ii

iv

vi

viii

2

uneasiness — how can we work with what we have instead of making new buildings?

The thesis asserts that it is only by repairing the systems and processes of the industry that we can achieve the change needed to reduce its significant impact on climate emissions. While it is essential to pursue scientific strategies to make new buildings more ‘green,’ we cannot rely on technology alone to save us. In this spirit, the research takes as its starting point the existing — the ways we view, represent, design, and live in buildings — and unfolds as an interrogation and reinterpretation of these assumptions.

My thinking developed through an intimate and ongoing engage-ment with the case study for the thesis: my family’s home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, which serves as a sort of personal testing ground for its universal theories. The house is the subject of a practice of drawing which is used to consider how the representation of archi-tecture reinforces an insufficient view of buildings as ‘complete’ and immutable. This practice continues throughout the project as a means to experiment with ways of better capturing buildings as perpetually unfinished networks of tangible and intangible components.

The ongoing process and the accompanying research develop into a theory of more-than-maintenance, a way of seizing the failures of the everyday as opportunities for small acts of repair that do more than perpetuate the status quo. The practice is tested in a series of interventions to the house and then exposed to the contingencies of the real world in a public installation.

This document tells the story of the research, explaining in a rough chronology how my thinking developed throughout the year alongside the evolving representation. It is structured into six chapters which each incorporate discussions of relevant making, literature, prece-dents, and thinkers.

Chapter 1: Working with What We Have explains the importance of developing theories for reusing ordinary buildings as well as the extraordinary buildings that are the focus of the majority of the liter-ature. It introduces my family’s home as the case study of the thesis and recounts the first set of drawings, which are redrawn from the original documentation of the house.

Chapter 2: The Myth of Completion draws on Actor-Network Theory

4

the theory yet impossible to simulate through drawing. Learnings from this installation are used to articulate an expanded role for the architect characterised by a continual engagement with and retreat from the reality of buildings in the everyday. The final crit is described as a reintroduction of the theory back into the world.

8

Similarly, academics Christopher Grafe and Tim Rieniets advocate for the unconditional use of existing buildings as the resource for all future architecture. They recall a 1967 demonstration in Berlin during which students held a banner reading “All Buildings Are Beautiful; Stop Building More” to protest against what was seen as the careless demolition of historical structures in favour of mass housing. Grafe and Rieniets argue that today (as the postwar housing opposed by the students is demolished), this slogan should be interpreted as a “specific call to action for everyone who plays a role in shaping the built world of tomorrow.”9

Working with the Ordinary

Any shift towards the use of existing buildings is not without prec-edent. The discipline of heritage conservation has been evolving for centuries to define how we preserve old buildings. However, only a small minority of buildings are deemed worthy of conservation within the heritage framework. In New Zealand, the ICOMOS New Zealand Charter establishes principles for conserving places of cultural herit-age value.10 The value of a particular building is defined by its signif-icance, which is determined by assessing its relative worth across aesthetic, scientific, social and historical criteria.11 Heritage thinking has also served as the foundation for the comparatively recent practice of adaptive reuse, a process of “transforming an unused or underused building into one that serves a new use.”12 Although the adaptive reuse field does not share the same constraints as heritage conservation, it is still characterised in the popular imagination by the soaring ceilings and crumbling brickwork of vast industrial monuments.

The bulk of our building stock is not significant but boring and unremarkable. Working with what we have in the urgent context of the climate crisis therefore requires emphasising the ordinary as much as the extraordinary. This project adopts the ‘ordinary’ as its focus, a broad label encompassing all buildings that exist outside the

10

Despite the unassuming ubiquity of ordinary buildings, they cannot be generalised into a homogeneous block — their immersion in the everyday means they are highly specific. This specificity is apparent on a second look, in the way a footpath veers around a tree, its roots forcing a break in the kerb, the particular way it casts its shadow on a timber fence. Everything is found to be unconventional when focus-ing more closely on the expected convention of the everyday. I used photography and video to record these anomalies within the fleeting moments of daily life. These images illustrate the thesis and served as a constant tool to observe the phenomena explored in the research.

The House

I decided that to properly grasp the specificity of the everyday, I needed to pay particularly close attention to a building that would not normally be the subject of close architectural investigation. I chose my family’s home in the suburbs of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s North Shore. The five-bedroom house is large, but quite ordinary. It was designed by architect John D’Anvers in 1984 and sits in the middle of a 1301m2 site lined by trees. A brick veneer base is topped with two floors clad in cedar weatherboards and an irregularly pitched roof. Inside, the rimu timber ceiling framing is left exposed.

We have lived in the house since 2007, soon after our arrival in New Zealand from the United Kingdom. It is my normal, a space I have an intimacy with like no other. Every room is saturated with memories and slight changes are obvious. My familiarity with the house meant I could investigate it with a freedom not possible with any other building. However, I did worry that I would take too much for granted — that my immersion would make it difficult to see the forest for the trees.

I turned to architectural drawing to record the specificity of my particular normal, using D’Anvers original documentation as my start-ing point. Since the drawings had survived only in the form of poor photocopies, I began by producing a copy of the building consent plans and sections. These were identical to the originals but omitted the messy marks and unintelligible sketches of the scanned documentation.

Fig. 5. Detail of redrawn plan (opposite).

20

The re-drawing was made by tracing over the original drawings using a lightbox or a window, a time-consuming process that made me engage with the building in a new way — not the close familiarity of the resident, but the holistic vision of the architect. It was as though I was impersonating the draughtsperson who originally drew the plans, a slight iteration of the drawings forty years after the previous.

It was slightly disconcerting to describe in the detached way of the architect spaces that were almost, but not quite, those I knew so well. As I drew, I noticed discrepancies between the original drawings and the house as it exists today. A few rooms were slightly larger, a window was missing here and there and some of the spaces were labelled with functions that do not match their current use. Some of the changes must have been made during construction, while others had been made later on, sometime between its completion in 1985 and today.

I produced another copy of the drawings to reflect these changes. This time, I drew within the house itself, moving from room to room, measuring each space using a tape measure and then transcribing this information onto the page. While comparing the measurements to the original drawings, I continued to notice additional changes — the resi-due of the numerous families who have lived in the house, decorating rooms, arranging furniture, breaking things, renovating and adapting.

28

Modernes Frugès, a 1924 experiment in standardised low-cost hous-ing in Bordeaux.14 Over four decades, the residents made significant changes to the houses, adding pitched roofs and decorative window boxes, painting the exteriors and enclosing roof terraces and garages.15 The open plan and flexible space had inadvertently created the condi-tions for easy adaptation.

Fig. 14. Altered houses in Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès.

36

With a level of detail not usually included within the conventions of architectural representation, this new set of drawings became very quickly out of date. Almost as soon as I had finished drawing a room, something changed — a coffee mug moved, a door opened, or a dog toy was deposited on the floor.

These changes are not planned or rehearsed but unpredictable and elusive. They accumulate into continual and overlapping perfor-mances, with architecture the scenography against which these take place. But, as New Zealand artist and designer-academic Dorita Hannah suggests, buildings are not simply static backdrops but active participants in these performances. Hannah uses Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘spacing’ to describe how space is made by both the designer and the inhabitant over time, “whereby both are constantly recon-structing their perception of, and engagement with, the built environ-ment through time-based, embodied occupation.”18 In the same way that speaking can simultaneously describe and enact something (to say “I do” is to marry), the construction of space is at once a descrip-tion and an action.19 The places and things within and around which a verbal commitment occurs are essential for the action to be realised, suggesting that these do not simply describe but also perform as “authentic elements inherent to the event.”20 In this sense, the built environment itself can be considered to perform through the act of spacing — an “active becoming rather than passive being.”21

Completion

Buildings are perpetually unfinished, altered by and altering residents and professionals alike in a multitude of ways. Yet as soon as the turmoil of the site is cleaned up and the new inhabitants move in, a building is considered ‘complete.’ Our prevailing belief in completion means the life of a building after construction is largely disregarded. Brand describes this period as “the lost years—the unappreciated, undocumented, awkward-seeming time when [the building] was alive

38

Isolated in this way far from the messy realities of life, it is unsur-prising that architects continue to be “obsessed with notions of the iconic, the one-off, the monumental.”28 The climax of completion, when the finished object is presented to the client, is prioritised over all else. However, this prejudice cannot be blamed on architects alone. Our conception of buildings as products consumed by inhabitants is reinforced by the primary role of houses to Aotearoa New Zealand’s economy, which economic journalist Bernard Hickey describes as “a housing market with bits tacked on.”29 In Aotearoa 52% of wealth is held as property and the safest way to ensure a comfortable retirement is to acquire housing, which continues (almost without fail) to increase in value.30 The role of buildings is first and foremost capital investment — “houses are homes for people to inhabit secondarily, after they are a financial asset.”31 Mortgages abstract buildings into debt, reducing “the future and its possibilities to current power relations” and resulting in what philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato describes as the “strange sensa-tion of living in a society without time.”32 Outside of time, it is difficult to see buildings as anything more than static containers for money.

The house as commodity is traded on a flourishing real estate market and promoted with pictures of spotless rooms, perfectly staged and seemingly eternal. Like the photographs of the architectural canon, these images are sanitised to omit any traces of life, generically decorated and painted to appeal to as many consumers as possible.33

Since photographs of buildings play such a role in objectifying architecture, I began to look for ways to alter these representations to better reflect the dynamism of buildings in use. I collaged people cut from candid and street photography into local real estate listings. In one, a group repairs a car out on the street whilst an elderly lady welcomes guests to a pool party. In another, a man hides the privacy of the interior from the intrusive gaze of the camera. Worlds intersect, and it is unclear where one timeline ends and another begins.

40

Fig. 23. Pool party and car repair.

44

Fig. 26. Breakfast time stress.

46

My own photography in and around buildings became increasingly focused on those using them. However, I found that even introducing people sometimes failed to convey the dynamism of buildings in use. To add movement into these images, I started to work with an old video camera that my family had used for many years of home videos. I kept it with me as much as possible, bringing it out to capture little moments of unusual or interesting activity.

Fig. 28. Canon Legria FS46.

48

Existing Buildings

In such close proximity, it was clear that buildings would not be the same without the social life within them. Rather than being simply a physical container for family life, this activity itself formed an inherent part of the house. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has been invaluable in consolidating this way of understanding buildings as intertwined with society. Developed in the 1980s in Paris by sociologists Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law, it offers the foundation for an understanding of buildings as networks of relationships between actors.34 Society is traditionally understood as a homogenous entity with predetermined rules and structure that account for different types of action or behaviour.35 It cannot be understood in its entirety except by those standing outside it. Latour endorses instead a performative view of society, in which it is “constructed through the many efforts to define it. It is something achieved in practice by all actors involved.”36

Actors are “anything that makes a difference,” a broad category that includes humans but also encompasses non-humans such as animals or a building and its parts.37 This means that rather than viewing buildings as physical objects placed into a social or environ-mental context, we can see them as a network (and part of a network) consisting of interactions between actors (building materials, archi-tects, human and non-human residents, weather, money, regulations, etc.). They are what architectural theorist Albena Yaneva describes as “socio-architectural assemblage[s] made out of heterogeneous stuff,” perpetually unfinished and in a permanent state of becoming. Their making is not limited to the construction and alteration of building professionals but happens constantly by a wide range of actors.

From this perspective, the point of completion is merely an arbi-trary marker within a continuously changing network of interactions. Buildings exist within the world, not in isolation, and it is this world (or ‘society’) that causes, encourages, and enables change. Therefore, the spirit of ‘working with what we have’ concerns not only alterations

50

social significance over its material authenticity, rearranging joinery and flooring throughout the building to enhance its sense of drama.40

For the SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi reused an old factory as a sports and cultural center for commercial workers. Similarly to Flores and Prats, Bo Bardi considered the “preservation of the city’s popular soul,” rather than its physical fabric, the driving force of her work with old architecture.41 Before the project began, she found that local people had already appropriated the unused factory for their own recreational use, so everything she added

Fig. 38. Rearranged tiles and new voids in the Sala Beckett theatre.

52

after having each of its components replaced?) are ultimately unimpor-tant.44 No one is bothered about whether an ordinary building is still the same as when it was first built. This means that although ‘reuse’ is typically seen as an ostentatious transformation of an old building into something new, in many ordinary buildings it happens continuously, the product of an immeasurable number of small actions performed by specialists and non-professionals alike.

Representing Change

I felt that this quality of aliveness had great potential for reducing the demolition of ordinary existing buildings. It suggested a practice of reuse articulated through manageably sized interventions rather than large and costly transformations. However, our current means of representing buildings using sparse photography and static architec-tural drawings can curtail this possibility. We require a device like that desired by Latour and Yaneva, that could “transform the static view of a building into one among many successive freeze-frames that could at last document the continuous flow that a building always is.”45 I began to consider how I could expand my representation of the house to better reflect its constantly incremental change.

I drew two perspectives of the house that sought to illustrate some of the small, everyday change that occurs in the interaction between physical and social worlds. I spent time in the lounge and on the deck, sketching and taking photos of my parents repairing things and vacuuming, moving chairs and opening windows, and my dog Jasper rotating through his favourite spots. The fragments were then collaged together into a single composition using a combination of photoshop and redrawing.

Fig. 40. Detail of Lounge Perspective (opposite).