Repairing What’s Broken and Breaking: Melbourne Public Housing and OFFICE Architects

Abstract

This paper is a response to the growing crisis of “disrepair” in the built environment. Alongside the material disrepair that looms in the wake of imposed neglect and increasingly volatile weather, another disrepair prevails. This is the production of a housing market to which we are unable to repair in comfort; from its financial inaccessibility and uninsurability, to its inadequate climatic performance, and, by virtue of its entanglement with the carbon logic of energy extraction, its ongoing complicity in the destruction of planetary conditions. These realities highlight the complexity of fixing a housing system that is both broken and actively breaking. In this paper, I recentre the reparative dimension of repair, as suspending rather than entrenching the old, through a close reading of the Melbourne-based architecture and research studio, OFFICE. Combining the reparative aims of retrofit and care, OFFICE provide an effective beginning in a programme of architectural repair.