Abstract
This paper is a response to the growing crisis of “disrepair” in the built environment. Alongside the material disrepair that looms in the wake of imposed neglect and increasingly volatile weather, another disrepair prevails. This is the production of a housing market to which we are unable to repair in comfort; from its financial inaccessibility and uninsurability, to its inadequate climatic performance, and, by virtue of its entanglement with the carbon logic of energy extraction, its ongoing complicity in the destruction of planetary conditions. These realities highlight the complexity of fixing a housing system that is both broken and actively breaking. In this paper, I recentre the reparative dimension of repair, as suspending rather than entrenching the old, through a close reading of the Melbourne-based architecture and research studio, OFFICE. Combining the reparative aims of retrofit and care, OFFICE provide an effective beginning in a programme of architectural repair.
This paper responds to the crisis of placed disrepair, one that extends from crises in homelessness and unaffordable housing to the planetary disrepair of the climate crisis and increasingly volatile weather systems. Where the former reveals the impossibility of repairing in comfort to the sanctity of the home, the latter exercises a tightening global grip on the possibility of architecture and design to operate outside the logic of survival and mitigation.Footnote1 As the environmental impacts of the climate crisis become apparent—3,000 homes destroyed in Australia’s Black Summer bushfires of 2019/2000 and 897,014 houses destroyed in 2022 by flooding in Pakistan, and the implication of the construction industry in sustaining that crisis (accounting to as much as 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions)—the call on architecture to respond is pronounced.Footnote2 A new regime of repair, one that allows the possibility of “repairing-to” the world as a site of comfort and security by repairing the world, must be defined. Charlotte Maltherre-Barthes has offered one intervention here, calling in 2020 for a moratorium on all new construction, a position that was re-emphasised by Joe Giddings in 2023 in the call for a moratorium on demolition.Footnote3 While different in orientation, what both moratoria seek to suspend are the effects of a carbon logic that makes dwelling complicit in the production of planet-breaking conditions. In so doing, each advocates for the material repair of buildings alongside the ecological repair that is made possible by minimising the construction industry’s environmental impact. Such accounts of repair, when read in dialogue with existing vocabularies of reparative justice and reckoning with the historical legacies of injustice, highlight the need to interrogate repair in disciplinary specific terms.
In looking to the built environment, this paper asks that we reject the possible equivalence of repair and renovation, a practice bound up in the logic of housing commodification, and locate the reparative dimension of architectural repair in the notion of “repairability.” Shifting from a language of repair as an intervention that reinscribes the static dimension of materiality to one of the repairability of the built ecology leads us to consider the way in which buildings form part of infrastructural networks, where buildings are not repaired in isolation, but rather in the context of a world that can be repaired. Qualified in these terms, repairability is not the same as the material repair of apartment blocks that presupposes the eviction of low-income residents, nor is it witnessed in the environmental certification of “green buildings” that are constructed either from materials imported from halfway around the world or from freshly extracted materials that reaffirm a logic of resource depletion and building from a tabula rasa.Footnote4 Repairability asks that we suspend isolated interrogations of material repair to ask social and historical questions: for whom do we repair and what qualifies disrepair? I offer some preliminary answers to these questions, challenging the regressive conditions of repairing what was by repairing instead to a future of productive ambiguity.
The paper is staged in two halves. I begin in section one by defining repairability, a notion that I develop largely from the writings of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Following Sedgwick and marking a distinction from material or technological acts of repair, I understand repairability as irreducible to the built, and with it the broken, form, but as instead pertaining to the networks of relations that constitute buildings as part of the living environment. Suspending the malevolence of the broken building as one that is in static or declining disrepair, this move towards repairability enables a shift in rhetoric from a response to breakage to the ongoing praxis of repair. The latter, as others in the architectural humanities have already noted, distinguishes repair as the ongoing work of care, to which I would add, the ongoing work of vigilance.Footnote5 Without a determined endpoint, repairability repositions the built environment as one in perpetual becoming, sustained by ongoing reparative interventions and as itself living, hence the necessity of the repairer’s vigilance. In section two, I turn to the reparative project of the Australian architecture and research studio, OFFICE. OFFICE is a compelling example within the field of repair-informed architecture. Their work is determined in accordance with their legally binding repair constitution, which obliges their projects to work through a range of different formats—architecture, design, construction, research, exhibition, public lecture, and education—for public benefit. Exploring the implications of this document as a response to contemporary criticisms of Sedgwick’s reparative project, first and foremost those of Patricia Stuelke, I highlight how OFFICE’s work with a Melbourne-based public housing estate challenges the ahistorical romanticisation of which repair is frequently accused. In this section, I argue that insofar as buildings are always in need of repair, the finished product of reparative design must remain ambivalent. To this end I aim to develop earlier accounts on repair such as Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift’s appeal to see repair as akin to the humility of the earthworm, namely as “the main means by which the constant decay of the world held off.”Footnote6 Rather than reinforce critiques of repair as vulnerable to an aesthetics without politics, I suggest that cultivating spaces of repair, as in the comfort of “repairing-to” the home, is the aim of repair. Against the disrepair of a neoliberal real estate market in which all housing is commodified, a vulnerability that is particularly acute in the selloffs of public housing against which OFFICE is opposed, the force of this paper lies its commitment to retaining repairability as a condition of the built environment.
It is also worthwhile setting out what this paper is not. It is not a reflection on renovation as a material intervention that reaffirms the house as commodity, nor is it a reflection on conservation as a function of national inheritance (a programme that in the Australian context is inextricable from the persistent disinheritance of Indigenous relations to Country).Footnote7 While the question of materiality emerges as a central concern in relation to the retrofit of buildings and the renewal of urban space in response to shifting demographic needs, here I join OFFICE in placing the emphasis on the political and social imperatives at stake in these interventions. What is thus distinguished as “repaired” are not the cracks in the paint or the leaking of the plumbing (although this may well be the case), but how these interventions align with a broader project of reclassifying housing as a site to which we have the right and the possibility of repairing. In other words, what must be advanced in dialogue with the literal repair of buildings and infrastructure is the degree to which such repair allows for communities to flourish and find comfort in their dwellings. Inasmuch as material retrofit of the singular building is undertaken by OFFICE, the account of repair that I see at work in their practice ultimately relates as much to materiality as it does to the structuring effect of disrepair seen in regimes of housing hostility and displacement.
Repairability
The notion of repairability that I am seeking to advance builds on existing literature that explores the social and political stakes of repair. Recuperating the Heideggerian inflection of Graham and Thrift’s claim that repair emerges in the “space between breakdown and restoration” and that it is here that it “makes its bid for significance […] for without that capacity, the world cannot go on,” repair can be seen as not simply an act on the world but a modality through which we relate to the world.Footnote8 While repair in lay terms is most commonly associated with the material labour of fixing what is broken or, as an ethical construct, as a way of exploring the possibility of reparations for past injustices—perhaps most prominently the “disrepair” of colonialism, slavery, and systemic injustice—a growing trend in repair studies (if we want to identify such a field) is moving towards a conception of repair that recuperates the labour of maintenance, care, and vigilance. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s work has highlighted the productive overlap between these areas, demonstrating that climate justice cannot be legitimately considered without a simultaneous recognition of the ways in which racialised oppression has been central to the production of climate injustice.Footnote9 His work complicates and extends earlier reflections by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the “entanglement” of climate histories, by Ghassan Hage on the question of whether “racism [is] an environmental threat,” by Max Liboiron in drawing attention to the colonial conditions of pollution production, and by Kathryn Yusoff in her discussion of geology’s “black Anthropocenes.”Footnote10 More recently, Indigenous scholars have cultivated the notion of “solarity,” an energy justice formulation that “repairs” by foregrounding self-determination and suspending logics of extraction complicit in sovereign and environmental disrepair.Footnote11 Adjacent to these projects is the feminist work of Shannon Mattern, Elizabeth Spelman, and Kim Trogal, each of whom create space for the alternately invisible and naturalised care work of feminist maintenance.Footnote12 Recognising the specific insights yielded by this literature, I turn to the notion of “repairability” as a way of recuperating the shared aims of its various branches. In their overlap, the ideals of progress and technocratic utopianism are suspended, allowing for the ambivalence of breakage and breakdown to become the conditions of “rebeginning.” Here, reckoning with cracks, fissures, wear, and decay becomes the basis of innovation, a potential now unshackled from the consumerist demand for more, here, now, and faster.
As these fields, which might broadly be understood as feminist ethics, decolonial theory, and science and technology studies are brought into productive dialogue, we are offered narratives of decarbonisation as decolonisation and of building maintenance as care. Recognising the productive intersections between the social and material aspects of repair offered in their union is central to the possibility of creating a more just world to which more people can repair in comfort. In an era of housing stress and planetary alienation, the political force of the right to repair in comfort cannot be understated. It speaks to the right not only to survive in the built environment but to dwell securely and safely in homes and living spaces. To this end, the right to “repair-to” recuperates the original human stakes of architecture: that it is a move away from mere shelter to the cultivation of place. As the indeterminate aim of repairability, creating conditions of “repairing-to” relies on the ongoing vigilance of the repairer to discern the breakage, breakdown, and latent potential of worldly relations. Learning to see the world as repairable is one of the primary modes by which we can “repair-to” the world despite the disrepair of climate crisis, rising seas, and a seemingly unending waste stream.Footnote13 What underpins the legibility of repairability is the desire to disrupt the status quo; meaning that the ongoing struggle to realise a “right to repair” is an overt challenge to the structures of planned obsolescence that currently organise extraction (from over there), consumption (here), and disposal (back over there).Footnote14 Suspending the cultic logic of production and consumption, the reparative project of repair—whether that is technological or social—offers a glimpse of another posterity, as one that is not defined by the disrepair of today but the emergent potential of tomorrow.
Against the conservatism of certain repair typologies that entrench the same for fear of the unknown, Steven J. Jackson reflects that the work of repair is not to ventriloquise the past but an attempt to “occupy and constitute an aftermath, growing at the margins, breakpoints, and interstices of complex sociotechnical systems as they creak, flex, and bend their way through time.”Footnote15 Introducing the notion of a so-called “broken world thinking,” Jackson asks that we celebrate the possibility of living in moments of suspension and see them as the conditions of beginning rather than attempt to assume a position outside of the histories and realities that currently orient the world. This is the beginning of learning to see and think through the logic of repairability. Taking methodological form from the essay’s arguments, Jackson offers the directive that we consider what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. Broken world thinking is both normative and ontological, in the sense that it makes claims about the nature of technology and its relationship to broader social worlds, some of which may differ from deep-rooted cultural assumptions. But it is also empirical and methodological, an argument and provocation towards doing new and different kinds of research, and new and different kinds of politics, in media and technology studies today.Footnote16
In an age of planetary disrepair and the irreversible “breaks” posed by climate change, Jackson’s essay offers a compelling narrative in how to think the conditions of action today. However, almost twenty years before Jackson’s essay, Sedgwick introduced the idea of “reparative reading.”Footnote17 Indeed, it is her to her 1990s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You” to which we can date the “reparative turn” in critical theory from which the architectural humanities have since articulated their own philosophically rigorous account of repair.Footnote18 For this reason, I want to suggest that for the sake of our own practice of repair that we look back to Sedgwick ahead of any substantive reading of Jackson and those others following in her wake.
Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading is particularly compelling, emerging out of her engagement with and witnessing of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Against what she saw at the time as the dominant trends in critical theory to think with “suspicion” and “paranoia,” Sedgwick offered repair as a function of thinking that would move outside the logics set down by normative society and our suspicion of it. What this looked like in practice for Sedgwick was pursuit of a mode of thinking that was not determined by the precise conditions of violence around the AIDS epidemic and that in many ways sustained the epidemic, but by thinking through and with the modes of resistance and imagination that maintained impacted communities. Rather than negate the violence that they experienced or absolve those responsible for the perpetuation of violence through the omission of education, protection, or care, Sedgwick offered repair as a way of moving towards a different future. In so doing, she refused the dismissal of resistance as a mutable externality. And so, even where resistance is kept at bay by power structures, Sedgwick saw historical potentials within it. In other words, what she “repaired-to,” in the precise sense of seeking comfort in, was the possibility of a future not determined by the claims of particular histories of violent exclusion and hostility to a natural linearity. Instead, she rejected the move from a normative position that diagnoses “this is how it is” to the naturalised and suspicious position “they say this is how it always is (and consequently, always will be).” Insisting that the future can be repaired to and built up out of the practices that dominant cultures have avowed not to sustain, Sedgwick sought out a future that was neither predetermined nor inevitable but always open to a renewed interrogation.
What I am calling Sedgwick’s invitation to “repair-to the future” in the sense of seeking comfort in the sanctity of something that sustains us—“repairing to the home/the house of worship/the comfort of the family”—is developed today into the language of care ethics. Indeed, it is worth noting that Jackson writes in his paper that what repair references is the “routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.”Footnote19 Part of Sedgwick’s insistence on repairing-to something that remains uncertain then is the labour of not forgetting the responsibility we all share in creating a world to which we might repair. As in Jackson’s case, Sedgwick asks that we stay with the conditions of breakage and breakdown that sustain the work of repair as part of the possibility of repairing-to another future. Living in this way reorients the temporal framework of repair as determined by a broken past and suspends the logic of urgency that frequently accompanies responses to breakage or breakdown. Repair instead becomes a function of the present, which is held open against claims of the past in order to insist on other futures. When Jackson thus describes repair as occupying an “aftermath,” he is inviting a renewed consideration of the way in which the old and new layer together. Given the inherently unfinishable nature of repair, by looking at the world as repairable and seeing it as one to which we might repair as a site of comfort, repairability demarcates a condition of open possibility. And yet, as much as we might aspire to a possible future of repair, repair itself is entangled with the violence of disrepair. It is, to this end, a fundamentally historical and specific project, one that attends to a particular violence even as it bids for an undetermined future. In the move towards this possibility, a reckoning with, without a reduction to, disrepair must be paid.
Reckoning with Disrepair
As much as Sedgwick outlines a reparative project that aspires towards an alternative posterity and hence proclaims the possibility of history’s redemption in and as the future, it is not without its own critique. While suspicion of repair is legitimate, particularly when repair is deployed in the revival of a problematic past or to exclude the emergence of the new, alternative, or deviant, Patricia Stuelke’s criticism of Sedgwick is more precise. Ahead of my consideration of OFFICE, the Melbourne-based architecture and research studio whose work I argue captures the political claims of repairability, Stuelke’s reflection on the emergence of repair studies in the wake of Sedgwick’s intervention highlights the dangers of blindly advancing towards the supposed ethical redemption that repair claims to offer. Her critique is threefold. She argues firstly that Sedgwick’s reparative reading presupposes the immanent and shared legibility of violent mechanisms, a claim that risks moving to repair without pausing to question the often-opaque forms of structural violence that critique might first be required to expose. At the expense of such critique, Stuelke shows that repair risks divesting itself of its own historicity, moving towards an idealistic realm that is untethered from the conditions of its own production. Repair, Stuelke wants to suggest in a manner that echoes precisely those historical writings of Chakrabarty, Hage, Liboiron, and Yusoff alluded to in the introduction, must be entangled in disrepair. Indeed, it is this second critique of repair’s ahistoricity, combined with Stuelke’s final critique of repair’s overinvestment in pleasure that becomes her most damning indictment of reparative reading: its vulnerability to operating in collusion with the mechanisms of violence against which it was first sought. She writes in the introduction to her text, tellingly entitled The Ruse of Repair, that
without grappling with such entanglements, the widespread commitment to the reparative—often recognisable by way of its earnest commitment to making room for pleasure and amelioration, in its celebration of survival strategies and coping mechanisms as beautiful seeds of that which might one day, in the future, save the world—can sometimes seem to stave off the difficult work of imagining possible worlds that break definitively with this one; instead allegiance to the methods people use to survive things as they are becomes a form of solidarity.Footnote20
The risk cannot be overstated. In moving towards a reparative future, one that is inherently ambivalent and indeterminate, repair risks depoliticising its own aesthetic regime. Exposed as a hollow intervention, Stuelke returns to the historical period of Sedgwick’s writings, and shows where and how repair became implicated in the neo-liberalisation of those same social ills—anti-queer rhetoric, war, sexism, and settler-colonialism—that it first sought to challenge.
Before I contend with the accusation that Stuelke poses, it is worth pausing to consider a related argument. Responding to a similar political reality, Bonnie Honig describes the vulnerability of what she calls “feminist refusal,” a programme of action that she extracts from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of inoperativity, to an equally febrile form of collusion. Borrowing from Agamben, Honig describes refusal as a regime that seeks to reject “instrumental and teleological approaches to ethics or politics” and yet that in so doing (and hear she echoes Stuelke) risks denying its own revolutionary function.Footnote21 Indeed, Honig shares Stuelke’s position that without interrogation of the mechanisms that originally provoke resistance, understood as either refusal or repair, it can be left “vulnerable to charges of aestheticism, purism, or passivity.”Footnote22 Here the hollow ethics of something like “greenwashing” can be acutely felt—without a substantive political programme and a critical response to material conditions, aesthetics become a- or even anti-political. Where Stuelke describes reparative reading as historically “implicated in short-circuiting rather than successfully realising attempts to break with the world as it is in order to create equality,” Honig charges refusal with seeing itself as the beginning and end of political action, a self-annihilation that effectively castrates aesthetics before it becomes political.Footnote23 Against this scene, both Honig and Stuelke seek out a project that responds to the particular forms of violence that constitute the breakdowns of feminist, queer, and decolonial solidarity by highlighting that break and operating from within it. In essence, repair must also break if it is to be reparative. Rather than exist as self-destructive, the conceptual break that repair poses is a moment of beginning. Inevitably however, this constitutive moment is fundamentally paradoxical. It is simultaneously irreducible to the structure of disrepair from which it breaks away, whilst also being irreducible to an instrumentalist logic of the future. Past and future remain both essential and contingent. It is this paradox that enables the past to be broken and the future to be engaged as a site of speculative renewal without historical denial. This is the fundamental thesis of repairability.
Capturing this paradoxical reality, OFFICE offer a compelling case-study for thinking through the intervention that a historical and reparative design might be able to make against a reality of disrepair. Working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin nation in a country founded on the fiction of terra nullius, OFFICE are a not-for-profit multidisciplinary design and research practice whose projects span the intersection of built form, research, discourse, and education. The practice initially grew out of an unfunded community engagement project looking at how space generated by the Melbourne sky-rail project could be reshaped. It developed into its current form as co-founders, Simon Robinson and Steve Mintern, began to reflect critically on how aspects of that work, specifically the impact of politics on urban space, was presented as part of design-based education. As tutors at RMIT University, Robinson and Mintern were struck by the lack of critical reflection on the relationship between urban politics and place-making, something that encouraged them to take their classes into the city—a reciprocity that is now reflected by bringing aspects of the city as politically determined into their practice. Embedded within the Australian context and set against a national history of dispossession where, as Libby Porter and Oren Yiftachel write, “the establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with ‘development’ and ‘progress’ … and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation,” OFFICE reflect the reality that any act of building repair must recognise its implication in the disrepair that is colonial displacement and structural violence.Footnote24 Indeed, the very question of how to repair a built object that is structurally equivalent with what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has called “the white possessive,” means that repair must be determined by its own historical entanglement. It is only this entanglement that disentangles repair from a moment, understood after Stuelke, of violent collusion. Reclaiming a reparative bid to the future, OFFICE’s work emerges from a constitutive entanglement with this history. Indeed, the studio operates in accordance with a binding constitution that foregrounds the reparative:
(A) to use the tools of design, architecture and research to assist in the design, development, construction and development of projects with a public benefit; (B) educating and engaging in public discourse about design, and issues related to it, through research, exhibitions, public lectures and publications; (C) educating and mentoring students of design, architecture, and visual arts; (D) supporting organisations and assisting with projects that promote the art of Indigenous Persons and other Specified Cultural Forms.Footnote25
How Did It Break?
The background of the Ascot Vale Estate project was determined by the Victorian state government’s response to the renewal of public housing. The Public Housing Renewal Program (PHRP) was introduced by the government in 2017 to redevelop what it had identified as under-maintained public housing sites across Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Tellingly this classification of “under-maintained,” did not disclose the buildings as repairable. Despite admission that same year in the Victorian Auditor General’s report on Managing Public Housing that found that the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) had underspent on statutory maintenance of public housing each year since 2012–13 by between A$4 million in 2012–13 and A$437,000 in 2015–16, the response of the PHRP was to demolish and rebuild rather than repair and reinvest.Footnote27 Intentional disrepair, in other words, was not resolvable via repair. The same report highlighted a lack of “long-term direction” in public housing policy as one of the root failures of public housing management and building performance. This short-termism was then connected to what I am calling the repairability of the housing stock, insofar as the report noted that a lack of reliable access to data meant that it was unclear whether buildings were deteriorating at a rate faster than they were ageing. In other words, it was a deficit of knowledge relating to the repairability of the buildings that produced them as unrepairable within the framework of the PHRP. The subsequent response to demolish and rebuild thus became the only response to a problem defined in advance as irreparable. Suspending precisely this paradigm, and foregrounding both the moment of reparative beginning that Sedgwick sought and the historical specificity that Stuelke demanded, OFFICE developed a project entitled “Retain, Repair, Reinvest.” This project would challenge the established approach of demolition and rebuild, “to demonstrate that it is both technically and economically feasible to retain the existing public housing, as well as providing great social benefit.”Footnote28
The study, which pertained to just one site identified by the PHRP in Melbourne’s inner-north-west, was the product of a seven-month long collaboration with the resident group SAVE (Save the Ascot Vale Estate), which sought to retain, repair, and reinvest in the site and what residents enjoyed about living there. The site was originally identified through OFFICE’s involvement with the Save Public Housing Collective, a grassroots organisation committed to fighting against the forced displacement of public housing residents. When they originally proposed the idea of undertaking a feasibility study on an estate earmarked for demolition, OFFICE were introduced to the SAVE residents group who were opposing the housing renewal strategy put forward by Homes Victoria. As they explain, “it was then by visiting the estate that we discovered the architect was Best Overend and the buildings were great. Key to these studies is being invited in by the community and treating them as our client.”Footnote29 In dialogue with SAVE, the study was supported by funding from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and underpinned by the research team’s commitment to ensuring housing as a basic human right. Through a case study of one building within the estate, the project was framed as a response to the desires of residents to remain onsite, to the rationale for demolition provided by the State Government, and to the heritage concerns that were felt in regard to the original Overend design ().
Figure 1. Best Overend’s design for the Ascot Vale Estate. Source: OFFICE, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 2022. Photograph by Ben Hosking.
Reflecting the studio’s binding constitution, the proposal challenges the government’s suggested paradigm of designing from absolute beginnings and the false claim that any building, particularly building that occurs on the stolen and unceded lands of Indigenous peoples, can depart from a tabula rasa. Repair had to be the basis for beginning. The proposal equally resists the idea that broken things can be fixed with merely the best of intentions (one of Stuelke’s primary critiques of Sedgwick) by asking what is repairable both within the site’s specific context and what is broken at the national level of housing and homelessness. Indeed, it is this latter consideration, one that builds on a now decades old intervention by Australian urban planner Kim Dovey that “despite the fact that trauma and family conflict are acknowledged as key factors in initial exits from home … grief and trauma are never examined seriously as key structuring principles of homelessness,” that underscores the proposal’s commitment to working with community and resisting a demolition-and-relocation contingent design.Footnote30 In other words, the project gives equal consideration to the possibility that material repair can cause social disrepair, ultimately re-entrenching mechanisms of violence that vulnerable communities are already victim to before the material conditions of their homes are neglected. The grief of being unhomed, as the communities and networks of support that exist in public housing are prematurely and forcibly ended, has the potential to have lasting and damaging consequences, even when processes of relocation that offer the eventual possibility of return are offered.Footnote31 This is one “break” among many that the OFFICE proposal seeks to repair. A central component of the feasibility study was ensuring that all residents remained onsite during the repair and retrofit process (), ensuring that the residents already living there maintained their right to repair to the security of community.
Figure 2. Relocation of residents during renewal process. Source: OFFICE, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 2022.
The broader objective behind the proposal was to present “an alternative strategy for the renewal of public housing in Victoria through questioning the PHRP’s rationale for demolition and quantifying the uncaptured costs and value-loss of the real estate-led model.”Footnote32 As I will indicate in the following section, this meant retaining the key structural elements of the site while also responding to the government’s identified areas of necessary improvement—creation of new or improved open spaces, improved safety and surveillance, improved unit layout, and improved cross ventilation.Footnote33 Following global precedents in the repair world, perhaps most prominently the work of Lacaton & Vassal, whose similar intervention in the Grand Cité estate of Bordeaux saw all 530 apartments remain occupied during a process of housing repair, OFFICE’s proposal is an intervention that refuses to perpetuate breakage. Highlighting the necessity of repair to operate on both social and material fronts, OFFICE share in what the 2021 jury of the Pritzker award said of Lacaton & Vassal: that they reflect “architecture’s democratic spirit.”Footnote34 Where Lacaton & Vassal executed a project with “humility … that respects the aims of the original designers and the aspirations of the current occupants,” OFFICE’s proposal provides an Australian exemplar, highlighting a common ethos of repair and shifting the primacy of repair from the aestheticisation of the repaired object to the ongoing labour of the reparative act.Footnote35 While precise and location specific, the project’s scalability is not limited by these factors. Indeed, what both the following section and the proposal demonstrate is the need for an organising ethical programme—captured in the title of the feasibility study, “retain, repair, reinvest”—to be commonly applied across different building scales. Breaking existing programmes of use, zoning, and conservation, the maxim reflects other interventions like the Australian-based YIMBY movement (Yes In My Backyard!) that challenges zoning laws or 51N4E’s project that saw a Brussels office block radically reimagined as classroom, community centre, vegetable garden, art space, and atelier.Footnote36 Though radically different in scope, what these projects share is a concern for material reuse alongside the demand that buildings bring life to the communities around them. What thus emerges in each instance is consultation as a reparative gesture that can be inscribed within the building and reinvention that breaks with the existing regimes of use (and later disposal).Footnote37 As becomes clear then, rather than demolish the Ascot Vale site, OFFICE sought to retain the estate’s original post-war design as well as its organising social principles ().
Figure 3. The proposed RRR refurbishment to 42 Ascot Street, Ascot Vale Estate. Image by OFFICE.
Save the Ascot Vale Estate
The Ascot Vale estate was originally designed in 1945 by leading modernist architect and public housing advocate Acheson Best Overend (1909–77). It consists of fifty-seven freestanding housing blocks (though as noted only one of these was the focus of the proposal’s study), all of which are variations of the same design. The blocks form part of Overend’s portfolio as modernism’s “arch-publicist” in Australia.Footnote38 Constructed during his tenure as one of the four architects on the Architect’s Panel of the Housing Commission of Victoria, which was responsible for the policy and design for state-funded public housing at the time, the flats reflected his belief around the intersection of aesthetic design and ethical principle. Similar to his renowned Cairo Flats, erected just under a decade earlier in Melbourne’s Fitzroy and heralded at the time for their “unsupported staircase, believed to be unique in the world,” the Ascot Vale flats demonstrate Overend’s commitment to modernism’s melding not only of form and function but of comfort and luxury.Footnote39 Overend emphasised the latter point in an essay published in Australian Home Beautiful in 1938, setting the stage for the political stakes inherent to the Ascot Vale estate. Entitled “The Desirable House,” Overend outlined two architectural imperatives that, close to eighty years later, are echoed in OFFICE’s reimagination of the site. The first is a qualification of his relationship to modernism: “I should hate to be thought a modern architect of 1938, as that would mean that the work that one does now in 1938 would accordingly be out of date in 1940. That would be an insult to the client, as well as to the architect.”Footnote40 The second addresses his commitment to comfort: the source of the modern house should be “born of the demand of the average home owner, of their healthy dissatisfaction with their previous lot, their desire for all the conveniences and comforts hitherto enjoyed by the wealthy and accordingly powerful.”Footnote41 Together, the two points address the reparative dimension of architecture as open (first) to (re)appropriation and (also) to the rights of residents to repair to homes as sites of comfort and refuge.
In the original Overend design of the flats, and in contrast to later public housing that advanced with precast concrete formulas, the buildings at Ascot Vale represent what Philip Goad has called the “socialist realist design approach of the Housing Commission.”Footnote42 The OFFICE feasibility study incorporates this spirit of pragmatic design in its response to the proposed demolition of the estate in terms of three value regimes that are overlooked in the demolition-rebuild model but that are central to the logic of an architecture that facilitates the right to repair as both a material and social prerogative. They are environmental sustainability, social impact, and heritage value. The new study refracted these values through feedback from existing Ascot Vale Estate residents, the structural assessment of the existing building, environmental and sustainability design solutions, energy performance targets, and quantity surveyor costings. Yet it is as much the nature of the project’s material intervention that determines its scalability as its progression in accordance with the studio’s constitution and project framing, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest.” In OFFICE’s response to Overend’s design, a clear conviction to maintain his original commitment to comfortable living can be discerned. Responding to resident feedback garnered through consultation sessions, the design was “born of their demands,” all of which were linked to remaining in place and designing for ease of maintenance.Footnote43 Yet it also engaged each PHRP rationale for demolition, effectively melding the quantitative logic of the PHRP alongside the humanist underpinnings of Overend’s original scheme. Alongside the retention of existing brick facades and landscaping, the project saw the introduction of a new lift within an existing stair core, increased accessibility to the community rooftop garden, introduction of two accessible apartments on the building’s ground floor, adaptation of two-bedroom layout to three-bedroom, new roof, and the option for private laundries alongside shared facilities (). Providing tenants with a degree of epistemic authority, OFFICE also conducted an environmental sustainability study to bring the building to a 5-star Green Star rating and 7-sar NatHERS average rating, thereby challenging the PHRP’s original claim regarding the impossibility of retrofit.
Figure 4. Original ground floor plan for Overend Design. Source: PROV, VA 508 Housing Commission of Victoria, VPRS 3157 Contract Documents, Architectural and Engineering, 29-689, 42 Ascot Vale St., Ascot Vale, 1945.
Figure 5. 42 Ascot Street, proposed changes to ground floor under RRR. Source: OFFICE, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 2022.
Figure 6. 42 Ascot St Proposed ground floor. Source: OFFICE, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 2022.
While OFFICE themselves note that the new feasibility study does not respond to the government’s initiative to increase private density on public land, the justification of this returns to Stuelke’s commitment to embed reparative ethics in the history of their production. As OFFICE note, private sell-offs, while intended to produce the profit that will subsidise the construction of public housing, are themselves part of the increasingly real estate-led response to public housing crises in Australia and abroad. Resisting the commodification of land that precipitates not only the decision to demolish public housing but to neglect and thus facilitate the justification for demolition, OFFICE commit to a practice of repair that brings systems of imposed disrepair into disrepair themselves. The resources required to justify why they did not increase density on the site brings the project into a terrain that is evaluated in terms that are largely external both to its specifics and to the broader reality of housing precarity. Densification does not respond either to resident concerns nor to the fact that Australia’s housing crisis is not reducible to supply but as the recent study of housing by economist Alan Kohler points out, poor government policy and under resourced infrastructure projects.Footnote44 What distinguishes this project as either successful or not might be better realised either through consultation with residents or, and again taking guidance from Overend’s original approach to the estate, through the understanding that what is offered here is not a design for 2022 but another moment in a design that remains incomplete. While the quantitative framework of environmental assessment offers one metric as to whether the design is successful, building on studies of relevant median house prices, public housing waiting lists, and population density, these kinds of analyses alone do not determine the measure of success. Rather success and limitation of the project remain contingent on the degree to which the estate enters into a public (and political) imaginary as repairable, whether the design creates a framework of analysis that locates it as capable of being repaired and of its residents as maintaining the right to repair in comfort to the security of their community.
To this end, it is perhaps designing for maintenance that distinguishes the project and its claim to success. While an immediate response to concerns from residents around the estate’s imposed disrepair and the government’s denial of its repairability, design-for-maintenance can equally be read as a way of challenging the implicit logic of (public) housing commodification. Indeed, insofar as the latter is premised upon a framework of increased return, and hence the presupposition that the extant will become obsolete and precipitate the new, disrepair must be imposed. And so, while the OFFICE project offers both a response to residents and a political response by way of challenging the systemic issue of disrepair, it recuperates the aims of Stuelke’s critique of repair: that after celebrating our modes of reparative resistance we not only intervene by marking the death of violent mechanisms but stay vigilant to their ghosts. At the same time, of course, precisely because the commodification of housing is not isolated to this once instance, nor indeed to public housing as a distinct project type, the work of repair that is outlined here is always already limited by a set of conditions that far surpass it. While no one architectural project can serve as a panacea—nor it is worth noting do OFFICE claim to be realising something of that scale—this paper highlights the fundamental condition of relationality and externality that defines the supposed singularity of the ideal “architectural project” as a definitive case. There is, in other words, no masterpiece or award-winning design that is not already dependent upon its relation to its own maintainability, appropriability, and enduring claim to liveability. Repair offers a humble mode of entry and reckoning with this reality, creating spaces that flash with repairability and with them the possibility of another (architectural) beginning.Footnote45
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Lucy Benjamin
Lucy Benjamin is a postdoctoral research fellow in architectural theory and creative practice at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. She has published on repair in a range of different settings including Theory, Culture & Society, Critique, and the Architectural Review. In 2023, she was a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. She has a study of Hannah Arendt’s environmental writings, Planetary Politics: Arendt, Anarchy, and the Climate Crisis, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (2025).
Notes
1 See Daniel Barber, “After Comfort,” Log 47 (2019): 45–50.
2 See “Australian Architects Declare Climate & Biodiversity Emergency,” https://au.architectsdeclare.com/.
3 Maltherre-Barthes’s provocation in 2021 followed the “global pause” of the Covid-19 pandemic. Critically, she notes that this pause failed to extend to the construction industry, which globally responded to the health crisis with appeals to “build back better,” where “better” was often defined as bigger and faster.—Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “A Global Moratorium on New Construction,” https://www.charlottemalterrebarthes.com/practice/research-practice/a-global-moratorium-on-new-construction/. See also Joe Giddings’s keynote essay in Architectural Review, which explored the called for a moratorium on demolition completed Maltherre-Barthes’s narrative: Joe Giddings, “Demolish Nothing: Densify the Built Environment through Accretion,” Architectural Review 1503 (July–August 2023), https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/keynote/demolish-nothing-densifying-the-built-environment-through-accretion.
4 In 2017, Bloomberg’s European headquarters, designed by Foster + Partners, received the highest design-stage score ever achieved by any major office development, a 98.5% BREEAM score. As Reinier de Graaf has recently pointed out, however, the façade is made of 600 tonnes of bronze imported from Japan, “while the exterior was clad with 10,000 tonnes of granite from India.” Reinier de Graaf, architect, verb (London: Verso, 2023), 66.
5 See Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, eds., Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Vienna: Architekturzentrum Wien, 2019).
6 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
7 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
8 Graham and Thrift, “Out of Order,” 3.
9 Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering reparations: Worldmaking in the Case of Climate Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222; Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
11 After Oil Collective, Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice, ed. Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022); Jordan Kinder, “Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, or, Indigenous Solarities against Settler Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 63–76.
12 Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal (2018), https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/; Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Kim Trogal and Valeria Graziano, “Repair Matters,” ephemera 19, no. 2 (2019): 203–27.
13 Hélène Frichot, “Wasteocene: The Dirty Architecture of Progress,” Architectural Review 1482 (2021): 6–11.
14 See Aaron Perzanowski, The Right to Repair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Lara Houston, “The Timeliness of Repair,” Continent 6, no. 1 (2017): 51–55.
15 Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Bocskowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 223.
16 Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” 221.
17 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.
18 See Robyn Wiegman, “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn’,” Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2014): 4–25.
19 Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” 231.
20 Patricia Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 17.
21 Bonnie Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 14.
22 Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair, 15.
23 Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair, 29.
24 Libby Porter and Oren Yiftachel, “Urbanizing Settler-Colonial Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 2 (2019): 177–86.
25 OFFICE, “Constitution,” https://office.org.au/information/.
26 “Everything we do is completely covered by the objectives of the constitution and it’s legally binding. If we don’t hit those aspects of the Constitution, we get fined with an enormous amount of money by the government, which is the whole point of setting up in this way, because it means that we can’t not work in a certain way.” Kelly Herbison, “‘The Politics of Public Space’: Interview with OFFICE,” January 7, 2021, https://www.vervezine.com/home/2021/1/6/the-politics-of-public-space-interview-with-office.
27 Victorian Auditor-General, Managing Victoria’s Public Housing, Victorian Auditor-General’s Report, June 2017, 2016–17:28 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 2017).
28 OFFICE and Miriam McGarry, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest: Ascot Vale Estate Feasibility Study and Alternative Design Proposal,” May 24, 2022, https://office.org.au/api/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/RRR_Ascot-Vale-Estate-Feasibility-Study.pdf.
29 Pers. corr., Simon Robinson, OFFICE to Lucy Benjamin, February 22, 2024.
30 Kim Dovey, “Home and Homelessness,” in Home Environments, ed. Irwin Altman and Carol M. Werner (New York: Plenum, 1985), 49.
31 A study of a comparable demolition-relocation-rebuild project in Kensington, Melbourne that was incorporated in the PHRP shows that only 20% of residents returned to the rebuilt site. The study notes that “there were a number of reasons for this, including satisfaction with the alternative accommodation, desire to avoid the disruption of a second relocation, the time taken for new units to become available, and the reconfiguration of dwelling styles on the redeveloped Estate which meant not all households were able to be re-accommodated.” Kate Shaw, Peter Raisbeck, Chris Chaplin, and Kath Hulse, Evaluation of the Kensington Redevelopment and Place Management Models: Final Report, prepared for the Department of Human Services (Melbourne: Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, January 2013), 8–9.
32 OFFICE and McGarry, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 1.
33 OFFICE and McGarry, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 24.
34 Jury citation for the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize, https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/anne-lacaton-and-jean-philippe-vassal#laureate-page-2291.
35 Pritzker jury citation, 2021.
36 The YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard!”) movement presents itself as a direct challenge to the conservative dominance of NIMBY-ism (“Not In My Backyard”) in urban planning. YIMBY groups first emerged in Australia in opposition to residential zoning laws in the Australian Capital Territory outlawing medium density housing in inner suburbs. Subsequent groups have emerged in other capital cities across the country. See YIMBY Melbourne, https://yimby.melbourne/. In the European context, 51N4E’s Brussels project in collaboration with l’AUC, Jaspers-Eyers, and Befimmo, reimagined the 1970s World Trade Centre according to a reduce-reuse-recycle principle into a multi-use and appropriable space across two original building cores and the insertion of a “Volume Capable” between them that would invite new building programmes. 51N4E and l’AUC, How Not to Demolish a Building (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2023).
37 In a similar manner, Emmett Zeifman articulates three architectural models from the work of Lacaton and Vassal, from which five architectural propositions can then be drawn in order to express the architects’ scalable and coherent system of values. Emmett Zeifman, “The Five Points of Lacaton and Vassal,” Log 58 (2023): 141–59.
38 Philip Goad, “Best Overend: Pioneer Modernist in Melbourne,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 6, no. 1 (1995), 101.
39 “Young Architect’s Triumph,” Herald (Melbourne), October 17, 1936.
40 Best Overend, “The Desirable House, with Some Thoughts as to the Source and Success of Modernism,” Australian Home Beautiful (June 1938), 20.
41 Overend, “The Desirable House,” 20.
42 Phillip Goad, A Guide to Melbourne Architecture (Sydney: Watermark Press, 2006), 159.
43 Consider OFFICE and McGarry, “Retain, Repair, Reinvest,” 25–26.
44 Alan Kohler, “The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and how to Fix it,” Quarterly Essay 92 (2023).
45 Here I am, of course, invoking the messianic flash of recognisability that Walter Benjamin attributes to the work of the material historian. See Walter Benjamin “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 389–400.