Broken World Building examines how repair, care and adaptation can lead to a new conceptualisation of architectural production. By challenging building completion as a single end-point for design, the international symposium asks how actions of care and repair can form the basis of a new critical sustainability discourse.
The symposium brings together novel interdisciplinary perspectives from practice and theory to discuss the foundations of this emerging discourse. By framing ideas of fragility and impermanence as novel axioms for architectural production, we ask how we can imagine building as an expanded process of continual construction. The symposium is structured across three key questions:
Broken World Building: Framing fragility and impermanence as new questions for architecture
Architecture is traditionally cast in the image of the permanent and durable. How can new discourse informed by limited life-spans, circularity and reuse challenge the foundations of architectural thinking?
Material Value: Care & Repair as practices of circular construction
Care and repair are key principles of the circular design framework conceptualised through processes of material cascading (the practices of refitting, reusing, repairing, and recycling materials). But current industrial building practice cast these as consequences of failure. How can new frameworks allow us to understand care and repair as constructive middle-points and fundamentally integrated with design practice?
Material Practice: Design for Repair & the ideation of continual construction
Care and repair are mainly performed outside the pretext of design and by actors removed from the initial process of fabrication. How can we learn from existing processes of care and repair through the specifics of surveying, building pathology and remediation, and how can these be translated into languages of design and processes of fabrication?
The symposium presents a wide spectrum of keynote presentations and case studies exploring the emergent vocabulary of care and repair. From theoretical overviews to real-world practical cases and speculative arts-based presentations, all contribute their unique perspectives on broken world thinking and fragility in architecture from material, societal, social and technological perspectives across the fields of cultural heritage, anthropology, self-build and fabrication studies.
With this interdisciplinary approach, we aim to conceive and initiate a new sustainability discourse for the built environment that assigns broader social and ecological responsibilities to architecture.
The symposium is part of the ERC research project.
