Salon Talks _ On Maintenance

The S AM’s winter exhibition, «Make Do With Now: New Directions in Japanese Architecture» (12 November 2022 – 12 March 2023) shines a light on a younger, lesser-known generation of Japanese architects and urban practitioners who are developing a range of critical, ecological, and social practices that creatively «make do» – with limited resources, with found materials, with existing spaces – while seeking appropriate responses to the urgent problems of the present. To coincide with the exhibition, the S AM is collaborating with LINA, the European architecture platform, to organize a series of informal talk events bringing protagonists from this burgeoning scene into dialogue with practitioners from the European context.

Each event, which will take place in the workspace of a young practice based in Basel, brings together three practitioners working on similar themes in different locations: one from Japan, one the EU, and one from Switzerland. Short presentations of their work will be followed by an open-format discussion in which members of the audience are actively encouraged to take part.

Ideally, this event will lead to longer lasting contacts and new alliances among a transnational and -regional generation of practitioners working with the built environment today. At the same time, the LINA Fellows will gain new knowledge about the specific conditions and concerns driving building culture and practice in other contexts, hopefully leading to a more nuanced and multifaceted approach in their own work.

Salon Talk 3: «On Maintenance», 17 February 2023

The third and final talk of the series tackled the topic of maintenance. In architecture, maintenance – along with adjacent activities such as repairing or cleaning – is all too often seen as a menial task, the labor invested in it as somehow inferior or less valuable than the creation of something new. Yet in an age of degrowth and climate emergency, as architecture no longer just means the design of new buildings but rather the care and transformation of existing ones, perhaps the time is ripe for a radical revaluation. What if we were to understand maintenance not as merely keeping the status quo, but as a practice with creative potential in its own right?

This event, the best attended of the three discussions, brought together representatives of three interdisciplinary collectives working on the common theme of maintenance. The discussions were wide-ranging and at times philosophical, touching on fundamental questions regarding the role and responsibility of the architect in a time of climate crisis.

Participants

• Gaku Inoue, Arata Mino, Naoki Saito, Ken Akatsuka, architects and artists, GROUP, Tokyo

• Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet, architects, Truwant+Rodet+, Basel

• Gian Maria Socci and Rebecca Van Beeck, Space Saloon / The MAAK, various locations (LINA Fellow)