1. Architectural Care-taking: Theoretical Perspectives on Repair and their Implications for the Architectural Discipline

The dilemma of whether to repair or replace built architecture, specifically a home’s assembled parts, has become central amid today’s environmental crisis, demanding a shift away from resource-intensive architectural mindsets. Approaches grounded in care, empathy, and repair offer a constructive alternative. Repair, typically defined as fixing what is broken, warrants reconsideration. This text examines the discourse on material repair and explores what a repair-oriented mindset could mean for architectural practice. Anticipated material ageing and deterioration are understood here through the lens of materials as active agents. Their reacting, shifting, and altering conditions over a home’s lifetime could carefully inform early design decisions. A disconnect emerges between this dynamic concept and architecture’s current pursuits of completeness: the ideal of a home as a stable object, fixed momentarily in time and comprised of ‘maintenance-free materials’. Acknowledging
this gap highlights the difference between how buildings are designed and how they truly exist. Designing with repair brings an often-overlooked everyday practice of care to the forefront and renders its hidden values visible, considering an inverted starting point. Architect’s adopting mending mentalities could cultivate an ethic of care, while enabling knowledge to traverse from designer to maintainer and, ultimately, to dweller, working with the cyclical acts of repair through which homes, their material assemblies, and intact values are sustained.