Repair is cool again in the design world. Inundated with the perpetual demands of a throwaway culture for ‘what’s new’—from the fast fashion industry to objects designed specifically to wear down over a certain period—sustainability and the responsible use of resources have long been a topic of contemplation for designers. Acting almost like buzzwords for sustainable practice, circularity and circular design focus on reducing waste in the production process, often by emphasising maintenance free product designs. Helpful in the short term, the label ‘maintenance free’ implies that a product has a defined life span; to be discarded once the model is updated. On the other hand, the circular economy also tends to focus on practices that work with recyclable or degradable materials. The work of repair and more importantly, maintenance are seldom highlighted when thinking about sustainable design. What does it mean then, to extend the lifespan of an object through the careful work of repair?

In a recent book, Katie Treggiden, founder and director of Making Design Circular, explores this very idea. In thinking through the idea of repair, she proposes practices of mending as the future of design. She argues repair work ought to be an ongoing process that engages with the material world and is, an active form of caring. “We need to hold the stare with what is broken, with what can be repaired or remade. The subtle acts of care by which order and meaning and complex socio-technical systems are maintained and transformed [and] human value preserved and extended,” she says, speaking about the book on her podcast.

This idea of preserving human value is vital to a world where commodities are reduced to their monetary or aesthetic value alone. Instead of encouraging new patterns of consumption (albeit towards a greater good), engaging with our world as it is: straining under mounds of waste, dirty and messy; presents itself as a radical act. “We must move past our disgust, to work with the dirt,” Helene Frichot writes in her manifesto that calls to think-with dirt and degradation; shedding the stigma often attributed to the messy work of maintenance to call for unconventional practices of caring for the planet. Looking at the practice of architecture through the lens of care in this vein: of maintenance, mending, working with and adding to the existing not only addresses the challenges of a resource-deficient world but presents alternate ways of thinking and doing.

Highlighting the vital and mostly indistinguishable processes of repair, maintenance and care in architecture and design, the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum in Helsinki present a joint exhibition, FIX: Care and Repair. Curated by a multidisciplinary team from Finland-based museums including curators Kaisa Karvinen and Jutta Tynkkynen, the design exhibition is on view from April 26, 2024 - January 05, 2025. With repair intrinsically connected to caring, taking care and being cared for, the slippery notion is central to the showcase which questions: What is cared for? Who does the caring? How is care practised?

What?

Ceramic artworks repaired using the traditional method of kintsugi, a chair designed by Alvar Aalto, used for years as attested by its peeling layers (preserved); the exhibition not only highlights practices that focus on the prefix re- (doing and then coming back to do again) in conjunction with our material world but the idea of ageing and the passage of time. What does it mean for an object to show signs of age? Which objects are allowed to age and gain value for their patina? What is discarded/demolished after a specific point in time has passed?

Often, narratives of maintenance are centred around this fascination with the aesthetics of ageing. The exhibition hopes to challenge this idea with the objects on display. Where a brass necklace by Alexander Calder is precious because of its patina; a Domus floor lamp by Paavo Tynell is regarded as ruined because of streaks on its surface due to ‘improper care’. In Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture, Frichot points at this very possibility, asking instead, “Cannot a dirty theory enable creative possibilities beyond mere aestheticisation - creative possibilities that can make a critical difference where it matters?” How does one care carefully then?

How?

“Maintenance is an active engagement with the world; following the dirt can [reveal] a profound relationship with our local environment-worlds,” Frichot writes, connecting the idea of care and maintenance to a larger project of care; an ongoing engagement with material. This not only involves thinking about what is being preserved, or repaired, but in what ways repair takes place. It’s an intuitive fact that repair work requires patience and commitment to a certain craftsmanship, for the artefact to last beyond the instant it was damaged. Sweaters darned precisely with intricate patterns, broken ceramic glued together with gold, these require practices that speak to the fidelity of craft.

Apart from objects that have betrayed their mended status, the showcase presents a set of architectural case studies to underscore the complexities and expertise required in the case of the built environment. An Alvar Aalto-designed silo that is planned to be converted into a centre promoting research on architectural preservation underscores that restoration can take place years after a structure has served its purpose, renewing the site for a new generation. The case of the Helsinki City Theatre’s renovation completed in 2017 highlights the sensitive nature of the work to be undertaken. Originally conceived in 1967 by Timo Penttilä, the restoration process required the production of special tiles at Pentik’s ceramics factory in Posio; to match the original facade design, which used tiles manufactured at the Arabia factory. The work of maintenance for buildings not only looks to reuse but to upkeep for future generations.

Who?

The upkeep of buildings, of course, requires constant labour to keep them functional. With maintenance and cleanliness (as forms of repair) always thought of in relation to dysfunction and dirt, it renders these tasks in themselves dirty, tasks that take place out of common sight. This stigma around aspects of cleanliness is further accentuated in how care/maintenance work often goes unacknowledged; the hum of a vacuum cleaner in the background unrelated to the other functions of a place. However, care, is in fact, dirty as Frichot reminds us of the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In her most recognised works of performance art, Ukeles performs mundane domestic tasks, granting them visibility and value.

Keeping with this idea, the exhibition confronts visitors with the objects that are used to clean and the manual processes involved in what is often rendered invisible. Where on the one hand, repair declares itself—in the thin golden line in ceramic, in the tape on your glasses—results of cleanliness are harder to point out generally. In the exhibition, posters from the 1930s to the 1950s delineate a societal obsession with cleanliness and the often gendered aspect of it, with ads targeted towards women and housewives. Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja’s photographs challenge this notion, with her bizarre self portraits involving cleaning tools paired with unfamiliar items: frozen pizzas, a hangman’s noose and balloons.

Where?

The specificity of the showcase is particularly worth noting. It underscores that the work required to maintain our worlds is local, rooted within specific contexts and cannot be abstracted while the principles remain the same. To this end, the museum specifically commissioned four art installations by locally based contemporary artists. The works by these artists delve into our relationship with dirt (through Liisa Ryynänen’s exploration of everyday office aesthetics); what constitutes noise and what background sounds to be ignored (implying an invisibility of cleaning by Helmi Kajaste and poet Petra Vallila) and even goes to question what is preserved and maintained within the walls of a museum (through Jessica Andrey Bogush’s alternative museum collection). Museums, after all, are places where maintenance work is most revered.

Adding another layer to this discourse is the exhibition design by Lauri Johansson; meant to appear unfinished, an ongoing process of restoration. The design further underscores the questions the showcase proposes around what is considered “good dirt” and the patinated nature of most displayed objects. A video work of the conservation process of a Diamond chair designed by Harry Bertoia for Knoll demonstrates the vital work museums carry out in the maintenance of what they deem cultural currency.

Thinking and doing dirt

Where Treggiden highlights that repair as a form of protest is trained towards creating a better world through acts that implicate community; of thinking and engaging with the material world and Frichot reminds us of the gritty, perpetual work of care and maintenance, in bringing these discussions to the space of the design museum, the exhibition in Helsinki vitally acknowledges that these issues are interconnected; ought to be part of wider conservations. An exhibition organised by ARCH+ in partnership with the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, ETH Zurich and the University of Luxembourg centred on similar themes points to the shifting discourse of repair work. Defining care, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher write in Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring, “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” Our ‘broken world’ demands that we (re)think repair as the future of design, taking dirt, decay and erosion as our starting points.

'FIX: Care and Repair' is on view at the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum Helsinki from April 26, 2024 - January 05, 2025.