Repair Manual

“Many of the stories and orders of modernity … are in process of coming apart,” wrote the technology scholar Steven J. Jackson a decade ago in his essay “Rethinking Repair.” The shibboleths of “progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development” are giving way, he warned, to “fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown.” Today the exigencies of climate crisis are giving new urgency to Jackson’s predictions — and raising new challenges for architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

How might professions premised on carbon-hungry growth and consumption adapt to an overburdened world in which the maintenance of existing structures and landscapes will be more valuable, environmentally and socially, than the creation of new ones? How might the design professions respond to the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world?

This series is made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.