Ignaz Strebel

The living building: towards a geography of maintenance work

This paper is concerned with the routines of concierge workers in a multi-storey housing estate: Red Road, Glasgow. Adopting a praxiological perspective, the paper focuses specifically on the work executed by concierges when they engage in an activity they describe as ‘block checks’. The block check comprises a systematic walk up and down the multi-storey block using lifts and stairs. As concierges swing down from one floor to the next, they monitor and assess the building, co-ordinate their route and carry out minor maintenance work. Drawing on ethnography and consensual video-tracking of the concierge personnel, the paper documents the architecturally sensitive and socially organised features of the block-check routine. Bringing such routines into view works against the static descriptions of architecture that can be found in many housing studies or literature on urban form. It is in and through the block-check routine that the high-rise gains momentum as a living building. The living building is both a function of the problems that the concierges encounter in their work routine, and of the practical ad hoc problem-solving solutions they adopt.

Houses of Experiment: Modern Housing and the Will to Laboratorization

This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social-science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuses on two examples of these housing sciences, tracing their role in the production of British modern housing. The first example focuses on a set of experiments conducted on ventilation and heating at Britains Building Research Station. The second example examines the social science of a post-occupancy study of multi-storey flats in Glasgow. The article argues that mid-twentieth-century housing construction and provision was structured in and through a laboratory logic that had a complex geography and temporality. In the sciences of housing conducted during this period there is a conflation and hybridization of the space of the laboratory, the site of the house and the action of the experiment.

Houses of Experiment

This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social-science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuses on two examples of these housing sciences, tracing their role in the production of British modern housing. The first example focuses on a set of experiments conducted on ventilation and heating at Britains Building Research Station. The second example examines the social science of a post-occupancy study of multi-storey flats in Glasgow. The article argues that mid-twentieth-century housing construction and provision was structured in and through a laboratory logic that had a complex geography and temporality. In the sciences of housing conducted during this period there is a conflation and hybridization of the space of the laboratory, the site of the house and the action of the experiment.