An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of
architecture, by an architect writing to architects.
Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of
architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with
indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new
over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy
and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings
and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form
cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary
Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance
of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific
buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom
choose to represent maintenance--imagining their work only from
conception to realization--artists have long explored subjects of
endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range
of art projects--by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and
Mierle Laderman Ukeles--to recast the problem of maintenance for
architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a
building cycle expands to include "post-occupancy"?
Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and
high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings
constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and
precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster
Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel
Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of
skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private;
labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural
projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of
buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of
maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo
Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.
