, a large child in the best possible way, for the humor and laser-precise insight of his edits. And to Albert Ferré and Jayne Kelley, whose shared efforts were indispensable.

None of this would have been possible without the hard work of our architecture office, especially Paul Ruppert and John Yurchyk, who have been critical throughout this long process and late nights. Many of the figures and drawings were only possible with the tireless support of Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Fancheng Fei, Mark Kamish, and Zosia Nowakowska, The finishing touches of graphic design by Studio Lin brought the book into focus, Throughout the years, Alex Lin has become our deeply valued conspirator and confidante.

For us, no project ever ends. Each time we look at it anew, thinking about alternatives. What if we did this? Or that? This would be better. That looks like a mistake… After a while, it becomes impossible to look at anything as a child would; looking at this book now, we see only decisions. In such moments, we would place drafts of the book in front of two clients, our children Alice and James, who like all good clients would offer incredible insight and suggestions, and just enough disinterest to keep us motivated and moving forward. They are our constant reminder to keep the wonder of childhood present in both our work and life, and the ultimate reason for this book.

The selection process revealed various categories and themes for which the projects could be classified. Some projects rethink the fundamentals of low-income housing’s spatial organization (corridors, courtyards, roofs), some rework labor and construction, and some recast structure or material. The forms of these works are generally economical but, unlike early-modernist projects at the Weissenhof Estate, their attitude is not one of a radical break. Today’s public will not protest flat (or pitched) roofs, and today’s architects will not claim to usher in a new style. If anything, these works relate to the vast, varied world of vernacular construction – to the majority of the built world that Architecture glosses over. Specifically, each house here responds to one of Mexico’s nine climatic conditions. At first glance, many of these works may not appear radically different from existing low-income housing. But upon closer study, the ingenuity of the selected projects becomes apparent as they become part of a larger whole and retain their individual identities.

The problem of low-income housing demands the thoughtful attention and expertise of architects like those included here. For, given the limited resources of such works, each decision gains greater significance and has greater impact on the design and on the life of its inhabitants.

Housing is only a short walk away. Located along a different track. It is something else. A different performance. A place for the athletes and guests. A series of parallel paths. Lines. Structural spans. Short cuts. Pedestrian streets. Lines punctuated by stair cores. Interrupted Lines. A mat building made of a series of rooms. Cellular. Individual Bedrooms and Bathrooms. Shifting. Shared laundry. Shared kitchens. Shared dining. Shared gardens. Always a little bit off. Random. Disjointed. Moving along the lines. Little parks. A courtyard. A meeting spot. Another courtyard. It fills the site like a carbonated liquid. Bubbles. It’s its own world. A collective communal world. More open than it seems. More connected than usual, with spaces to be alone.

This polemic, framed through resolution, suggests that high-resolution architecture operates as a form of distraction, a special effect, while low-resolution architecture engenders attention by being slightly off, crude, or abject. The loss of resolution directs us to think about architecture’s construction, its techniques, references, typologies, and materiality, while high-resolution glosses over the architectural object. Low-resolution includes glitches, gaps, the handmade, and abstraction, while high-resolution is an expression of complex technological expertise, where the ultimate desire of technology is to disappear into its environment. Low-resolution forces us to pay attention, to focus, to construct a reading of the architecture. As technology moves toward a seemingly unmediated, individualized expressionism, a world of constant distraction, “44 Houses” suggests a counterpoint: the (renewed) need to slow down, to study, to compare… to take apart architecture and look for specificities, to construct narratives, to perform analysis, to be attentive to our attention… and to take pleasure in the work of reading, of making comparisons, of constructing architectural values, rather than simply seeing, desiring, using, or being amused and distracted.

Each house is given a number and removed from its context, treated like an untethered object or image. All 44 houses are re-represented in the same medium (CAD lines plotted on 100-pound white Bristol paper), at the same scale (1/4”=1’0”), which allows comparison of the houses without comparing representations.

Some obvious curatorial decisions were made regarding the exhibition and this catalog. Each house is given a number – from 1 (6a) to 44 (WORKac) – and is removed from its context, which is arguably a source of debate. For better or worse, each house is treated like an untethered object or image, which is how we mostly experience architecture anyway. (Architecture is only produced through its circulation.) All 44 projects are re-represented in the same medium (CAD lines plotted on 100-pound, white Bristol paper), at the same scales (1/4”=1’0” [models] and 1/16”=1’0” [plans]) and with the same orientation (north). This was done so that we might compare houses without comparing representations. Additionally, each architecture office was asked to provide a material sample, product, or building element to represent its house at full scale. The exhibition oscillates between model as image (the primary view of the exhibition through the exterior window, the photo-studio environment and lighting), image as model (CAD working drawings printed on paper then folded into models), and model as model (material samples and building products). It was staged as if everything was floating, on display.

The Dequindre Cut, a former railway line, is a sunken, somewhat autonomous path connecting the Detroit River walkway and Eastern Market. It indiscriminately splits and connects the city, where urban areas are no longer distinct from non-urban spaces. Situated above and around the Cut, our proposal uses a low-rise, high-density development – produced through the loose arrangement of empty types, frameworks, and open spaces – to connect existing conditions into a new urban fabric. At ground level, a neighborhood of common spaces connects community with Cut and existing street system. A series of spiral ramps punctuate the structure, connecting all levels with pedestrian and vehicular traffic. A perennial garden and plaza extends across the roof, creating a network of spaces for recreation and social gathering. Thin buildings maximize the surface area of their facades, and in turn maximize daylighting. The structure and circulation are based upon the economical models of highway and parking structures. The collection of buildings, of emptied typologies, serve as open frameworks for something else, by someone else to happen; they are owned collectively, they do not front streets, and they work outside conventional notions of property and lots. The thresholds between interior and exterior – roofs, ramps, porches, and overhangs – provide informal areas for neighbors to commune. Every exterior space is a public space; every interior space is a public space. Staged intimacy is our social mode. Within each framework, shared spaces and circulation consolidate utilities like Wi-Fi, composting, and recycling. District heating and cooling, centralized parcel receiving/shipping stations, and small-scale commerce connect together the community at a neighborhood scale within the larger fabric.

This city, this situation, is one in which the relationships between things exceed individual spaces and buildings. Urban stuff drifts and interacts without concern for zoning, street, or the parcel logic of cities. Apartments, Record Stores, Electric Car Showrooms, Bike Shops, Community Centers, Florists, Vegan Doughnut Shops, Police Stations, Convenience Stores, Nondescript Offices, Coworking Spaces, Toy Stores, Candle Makers, Gastropubs, Green Dry Cleaners, Local History Museums, Maker Spaces, Public Pools, Greenhouse Nurseries, Cupcakeries, Stationery Stores, Lingerie Boutiques, Food Co-ops, Hardware Stores, Comedy Clubs, Ice Rinks, Religious Congregations, Microbreweries, Psychics, Montessori Schools, Post Offices, Shuffleboard Courts, Locksmiths, Spice Shops, Veterinarians, Governmental Administration Offices, Pharmacies, Laundromats, Groceries, Farmers’ Markets, Libraries, Bakeries, Conference Centers, Bikram Yoga Studios, Tattoo Parlors, Used Bookstores, Tuxedo Rentals, Hydroponic Farms, Cat Cafés, Karaoke Lounges, Gluten-Free Confectioneries, Artists’ Studios, Sewage Treatment Facilities, Computer Repair Shops, Pet Boutiques, Culinary Laboratories, Health Clinics, Beer Gardens, Law Offices, Dentists, Steakhouses, Pawn Shops, Beauty Salons, Funeral Homes, Breweries, Greasy Spoons, 24-Hour Diners, Department Stores, Opticians, Delis, Gymnasiums, Consignment Shops, Accountants, Whiskey Bars, Fashion Showrooms, Notaries, Burger Joints, Jewelers, Florists, Chess Clubs, Secret Societies, Ice Rinks, Pizzerias, Design Collectives, Day Care Centers, Nightclubs, Fitness Centers, Antique Stores, Test Kitchens, Butchers, Start-Ups, Concert Venues, Good Art Galleries, Bad Art Galleries, Hotels, Wine Stores, Zumba Studios, Taquerias, Fruit Stands, Shoe Stores, Dim Sum Halls, Tailors, Casinos, Insurers, Nail Salons, Pop-Ups, Travel Agencies, Banks, Soup Kitchens, Barber Shops, Juice Bars, Martial Arts Academies, Firehouses, Thrift Shops, Ice Cream Parlors, and of possible relationships. – produce a density of possible relationships.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Andrew Frame, Mark Acciari, Philip Denny, Jason Bond, Steve Gertner, Mathew Staudt, Sarah Wagner, Fauzia Evanindya, Fancheng Fei, Griffin Ofiesh, Michael Abel, Paul Ruppert, Yitao Wang, Ayesha Ghosh, Jacob Comerci, Michaela Friedberg, Taylor Cornelson, Laura Salazar
Book Design: Studio Lin

These “Uniforms” store and conceal their tools. These “Uniforms” make the labor seem incredibly fun, which it is not. (It is slightly fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.) While working, “People” carry wonderful “Activity Books,” designed in collaboration with Studio Lin. These “Activity Books” inform and distract them from their work. But the “People” are a nomadic workforce. They don’t want to be doing this full-time. They want to be somewhere else. They want to be distracted… Each “Activity Book” has 100 configurations – and a lot of stickers – that document a small portion of configurations made from “Horizontals” and “Verticals”: a bus stop; park bench; bed; catwalk; partition; auditorium; riot barricade; pop-up shop; A.A. (architecture anonymous) meeting space; breakdancing stage; performance review niche; community theater; avant-garde coffee shop; phone booth; bedroom ensemble; bulk storage; secret society hangout; temporary museum; graphic designer support space; place to forget your wallet; gluten-free cooking arena; artisanal mugs craft fair; yet another makerspace; lecture hall; nondenominational chapel; pretentious market; design night school; global art fair; open-source archive; revolutionary activity organization… We cannot anticipate what will happen, or all the possibilities for A/D/O, itself a workspace, design school, retail outlet, gallery, restaurant, and many more things all at once. It is a platform. It is an ever-changing assembly like the installation itself. We don’t completely understand what it will become. What we do know is that the “Verticals” and “Horizontals” are bolted together with ¼”-20 flat-head screws.

We began this project with no methodology other than casting a wide net, scouring both library and Internet to collect drawings by architects we knew to produce significant buildings and drawings or by those we simply thought of at the time. Then we deleted the architecture and context of these representations to focus specifically on the human(s) depicted by various architects or architecture offices. If we found nothing, we noted as much. While compiling all of these images, we were surprised to find that many architects simply do not represent people. Equally surprising, we found that architects who arguably have or claim nothing in common sometimes share an attitude towards scale figures (or a lack thereof). Perhaps their absence is evidence of desires for the so-called post-human; perhaps including people simply obscured representation of the architecture; or, perhaps the architects just didn’t get to it. Throughout the Encyclopedia one can find architects who: represent the human as inchoate scribbles; draw them by hand; exaggerate features; create a style; emphasize the geometric or mechanical aspects of bodies… And architects who: reference other scale figures; collage themselves as scale figures; make political statements; want to portray a mood or attitude; want to make scale figures as uninteresting as possible; show only backsides or only silhouettes; are eclectic; and so on. One can also see the relationship to media and technology through how architects represent people: in gaussy transparent Photoshop silhouettes; models collaged from lifestyle glossies and on-the-street fashion blogs; soft charcoal smudge-sketches; watercolors; full-color graphic illustrations; etc…. We tried to include broad examples but, when skimming the Encyclopedia, accept our apologies for those offices and buildings we have neglected to include. We did what we could to be as inclusive as possible within the relatively narrow medium of architectural publications. After all, the point was never to be completely totalizing – an impossibility, nowadays – but rather to be as broad as could be managed within our given resources… And we tried. We collected over 2,000 figures produced by over 200 architects, and presented every figure at the same scale (1″=1’–0″). Scale figures are a fundamental part of any professional architect’s arsenal; we have all amassed folders upon folders on our servers filled with these fictional people. And although scale figures are one of those things that most of us take for granted in day-to-day practice, they are no doubt a disciplinary problem, a fact which became increasingly evident as we assembled the Encyclopedia. It might seem naively absurd, but as we stared at the countless figures in this book, it became hard to see them as anything but a kind of global citizenry. They are Architecture’s refugees. They travel the world, popping up from time to time in various institutions and schools, at lectures, on reviews, and in student work. And the more we looked at them, the more we thought about both the architecture offices that created them and the wonderfully diverse world we all live in – a world which seems to be ever more intolerant of difference and increasingly inhuman.

Each project represents distinct forms of representations of architecture. As buildings that are permanent, fixed, and material, we have worked toward the making of a body of work that emphasizes form over shape, processes of form-finding focused on a certain set of problems, and work through archetypes as much as through vernacular typologies, representation, and media in response to the complexities of contemporary subjectivities. Architecture always deals in the paradox of making and unmaking in the world, which continually challenges us every day.

In working toward a particular aesthetic project, a kind of abstract version of architecture itself, we seek to define new limits for the discipline of architecture. Specifically, we are interested in creative ways of making new visual limits. Through this collapse of art and life into new working method drawings and buildings are two separate acts that each inform the other. We’ve actively worked toward an increasing abstraction of architecture. If technology has given to the profession the ability to make lifelike views, what it has not offered the discipline is a critical lens for understanding those images. Rather, we offer up a new form of visuals – each image is an independent art work that is a space of its own to experiment, to play, and to collapse art and life into one new image. But we are not building images as buildings – images are not buildings. They are a form of architecture, in a kind of expanded definition of what makes up the things that we do as architects – we could leave the drawing at black lines on a white background, but we are trying to elevate the importance of drawing.

Renewing our interest in drawing has been done in parallel to the work done through videos and softwares. Spending time in those spaces and virtual worlds has had a lasting impression. As environments they have been far more productive, stimulating, and both more finite and infinite. As architects, we are supposed to be empathic. Sitting behind a computer screen down in the trenches is physically wearing, but we have always felt uplifted through each drawing. For us, the drawings reveal the kind of work process that we, as architects, are engaged within a kind of day-in and day-out. The space in which we draw as architects and designers is polychromatic and flat, not black and white and not deep, although we can create perspectives. Our visual work on images is separate as a thing to be made from the making of the architectural working drawings, or models, or prototypes, etc., and is a creative way to work through aesthetic and formal problems. It is important to keep the representations and their multiple forms separate from the actual forms of drawing used to make buildings. That each drawing is a visual and creative act has become more important in the overall work.

In creating buildings, we have sought to engage histories of architecture, culture, and society. Mostly the work seeks a kind of hollowed-out space enclosed by envelopes that are performative, creating careful, framed views of nature and the surroundings, but also at times producing new types of spaces that are outside but covered. The architecture seeks a kind of relationship with architecture’s vernacular types – primarily the domestic and its elements-roof, porch, hearth, chimney, front window, etc. Materially we’ve experimented from thatch to zinc, working through performance in a serious way. While we are playful, we take our work and the subjects we engage seriously. At times there seems to be a misunderstanding that when we say “playful” we are too lighthearted. We have dealt with the real problems in dealing with the subject of technological performance in the way a house floats, or the orphanage’s construction methods in response to seismic issues, to the ways in which a conservatory can coexist within a living space, to a visitor’s center’s ability to operate on limited energy. These are matters that just should be a part of the building, and are critical to its function but does not need to be the focus of its description. Rather, we’re interested in ways we can continue to be alchemical and produce new subjectivities and audiences for architecture while, at the same time, being serious architects who create architecture that embodies an exemplary practice and poses new visual limits for the discipline.

By making maintenance the subject of their work, artists reveal that, in the postmodern split between art and life, maintenance was cast on the side of life and technology – within architecture, especially, forgotten and removed from primary imagery, and when it was introduced, rendered as a technical act performed without consequences for the creative act of design. Yet maintenance is needed if beauty is to endure. It is labor. But it can be argued that it both produces work and affects the production of work. This portrayal of maintenance emphasizes its routine qualities and the endless repetition of skilled labor it requires. Maintenance, unlike general cleaning, should not be categorized as part of what Arendt called “reproductive” labor – manual acts of unskilled labor.5 Maintenance should be understood as labor, but skilled labor, especially when it involves large-scale buildings like towers. Meanwhile, buildings require labor and work if they are to be considered imageworthy, a goal in which maintenance plays an inherent part. In modernism, architects thought through the problem of maintenance as part of the architecture, and the division between art and life did not yet exist. It is time to rethink the relevance of maintenance’s effects on contemporary architectural practice, image production, representation, and culture at large.

Artists, on the contrary, have continued to challenge our notions of endurance and permanence in response to modernism and neo-avantgarde approaches toward art and work. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, people like Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Gordon Matta-Clark brought issues of maintenance and spectacle to the fore in projects like, respectively, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) and Conical Intersect (1975). This book examines a range of art practices-historical and contemporary – in order to address the problem of maintenance from an architectural perspective, and speculates how expanded thinking on the subject could impact future design and discourse. When a careful look is taken at the intersection between art, architecture, and maintenance, the recursive problems of subjects and objects surface in interesting ways.

Maintenance originates as a modern concern, though unlike cleaning, its more domestic counterpart, it is not a “happening,” as in the kinds of spontaneous events the artist Allan Kaprow created. But contemporary artists have recast it as a “happening” through their works, repositioning the subject as “cool.” While maintenance is not the origin of architecture, in architecture it is possible to find an origin of maintenance. Thinking back to projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1929) or SOM’s Lever House (1952), it is clear that issues of upkeep at both the domestic and urban scales were coming to the fore by the mid-twentieth century. Maintenance as a subject aligns itself with philosopher Martin Heidegger’s reading of Dasein‘s experiences regarding tools, things of nature, and other human beings as being-in-the-world.6 Through a careful reading of archival building photographs and architectural drawings, maintenance’s history can be found.

Not until the early twentieth century did photography become a widely accepted mode of architectural representation in magazines, newspapers, books, and elsewhere. Photographs became the way to circulate images of buildings to wide audiences, while simultaneously bringing problems of iconography and imageability to the discipline. Maintenance is a subject that appears and reappears throughout modern and contemporary histories of architecture, but also in contemporary art. It is impossible to do without maintenance unless the desired outcome is decay or death. Through images of maintenance, both in architecture and in art, it is possible to see the various roles that it plays.

This book is primarily concerned with a few specific types of buildings – the private house, pavilions, and high-rise buildings – and, because of the significance of images in the modern period, it pays particular attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing. This includes modern buildings like Lever House (1952) and the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and contemporary buildings like the Beijing Water Cube (2008) and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2004). The architects Alison and Peter Smithson present an imperative to assess this kind of work in their “Prelude” to The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture:

One further thought. No one has properly observed a quite definite special sub-category of modern architecture. An architecture of the enjoyment of luxury materials, of the well-made, of the high finish. It is special to Mies and occasional to Le Corbusier and Gropius.7

Taking the Smithsons’ prompt, Maintenance Architecture examines buildings in this special subcategory, citing a range of modern and contemporary works that take on maintenance as a subject without “one-thingly character.”8 Maintenance is deeply connected to issues of imageability and architecture’s present-day concerns. It is more than a problem of trying to be or appear eternally new. Maintenance presents evidence of nature, evidence of human relationships beyond the technical.9

The evolution of building construction methods, in conjunction with the increasing prevalence of architectural photography, began to produce a kind of architecture that based its worth on spectacle and iconicity over a lived experience. Today we cannot separate this kind of performance from other things. The significant things are those that are “close to us,” as Heidegger once said about airplanes and radio sets; the things that are close to us through technology, ultimately, are about the essence of an epoch, but simultaneously also bring us close to one another, physically or through information.10 For modern architecture, the photographs that captured the buildings in a certain state – that of newness or appearing new – kept the discipline close. But further following this thought, and looking more inward, maintenance is really the thing that brings us close and keeps us close. Its effect of continual newness contributed to a new representation: the photograph.

While the repetition of carefully selected images printed in black and white perpetuated the mythos of modern architecture, the expression of architecture through multiple media and modes of representation is necessary for contemporary projects. Ezra Stoller, the famous photographer whose photographs captured the modern moment, literally rendering the time period, was part of a bygone age; the fixed and singular image is no longer the only thing available, because of the proliferation of media today. These images no longer stand alone, but are instead viewed in the context of other images propped up against other forms of media from videos to blogs, Flickr streams, Instagram feeds, and so on. Architecture that bases its worth on the creation of iconicity and spectacle assumes it will endure in part because it is captured and archived online, instantly and forever available. Recently, the rapid and unprecedented growth primarily in the Middle East and Asia has likewise produced an image culture that is varied yet abundant. While it may be unrealistic to think of limiting a building through a singular or select set of discrete image(s), the way that an image or set of images endures has new meaning in today’s endless yet fleeting image culture; this is especially true for buildings that are public and urban.

The recent diversity of architectural works, styles, and ideologies has produced a crisis in the assessment of work and images. Without unifying evaluation criteria across the discipline, we have returned to a focus on performance, examining architecture through the lens of its built life. This is by no means a new concern – we need only remember the American oil crisis of the 1970s, the creation of Paper Architecture, and the beginnings of postmodernism to pull the discipline away from performance into “real architecture.” The focus on issues around technology and sustainability is reemerging as a way to think about architecture, but it only exacerbates the split between life and art. This way of thinking is an extension from the late 1990s and early 2000s building boom where realism became subsumed across the disciplines of architecture and art. In many ways architecture during this period leaned heavily on advances in allied fields like structural and climate engineering. Architecture could be advanced only by enveloping other disciplines, and in this moment those particular disciplines were largely based in technology.

Maintenance carries the expression of architecture’s essence and represents it as a forward-thinking practice (or not). If maintenance can formulate a line of questioning in the Heideggerian sense of a “question builds a way” and “the way is one of thinking”11 – then through maintenance it is possible to see a dialectical relationship with architecture. For instance, the Seattle Public Library, one of the most celebrated buildings of the early twenty-first century, advances the discipline through its form and function, and also through technology. But does it advance beyond its technological bounds? The building is cleaned by the most basic and dangerous method: a cleaner on a rope. The use of the squeegee here creates an unmediated relationship between humans and the architecture – bringing the building closer to problems of handicraft. This is a strange way to read a building, with its advanced diagrid facade that collapses structure and enclosure into one system. There is a glamour of the uncelebratory overlaid onto the celebratory, but perhaps there was no other way to solve the problem of cleaning, and the theatrical stunts of the window washer set against the backdrop of the building add to the recursive story of the building, even if it is absurd. We may never know.

Within contemporary architectural discourse, maintenance remains insufficiently defined, except in specialized and technical contexts. Rarely thought of in social or design terms, maintenance has been more readily explored and experimented with in allied disciplines like preservation, material science, development, policy, insurance laws, and building codes. Even as new forms of practice and built work begin to question the limits of its more standard interpretations, the concept of maintenance has not evolved much in recent years.

Furthermore, an important distinction should be made between cleaning and maintenance. The two are frequently misinterpreted: often maintenance is interpreted as cleaning. But cleaning is more generally associated with domestic, and therefore private and individual, activities: dusting, polishing, or vacuuming. Maintenance instead requires formal organization and teams of skilled workers, operating in public. Where cleaning engages the discrete parts of a building, maintenance is dedicated to safeguarding the holistic image of an architectural work. Each has a unique temporal quality as well. Cleaning is concerned with a building’s use at a particular moment; maintenance represents an investment in the persistence of architecture – both as an image and as an ideal.

Maintenance will become increasingly important as architects adopt practices that are to affect environmental performance and also the making of environments.12 In modernism, architects presented the building cycle with falsely constrained endpoints – conception and realization – that hinged on the parallel production of idealized images.

These pivotal points have cultivated a narrow understanding of architectural reality, often omitting the life of the building and its performance. An expanded building cycle that incorporates maintenance has the potential to affect the future of architecture by contributing to the cycle of creation, building, occupancy, the representation of architecture, and image circulation, which in turn will impact future invention.

Contemporary artists have pursued the subject of maintenance perhaps more than architects, for whom it is really the most pressing. The artists discussed in this book are often active participants in their work, performing cleaning tasks almost always staged within celebrated works of architecture. Artists choreograph scenes that disrupt iconic images of architecture in order to reveal the tasks of cleaning. In some cases – as with Job Koelewijn’s Cleaning the Rietveld Pavilion (1992) or Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999) – there is a kind of overperformance for effect, where the artists implement tools and dress associated with a kind of industrial cleaning in excess of both their task and the architecture being cleaned. In so doing they call into question something more than just cleaning. Their works deal with the representation of architecture and with labor that is robust, organized, social, and temporal.

Art practices also reveal technology, and have specifically illuminated the relationship between architecture and the maintenance workers who bring buildings to the forefront of our consciousness through their repetitive labor. Here we can turn to the window washer who exerts forceful energy across a building’s face. There is a particular beauty in the striking contrast of the image of the maintenance worker floating in front of a glass curtain wall. The scale of the body against an unrelenting grid has a diminishing effect on the body, but the beauty of the architecture is also disrupted by the image of the worker, reminding one that architecture is not complete. Maintenance in all its clumsy, barebones mechanics is an act of renewal or rebirth, even though it has primarily been thought of as a technical act of repair. In Morning Cleaning, for example, Jeff Wall broaches two paradoxical aspects, the everyday and the modern, by staging the event of cleaning. And while the everyday reenacted here is neither flat nor deadpan, it constructs a world that is never revealed.13

In architecture culture, maintenance can be understood through two concepts that have been circulating of late: performance and post-occupancy. Post-occupancy is a relatively new term that has been adopted into architectural discourse as a means of reconciling the recent and all-too-consuming movement toward realism. Coined to describe the period after a building has been completed, when it has begun to be inhabited, the term places importance on the life of a building rather than on the ideas surrounding its form making. Post-occupancy plays off the professional definition of occupancy, which describes the number of building users and the building’s occupancy type, such as assembly, office, residential, and so on.

Unlike building or design codes, post-occupancy offers calculable elements of knowledge – information or data such as natural elements from temperature to rainfall, or performance-based criteria such as specifications that can be used for evaluation and feedback. It is important to note, however, that these terms should be understood beyond the purely technological – they cannot be separated out from the social or cultural. In a period of tremendous production of the real, it makes sense that there would also be an abundant effort to absorb built work and its effect on discourse. It remains to be seen whether post-occupancy can create a new paradigm for evaluating architecture or effectively support the existing significance attached to form making. Post-occupancy seems to emerge on the side of the owner, the user, the inhabitant, or the specialist, and less so of the design architect, and so there is the danger of it only further fragmenting the discipline. Where post-occupancy takes root is up for grabs; but if it is rethought, it can be a place for new ideas and will deeply affect allied practices in addition to architecture itself.

Interest in preservation and in post-occupancy has come to the forefront over the last two decades, in parallel to the building boom or in spite of it. Most recently, these two subjects were explored through two architecture venues, one an exhibition and the other a book. At the 2010 Venice Biennale, director Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA asked exhibitors to consider the interaction between architecture and its occupants under the title “People meet in architecture.” In presenting an entirely new body of work on this topic, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas with OMA/AMO curated the exhibition Cronocaos, arguing that their work had always been concerned with time and history: “OMA and AMO have been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past.”14 This exhibition presented a select group of materials that became an archive of “fragments” of the total collection of buildings in a range of mediums, from photographs to a series of graphic posters with quotes, charts, and statistics on the subject of preservation; “project cards” made to look like postcards could be torn off a wall and taken with the viewer. The cards featured projects from OMA, including the Maison à Bordeaux, the overscaled fluorescent orange bean bag from the Maison à Bordeaux that was part of another exhibition, Content, and oversized photo albums. The posters were used as a place to locate specific quotes on theories about architecture’s endurance from critical figures like Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc. On one exhibition poster, featuring an image of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc alongside each other, Ruskin is saying: “Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture”; while Viollet-le-Duc declares: “To restore a building is not to repair it, nor to do maintenance, nor to rebuild it, it is to reestablish it in an ultimate state that never existed before.” The exhibition announced: “The interval between the now and the preserved is shrinking, and is about to disappear. From this moment, we do not only have to look back, but also forward; we will have to decide what to preserve in advance.”15 This statement underscores the compression of time between a building’s completion and its canonization. To designate a work of architecture a “historic monument” amplifies the burden of care, and raises questions not only around restoration or preservation but also those critical to creative making. Furthermore, deciding “what to preserve in advance” means reclaiming an aspect of the discipline that has been parceled out to specialists and historians. It urges architects to address preservation before a project is realized, and this includes the subject of maintenance, which is new territory in that it has not yet been theorized and the consequences are unknown. And while maintenance may seem like a separate act, not part of the discipline or discourse of architecture, I would argue that there are subtle shifts and slight visual adjustments that are made as a result of maintenance. As buildings go from daily maintenance to large-scale interventions such as labor done for preservation or restoration, I would still argue that all three things effectively change their appearance. Maintenance performed on a building before it becomes a monument is fundamentally different from when it is performed afterward. Inevitably, there will be codes, practices, and strategies to be put in place when we are trying to uphold a new yet re-created image of the building. If “preservation is overtaking us,” maintenance was there first.16 Preservation is in a way a singular act; maintenance is ongoing. In philosophy, endurance is questioned through a series of acts in looking: for instance, if something passes between an object and a viewer, is it still the same object? If the answer is no, if that object is indeed something other than the original, then this logic could be extended to acts performed on buildings, such as maintenance. In this way, it can be argued that even though the act of maintenance may not leave a trace, it fundamentally changes the image of a building, the image of its architecture. This may not seem particularly significant, but it can open up a new way of thinking whereby architecture is not fixed once a building is complete. Architecture is almost never new and, even more important, its aim should not be to remain new, singular, or fixed. In Post-Occupancy (a “special issue” of Domus, entrusted to an editor-architect of worldwide renown who illustrates architecture according to his own original codes of communication), Koolhaas presents four projects: the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, Seattle Central Library, McCormick-Tribune Campus Center at IIT, and Casa da Música. These works, he writes, “represent the realities we were complicit in creating, post-occupancy, as facts, not feats.”17 But these facts are still feats, particularly when they come up against the subject of time.

Maintenance is a reaction to and a momentary covering up of time’s terror.18 Manglano-Ovalle is captured through upclose stills from his film Le Baiser/The Kiss, dressed in his orange janitor suit, intently cleaning the glass façade of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. His pleasure in cleaning is intimately portrayed, perhaps as an attempt to return the house to a place that has been refreshed and reflects the original – “an action for a certain sense of responsibility” – and to avoid “empirical mediocrity.”19

Maintenance occupies a particular space and moment in the life of a building. It comes after design, after construction drawings – those documents that record the future realities of the project – but exists after building, between acts of building and preservation, and again after preservation or restoration. It would be, in a way, what Jacques Derrida speaks of as “operating in silence, it never leaves any archive of its own.”20 It is only through art that maintenance gets recorded and archived, even if those records are fake, staged fictions. If architecture has had a disciplinary amnesia about maintenance, it was the art world that created “the possibility of memorization of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression.” And to further this, Derrida goes on to say, “we also must remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction.”21 Architecture and architects have typically been figures of completion: completing the model, the design, the details, the job site inspection. Maintenance somewhat undoes this completion, requiring us (architects) to be vulnerable and in need of community.22 If, as Karsten Harries suggests, “What weighs on us is not so much that we are powerless, but that we repress that powerlessness and the associated emotions . . . hard to accept our temporality,”23 and “The historical dimensions of our environment must be preserved and represented if we are to keep open the possibility of genuine dwelling. And we do not preserve or represent history by just playing with its fragments,”24 I would then argue that sometimes it is only by looking through fragments that a clearer picture of what has occurred can be revealed. Maintenance offers a way of looking at the world, and artists who incorporate maintenance in their work are, in effect, re-presenting architecture back to us.

Each generation draws its own parameters around the discipline: sometimes the role of the architect stops at the idea, sometimes at the drawing, and sometimes at the built work. Each building process requires a unique approach, depending on which aspect the owner, architect, or society prioritizes above all the others: the concept or intent, the construction documents, the physical building, or its reproducible image. It remains to be seen whether architects will choose to stay involved in the constructed lives of their designs, and whether that involvement is even desirable. But one thing that seems to continually be at the core of architecture is its representation.

“Post-occupancy” offers a way to see what happens in the absence of the author; as Koolhaas suggests, maintenance is one component of post-occupancy. Its representation calls into question the very nature of architecture, since the imagery of maintenance, at first blush seeming only technical, would have nothing to do with beauty.25 The performative aspects of architecture remain repressed; instead, architecture constructs value through idealized representation in publications. Reflecting on architecture in The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (1995), the Smithsons write that the purpose of their book was an exercise in gathering images that meant the most to them personally. This collection, when put together and ordered, made – in their words a “work-document” that presented photographs and drawings of buildings which constituted a “harmonious whole.” The book’s mission was to focus on the way modern architecture had been represented through images of completed buildings. The series of black-and-white images collected enabled them to offer a synopsis of the period: “this is probably the last collection of its kind. The next collection in forty years’ time of the architecture of our own period will be quite different for it will not record buildings,’ but built-places, and the documents will be mostly air views, sequential photographs, and system explanations.”26 They conclude (as quoted above): “No one has properly observed a quite definite special sub-category of modern architecture. An architecture of the enjoyment of luxury materials, of the well-made, of the high finish. It is special to Mies and occasional to Le Corbusier and Gropius.” In the materials and details of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Tugendhat house, and in the Krefeld houses, they find a “shameless bankers’ luxuriousness.”27 What in the end, perhaps, the architects realized in their search and curation, and also through their own work, is that there are hidden contingencies yet to be understood by modern architecture. This realization suggests that architectural representation is not just caught up in a particular building, but is indicative of a movement.

While maintenance may initially appear less fundamental to architecture than geometry or other cultural signifiers, it is inextricably tied to the life of buildings. To establish a discourse on maintenance requires us to rethink its associated terms like cleaning and preservation which, while seemingly banal or misunderstood, have far-reaching implications for the conception, construction, and endurance of buildings and of architecture itself. To use them interchangeably ignores their unique protocols that underscore their social, cultural, environmental, and economic differences. Observations like these aim to affirm the visionary potential of architecture while debunking the imagined reality we attribute to great buildings. An essential aspect of this investigation concerns the labor and efforts necessary to ensure architecture’s enduring image. The photographs in this book span the modern and contemporary periods, yet over this long time frame there has been little change in the thinking about endurance, luxury, and the image of architecture with respect to maintenance.

The series of images and short texts included in this book attempt to unpack the history of maintenance in order to understand and uncover its underlying motivations and narratives, as well as alternative models. of architecture. The texts are divided into five parts – “Maintenance and the Urban Image,” “Cleaning and the Politics of Labor,” “Visualizing Decay,” “Modernizing Maintenance,” and “Post-Occupancy and Alternate Architectural Futures” – with specific buildings, art projects, materials, products, and thematic reflections organized to illustrate each part.

These parts are divided not by type but, rather, by important thematics that run throughout the book. “Maintenance and the Urban Image” deals primarily with the iconography of skyscrapers in the context of the city, in order to set the stage for the relationship between image maintenance and building maintenance that is present throughout. “Cleaning and the Politics of Labor” investigates the differences between public and private maintenance through the lens of those respective workforces. “Visualizing Decay” is the one section exclusively devoted to art practices, illustrating the range of ways artists make issues of maintenance visible. “Modernizing Maintenance” deals with the influx of technology and devices developed to reduce labor, while “Post-Occupancy and Alternate Architectural Futures” looks to a variety of contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that deal with the afterlife of buildings in interesting and creative ways. Each part begins with a short paragraph and a project that seems emblematic of the section as a whole. The subsequent short texts address more specific concerns. The result is a collection of small fragments strung together in a larger narrative about how to draw attention to the relationship between architecture and maintenance through an investigation of allied fields.

This book was written as a reflection on the contemporary intersections between architecture, art, and culture. We have just emerged from a period of extensive construction, the building up of cities through important and monumental works of architecture, in some cases undertaken without a totalizing image and in other cases unplanned, even excessive. That is to say: in the rush to build, to make new world(s), there has been little consideration for the unmaking – those things that cause wear and tear on the building, from use to weather, and so on.

In the following instances it seems clear that maintenance has been a subject of some interest, but as time passes it will increasingly become an issue for cities in the future, much as it will be for the individual and for society. Maintenance is much more than a metaphor for rethinking culture and society; it exposes a range of imperfections, from unmaking – the decay of buildings, failing joints or chipped glass – to social inequities and unjust labor practices, and to tangible acts that lead to novel design thinking, formal invention, and unprecedented detailing. Even if they are just fragmentary moments, each of these qualities is integral to the underpinning of architecture. This book should be read as a collection of equal images: every image is of equal value. It offers a sort of archive, a curation, a permeable collection that recasts one story about architecture. It is not final; it can be added to or expanded. It is my hope that for someone who reads this book and looks at its images, it will be impossible ever to think about maintenance with indifference, but imperative to recognize that architecture is constructed of several facets, including social facets, one of which is maintenance; and that maintenance can affect design and the creative process.

Notes

1 Interview with Donald Wall (1975), Canadian Centre for Architecture Archives.

2 Hilary Sample, “Maintenance Architecture,” Praxis 6 (2004): 114–121.

3 Ibid.

4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2nd edn.

5 Pier Vittorio Aureli, conference introduction, “Architecture and Labor,” a symposium organized by Aureli and the PhD program “City/Architecture,” Architectural Association, London, November 13, 2015, <http://www.aaschool. ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3256> (accessed March 1, 2015); Arendt, The Human Condition.

6 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 141.

7 Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Prelude” to The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 5. The Smithsons wrote the “Prelude” in 1965, but their book was not published until 1981.

8 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 147.

9 Ibid., 146.

10 Ibid., 147.

11 Ibid., 311.

12 David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 18–19.

13 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 70.

14 Rem Koolhaas, “Cronocaos,” Log 21 (Winter 2011): 119.

15 Esther da Costa Meyer, review of Cronocaos, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 2 (June 2012), 248–49. Meyer notes that “Cronocaos also perpetuates stereotypes concerning gender.”

16 See Rem Koolhaas with Jorge Pailos-Otero, Preservation Is Overtaking Us (New York: GSAPP Books, 2014).

17 Rem Koolhaas, “Preface,” in AMO/Rem Koolhaas, eds., Domus d’Autore, Post Occupancy (Domus, 2006).

18 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 255.

19 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 132–133.

20 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 78.

21 Ibid.

22 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 264.

23 Ibid., 261.

24 Ibid., 256.

25 Ibid.,119.

26 Smithson and Smithson, The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, 5.

27 Ibid.

Passage requires corridors.
Corridors require entrances.
Corridors require exits.
Two people living inside and outside of corridors.
Moving
resting
and functioning.
One standing.
One sitting.
One person stands on the interior looking at the other person functioning
sitting interiorly looking exteriorly.
Looking outside, the other person is processing the functions required for the day.
Two functioning people begin the day by dressing themselves.
The lower portion of one person requires long, thick cotton socks inside two hard leather shoes.
The other person brought the hard leather shoes interiorly from the exterior for the person to walk.
The other person likes how the hard leather looks.
The person likes how the leather smells on the outside of the shoes.
Leather comes from the skin of cows which graze exteriorly, harvested interiorly
to put a skin on the exterior of the shoes for the person to walk outside.
They need pants.
Inside the pants are briefs, the elastic waistband just below the navel.
Cotton grows exteriorly and is brought to the interior.
A person cannot walk beyond the interior without two pairs, one short, one long, of cotton pants.
One pair of short, thin cotton pants beneath one pair of long, dense cotton trousers.
For the upper portion, one thin cotton shirt with cold metal buttons.
The person leaves the right half and the left half of the shirt secured with the metal buttons and slips it over the head.
This saves time required for the day’s functions.
They tuck the bottom portion of the shirt into the trousers above the elastic waistband of the pants, taking care so as to not explode the abdomen.
Now dressed, the person looks at the other person.
The other person is nearly ready.
On the interior of two thin plastic shoes, are two long silk stockings.
The person brought the plastic shoes from the exterior to the interior for the other person to walk externally.
The person likes how the shoes make the legs look slender.
To walk in the shoes brings the person discomfort.
They do not like to walk with the shoes the other person brought to the interior.
One pair, thin silk pants, one short leather skirt with a cold metal zipper.
The person does not move the cold metal zipper as they slip the legs into the leather skirt.
The leather obstructs the metal zipper from sealing properly, stealing time which is required for the functioning of the day.
For the upper portion
one dense silk brassiere on the interior
one thin silk shirt on the exterior.
There are no buttons on the silk shirt.
The person, now dressed, looks exteriorly, thinking of the functions required for the day.
Two people functioning during the day require nourishment.
Nourishment takes energy from the exterior and uses it interiorly.
Exteriorly, there is nourishment; interiorly: the meal.
One person and the other person sit on the warm chairs beside the cold table on the interior of the warm corridor made of cold marble
eating the nourishment required for the functioning of the day.
On the table is a small warm bowl.
The person dips the wet spoon into the warm bowl.
The other person looks at the person.
The other person does not like the taste.
The other person places the spoon on the interior of the bowl, slowly stirring the nourishment.
The other person is pleased with the meal.
The other person brings the hot nourishment on the cold metal spoon to their lips.
The lips are connected to their mouth.
The spoon is connected to their hand.
The person looks at the other person eating, spilling a spoonful of nourishment.
The spill requires one cotton napkin.
A finger.
The soft back of one finger is a good substitute in the absence of a cotton napkin.
Now they stop.
It is no longer time for nourishment.
There is little time left in the day.
Where has the day gone?
The day usually requires work.
The day is measured in hours.
Hours are measured in minutes.
How many hours left in the day?
How many minutes?
Eight hours of work each day is required for the functioning of the week.
No work today.
Time is measured in weeks and the week in days and the day in hours.
Today is the end of the week.
No work today.
Today it is the weekend.
The week ends today.
Eight hours of work each day, but not today.
Today’s functions require relaxation.
Eight full hours of work each day, one full day of relaxation, for one functioning week.
They relax outside, collecting pieces, things, items for the inside.
Outside there are things. Many things.
Things to be brought inside.
There’s one now.
It glimmers in the light.The person squats real low, resting on their feet, buttocks below the knee, sitting on the heels.
The other person looks on.
Their body does not move like that.
How does the other person’s body move like that?
The person inside is watching, thinking, tallying the movements of the person outside.
Outside, they sift through the rubbish.
They collect.
Outside there are an endless collection of insides.
One person thinks it is a ruin.
The other person thinks it is a cornucopia.
Each piece is studied, scrutinized; does it belong inside?
Should it remain outside?
Moving from place to place, the person outside looks
studies
gathers
imagines
thinking of the things to be collected.
Photographing, documenting and representing each piece, the person imagines how it might look inside.
They send their photographs from outside to other insides
somewhere far away and very close simultaneously.
All pieces must be represented.
The person shuffles the outside pieces inside to the other who supervises the functions of the outside from the inside.
Outside the person is thinking of the pieces, being watched by the person inside
looking at their brightly lit screen with images of the objects from the outside, imagining what it would look like inside.
The person is not sure if they have any opinion on the matter.
Often the objects have specific qualities.
Little tiny pieces
remnants
memories
Each containing fragments of the outside.
Now they sit at opposite ends of the table, legs crossed in the chairs, the pieces of outside laid upon the table.
Piece by piece. One after another. The person shifts a piece.
The other person shifts it back, almost exactly.
Over, and over again.
Calculated.
Measured.
But now they stop.
Is this work?
Something else?
What does it mean?
Why do they gather things?
Why do they represent them?
They are no longer feeling relaxed.
It feels like too much, and almost nothing.
The day is almost over.
The birds outside have stopped singing.
The person relaxes on the interior inside the bath.
The other relaxes on the chair through the corridor watching the person relaxing.
The bath is made of cold marble, inside is hot water.
The person relaxes.
Exterior skin is refreshed from the hot water.
They see a tree.
On that tree is a nest.
Inside that nest is a bird.
The person is thinking.
What are they thinking?
What does the person think?
The person wonders where the day has gone.
The person wonders what the next day will bring.
The person sits looking outside at the bird, being watched by the other person inside on the chair.
The two people are connected together.
They are connected by the things they have collected.

It was not always like this
We are confronted with things when they break down
The architecture is broken
The night is dark
Very much like the night before this
And the one before that
The nights repeat more than the days
Used to be able to tell them apart, now we can’t be sure
Slightly different
Generally the same
Different sameness
I’ve been lost here before
My device notifies me
This was the way
Now is the way
It is precise
It has glitches
The process of decay is the process of crystallization
In the day this looks the same but different
I much prefer here to being there
She stopped and described a dream
He repeated it
Woman on a Bicycle, Wearing a Fur Coat –
Drinking Non-Fat Caramel Macchiato –
Extra Whip
Everything was the familiar but not
Somehow it goes together
She has the same device I have
That question regarding technicity
Where you begin determines where you end
Everything was covered in the Agreement
Technology determines the history of art
Systematic
Sequential
My device takes pictures
An emptiness that has to be filled up with production
Endlessly order and rearrange
Construct and fill up space through aimless activity
Starting, repeating it differently
We departed from an unknown origin
Completely unoriginal
It demanded attention
We produced the phenomenon of distance
Art produces new forms of distance
New forms of indifference
My device is in the background
It tells me where to go
It calculates and studies degradation
We are still lost although it is technically impossible
We communicate
My device anticipates my words
It is an almost familiar language without signs or symbols
No flourishes
No allusions
Not simplistic
Concise
Watching
Walking