Preserving Scars

Whether called maintenance, repair, care, tending, or new experimental preservation, architects seek ways to resist endless growth, cyclic demolition, and planned obsolescence. As Bernard Tschumi said: “The most architectural thing about [a] building is the state of decay in which it is. [In fact], architecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. It negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it.” ¹ The traces of age and decay allow architecture’s processual character to gain some recognition. Resisting the short lifecycles of buildings and product warranties requires creativity. Within this space, architecture and care must be negotiated in ways that are meaningful to designers and communities alike.

In the book Upgrade: Making Things Better, Helen Thomas and Adam Caruso mention that it is necessary to reappraise the value of the ugly, the unloved, and the discarded. ² The acceptance of patina or alterswert is a reflective form of subversion and anarchy of both social and material processes. While architecture with a recognized status seems extraordinary or historically significant, a comprehensive approach toward heritage also values mundane and generic qualities. Under that definition, the legibility of historicity through neglect, filth, and vandalism can be considered part of heritage and thus worthy of preservation. Such counterpreservation affixes memories of buildings by embracing iconoclastic rebelliousness and appropriating decrepit appearances. ³ In the 1865 Ethics of the Dust by John Ruskin, the accumulation of filth, dirt, dust, cracks, and breakage are time-stains and have value.

The impermanence and transience of architecture allow a recognition of its many states and transformations. This includes objects or buildings that might be in a state of brokenness or decay but have utility potential that can be recognized and unveiled by the creative processes of caretaking. Regardless of their current state and use value, these artifacts manifest their possible repair within themselves, hinting at their diverse, varied, multiple states of existence. ⁴ Repair efforts should not fully erase material and immaterial damage. Preserving visible scars and collective memory is an integral aspect of maintenance work. Repair, therefore, becomes respectful of damage in its very nature. The creation of a repaired work must accept the inevitable difference from the undamaged original. It is aesthetically, architecturally, and socially appropriate to append the memory of damage. ⁵

Visible repairs bring the dimension of time and the marks of craft into the building, highlighting their processual aspect. They act as a resistant memory and refer to a history of the building that includes adaptations, transformations, and conflicts. This way, the memorial value is extended by the repair, which gives us information about how the work was carried out. Moreover, it creates a specific form of memorial architecture. The mended areas offer a way to understand objects as subjects, materials, and practices while accentuating imperfections as valuable indicators of history, time, and embedded emotion. The buildings are going through a learning process and need time to adapt, refine, retune, and repair parts that are not optimized or catered to current needs.

In a digital-industrial civilization where manual work is vanishing, repair is a form of resistance against the loss of construction traditions, which have always reflected individual histories through their material traces and layers. In “Rethinking Repair,” Steven J. Jackson, an information scientist, brings forth the concept of “broken world thinking,” which he describes as “filling in the moment of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven.” Many possibilities arise when the starting points for creation are damages, erosion, breakdown, and decay instead of novelty, growth, and progress. ⁶

Repair stands against a wasteful and historically oblivious throwaway mentality and against superficial reproduction and replacement. Repairing means working with the existing, it means embracing the human and environmental conditions that Bryony Roberts has termed tabula plena, as opposed to tabula rasa. It embraces a skeptical attitude towards arguments of economic efficiency, progressiveness, innovation-talk, or contemporary aesthetics, which all legitimize destruction and discard. A critical, creative, reflective, post-traditional cultural technique emerges from scars.