Riwaq | Theaster Gates | Demas Nwoko | Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng | Adam Khan Architects | AgwA | Architecten Jan de Vylder Inge Vinck | Cooper Scaife Architects | Kader Attia | Edgar Mazo
Like the built-in obsolescence of household appliances, intended to encourage continued consumption rather than repair, buildings are designed with a use-by date. Reuse and restoration can break this cycle; the surreal reinvention of a convention centre in Charleroi, Belgium, for example, challenges the capitalist paradigm of always building more. But the economic imperatives working against repair are powerful: in Ballerup, Denmark, Adam Khan Architects’ efforts to give a postwar social-housing estate a new life have crashed head-on with the demands of densification.
Architectural repair has repercussions far beyond the built envelope. In Chicago’s South Side, Theaster Gates transforms neighbourhoods in a blend of artistic practice and urban regeneration, while the restoration of historical ruins into a cultural centre in Kafr ‘Aqab in Palestine’s West Bank has created a haven for a community severed from Jerusalem by Israel’s segregation wall. In Gaza, meanwhile, ‘the process of reconstruction must transcend the replication of conditions that precipitated the recent surge of violence’, insists Nadi Abusaada.
Arguably the most urgent repair is of damaged ecologies: in Australia, the conservation of the landscape of Budj Bim is interwoven with the practices of care exercised by Indigenous people, and in Medellín in Colombia, a city block becomes a park teeming with nature.
Repair is vulnerable to co‑option by the very forces it hopes to counter; home improvement, self-care, and in many cases retrofit, are all ways in which the concept of repair may be recruited into the capitalist logic, unless the idea of ‘cheap nature’ is first thoroughly dismantled. As Lucy Benjamin suggests in this issue’s Keynote, we repair ‘by learning, first, how to break better’.
1508: Repair
Cover (above) Chenyuhan Zuo
Over three years as a student the photographer repaired cracks in the urban surfaces of Beijing, Melbourne and London using a staple gun. The work questions the futility of an individual’s acts of repair against the forces of rapid urban change and ecological breakdown
Folio (lead image) Bridget Harvey
The artist's MEND MORE offers a positive view on the role of repair in climate action. Made as a placard for a climate march in 2015, the words ‘mend more buy less’ are appliquéd onto an acrylic jumper, calling for a ‘reskilling’ of domestic labour oriented around maintenance rather than convenience
Keynote
Repair plan
Lucy Benjamin
Building
Kafr ‘Aqab cultural hub by Riwaq in West Bank, Palestine
Luzan Munayer
Essay
Rebuilding Gaza
Nadi Abusaada
Retrospective
Theaster Gates
Anjulie Rao
Outrage
Prague station dismantled
Adam Štěch and Jan Bureš
Revisit
New Culture Studios by Demas Nwoko in Ibadan, Nigeria
Immaculata Abba
Reputations
Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng
Tao Zhu
Building
Chapex convention centre by AgwA and AJDVIV in Charleroi, Belgium
Eleanor Beaumont
Building
Ellebo social housing by Adam Khan Architects in Ballerup, Denmark
Morten Birk Jørgensen
Building
Budj Bim Cultural Landscape by Cooper Scaife Architects in Victoria, Australia
Michael McMahon
Building
Parque Prado by Edgar Mazo in Medellín Colombia
Felipe Walter
Interview
Kader Attia
Kristina Rapacki
Film
Repairing Allensworth
Abiba Coulibaly
Books
Reparations as reconstruction
Huda Tayob
