Taking Care and Making Do: Finding Opportunity from Failure

Working with what we have in the urgent context of the climate crisis requires emphasising the ordinary as much as the small minority of buildings deemed worthy of conservation within the heritage framework. This project adopts as its focus my family’s home in the suburbs of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, an unremarkable building that would not normally be the subject of close architectural investigation.

It began with a series of redrawings of the original architectural documentation of the house. Each layer built on the previous, introducing additional detail that reflected how the house existed in the present. This process made me engage with the building in a new way — not the close familiarity of the residents, but the holistic vision of the architect. Comparing these new drawings to the original plans highlighted the change that had continued long after the building’s ‘completion’ in 1985. 

These experiments shaped the theoretical foundations of the project, which drew on Actor-Network Theory and the work of other architectural scholars to establish buildings as perpetually unfinished networks composed of physical and social actors and altered by professionals and non-professionals alike. A notion of completion is perpetuated through the representation and marketing of architecture, which reinforces a misconception of buildings as immutable and limits their capacity for appropriation. Therefore, representation was identified as a key means through which to better understand buildings as dynamic and alive.

As a building ages and is exposed to weather and use, parts of it inevitably deteriorate. The roof begins to leak. Leaves accumulate unseen in the gutters. Walls stain, get dirty, crack and peel. Maintenance and repair act in opposition to these failures and represent a large majority of the incremental change that happens over the life of a building. 

The degradation of some buildings and the endurance of others is not purely the result of a natural physical process but a social one as well. Each act of cleaning and fixing asserts a commitment to the continued use of an existing building. In this context, I came to see ‘working with what we have’ as a process that was already underway in the house in the form of maintenance and repair. 

As responses to failure, maintenance and repair tend to reinforce the status quo by restoring a building to a perceived normative state. In this project, however, failures (as intrusions on the fabric of everyday life) are posited as opportunities to challenge the otherwise unquestioned ways we live in buildings, in a practice I refer to as ‘more-than-maintenance’.

The thesis rejects the notion of architecture as a finished product. Instead, a series of animated drawings test how maintenance and repair could respond to failures in the house without perpetuating the inequities of its current existence. They are not intended to culminate in a dramatic finale but rather describe distinct points in time within the wider life of a perpetually unfinished building — one possible life of the house.

These interventions are made by designing through drawing over point clouds of the house generated through photogrammetry. In their broken incompleteness, the point clouds have the effect of ‘ruinating’ the house, returning it to a state more similar to that of a building under construction. Just as a damaged or partial building becomes more hospitable to change, the fairytale-like quality of these images transports the building outside of the every day to make interventions more conceivable.

The drawings provide examples of how a level of change that we normally associate with dramatic intervention in a building can be generated by small acts. I believe that rather than sterilising the architect, working with what we have can be an opportunity to re-conceptualise our role in a way that better reflects buildings as dynamic networks of physical and social actors. We cannot continue as we are, but we can make use of what we have – our buildings, our architectural knowledge, our observation and our imagination.

This thesis investigates unplanned, partially completed, and sometimes unremarkable aspects of architecture – and within these, finds beauty. It uses the lenses of repair and maintenance, failure and time; through these, architectural space is seen as ongoing, open to flux, and the holder of agents and agency. Starting not just from the domestic, but the student’s own home, the work moves across scales and public/private realms, to link to policy and governance, economy and the property market. Due to this, it comments on structures of architecture beyond the built realm. The thesis contains many series of drawings, models, photographs and installations; each iteration and representation is carried out with precision and experimentation, and each reveals and instigates its successor – it is a demonstration of practice-led design. Through skillful manipulation, translations between media have enabled processes of documentation, imagination, thinking, and processing to enable the development and evolution of the work. It is a study and code of practice for embracing bricolage as an architectural means through which to view, document and appreciate spaces around us, and an approach for future work.   

By Dr Marian Macken, MArch(Prof) Thesis Coordinator