An architecture project finds fulfillment in its completion: one could almost say that architecture is obsessed with the idea of completion. Whenever a building is built, it is considered to be in the state that is the best in.

What defines a completion is an ending. An ending can be read as temporality (end of design - construction – inauguration – life) but also via physical, spatial borders (by being physical, the architecture has limits). Maintenance is the aftermath of completion, and exists within limits defined by that: time-wise it works by reproducing and protecting an abstract image that via time gets distorted, space wise it functions within the borders that are given as a framework: maintaining as caring for a place we belong to, we own, we use: we need a place, hence we maintain it.

Our body is the first tool for maintenance, stretching to dust, during and over time, towards things to touch, to consume, to care about. It is also teh ultimate parameter of decay: a body is both the medium and the object of care.

When maintaining a building, the building teaches us its stories, it uses, its futures, its pasts. the ones we cannot grasp, we speculate on, or invent: the building will neither confirm nor neglect, but by embodying those speculations, we can test them and prove them right or wrong.

During a four months residency at Off the grid, in Cas-co (Leuven), we approached maintenance as a a theme for research and design investigation. Within such act, an image that does not truly exist is evoked and performed: as maintenance implies the assumption and knowledge of the original state, if that has been distorted via multiple alterations, what remains are suppositions. In this process, apathy and intimacy get intertwined, via the link that each time bounds building and body, hence setting and intangible and invisible mutual exchange.

An architecture project finds fulfillment in its completion: one could almost say that architecture is obsessed with the idea of completion. Whenever a building is built, it is considered to be in the state that is the best in.

What defines a completion is an ending. An ending can be read as temporality (end of design - construction – inauguration – life) but also via physical, spatial borders (by being physical, the architecture has limits). Maintenance is the aftermath of completion, and exists within limits defined by that: time-wise it works by reproducing and protecting an abstract image that via time gets distorted, space wise it functions within the borders that are given as a framework: maintaining as caring for a place we belong to, we own, we use: we need a place, hence we maintain it.

Our body is the first tool for maintenance, stretching to dust, during and over time, towards things to touch, to consume, to care about. It is also teh ultimate parameter of decay: a body is both the medium and the object of care.

When maintaining a building, the building teaches us its stories, it uses, its futures, its pasts. the ones we cannot grasp, we speculate on, or invent: the building will neither confirm nor neglect, but by embodying those speculations, we can test them and prove them right or wrong.

During a four months residency at Off the grid, in Cas-co (Leuven), we approached maintenance as a a theme for research and design investigation. Within such act, an image that does not truly exist is evoked and performed: as maintenance implies the assumption and knowledge of the original state, if that has been distorted via multiple alterations, what remains are suppositions. In this process, apathy and intimacy get intertwined, via the link that each time bounds building and body, hence setting and intangible and invisible mutual exchange.