Decay, Maintenance and Repair Symposium - Session One

Abstract

Kate Irvin - TITLE: "Repair and Design Futures: Lessons from Mended Textiles". This presentation explores the lessons that worldwide practices of mending offer designers today, moving from historic objects, the maker’s hand, and the care taken in the creation and life extension of singular, meaningfully crafted functional objects to overarching concerns of environmental and societal repair evident in contemporary design projects and proposals. Past practices of textile repair from around the globe will be explored alongside innovative design projects that are illuminated and electrified by their example. In this context repair is extolled and framed both as a localized, concrete mending practice applied to beloved textiles, and as something much larger—as a global meta-concept functioning as a palliative aid to environmental and socio-political tears and ruptures.

Claire Weisz - TITLE: "Maintaining Work: Recycling the Architecture of Past Industry".

Lynnette Widder - TITLE: "Döllgast and Domoto: Two Case Studies in Architecture and Repair". When repairing a building, an architect’s ability to define the boundary between old and new may require the repression of technique in order to maintain the standard of authenticity. Munich architect Hans Döllgast’s renovation of the Alte Pinakothek Museum (1946-73) illustrates this conflict. Its celebration as a masterpiece of postwar reconstruction represses the technology behind its reconstruction. A revised reading of the Alte Pinakothek would instead see its technical components as important contributors to its value as memorial and monument. The same struggle takes on another dimension when concerns derived from sustainability practice are taken seriously. In my own practice, the three-year renovation of Japanese-American architect Kaneji Domoto’s 1949-50 Lurie House, a focus on tempering, daylighting and air-tighting restored the building’s environmental responsiveness and enhanced the building’s original spatial structure as well.