Upkeep, Repair, and Maintenance in Adaptive Interiors by Campos, Amy; Schneiderman, Deborah; Suh, Keena;

Short description:

This volume explores issues of repair, maintenance, sustenance, and adaptation within the context of interior design and its histories. This will be of great interest to students and academics of interior design, as well as architecture, conservation, visual culture, art history, and those interested in the theory of the reuse of interiors.

Long description:

This volume explores issues of repair, maintenance, sustenance, and adaptation within the context of interior design and its histories.

The contributions to this volume celebrate critical analysis of past and present work as well as potentials for upkeeping the built environment, sustaining our histories and cultures, and maintaining our shared resources as we face radical shifts in the ways in which we inhabit the various spaces where we work, live, convene, cross, and connect. Chapters recognize the ways in which the interior has defined, reinforced, hidden, and protected servitude and repair. They offer an appreciation of the role of interiors to extend the lives of our architectures and the human interactions they sustain. Expert and emerging contributing authors explore varied topics such as Dalit cleaning as a practice of decolonial interior architecture, responses to pest invasion, cultural attitudes toward age, wear and waste, and creative repair, among many others.

This will be of great interest to all students and academics of interior design, as well as architecture, architectural conservation, visual culture, history of art, and all those interested in the theory and philosophy of the reuse of interiors.

"In a world with finite resources and with the demise of extractivist approaches with which to remove them, the refrain of ‘no more new build’ will preside over the future of the built environment.  The upkeep, repair and maintenance of the existing is an essential feature of these approaches. This volume provides a valuable overview of the thinking around how orthodox creative processes of the origination of the unfettered new are now reversed. As it states, working with the not new, cleaning, pedagogies of waste and the delegitimization of authorship in any construction are the only ways forward for a climatically challenged built environment in the 21^st century."

Prof. Graeme Brooker. Head of Interiors at the Royal College of Art, London and the author of ‘The superREUSE Manifesto’ (Routledge 2025).

"Upkeep, Repair and Maintenance in Adaptive Interiors is a valuable resource for design students, researchers, and practitioners interested in how care and stewardship shape the built environment. By probing often invisible forms of labor as well as the visible cracks that permeate life at all scales, the book makes an optimistic and timely case for thinking and making in a material world prone to breakage."  

Igor Siddiqui, Associate Professor and Program Director for Interior Design, The University of Texas at Austin; Editor-in-Chief of the journal Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: Upkeep: Keeping Up Or Working Toward A Sustained Social State  1. Move >> Interiority and Upkeep in Syrian Refugee Camps  2.The Merits of Dust: Remaking the Interiors of 8-14 West Eighth Street and American Studio Art Practice  3. Alternative Reality Creation as Liberatory Ideology  4. Francisco Toledo and CaSa: Cultural Conservation through Activism and Institution Building in Oaxaca, Mexico  5. Mixed Not Stirred: Diverging Outside the Confines of Racial and Disciplinary Boxes of Identification  Part 2: Repair: The Resistance of Change through Acts of Care  6. In-between Surfaces: the Fragile and Failing  7. From Making Good to Repair  8. The New Historic House: Mending Historic Space to Center Black Life in the United States  9. Moving Interiors: Disassembling, Reassembling, Re-Installing  10. Creative Repair: Sites and Strategies for Renewal  Part 3: Maintenance: Adding Perceived or Functional Value through Acts of Rehabilitation  11. Infested Interiors  12. Recipe for Disaster: Keeping Up with the American Kitchen  13. Dalit Spatial Continuities: Dirt and the Construction of Interior-Exterior Binaries in Colonial India  14. Upkeep and the Ghost in the Machine: Bataille Bursts Banham’s Bubble  15. Ruined Testimony: Rogelio Salmona’s Abandoned Vision for the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Cultural Center  Afterword: Time Is Our Most Precious Commodity