Washing, dusting, scraping, patching, and other overlooked acts of upkeep triggered Hilary Sample to direct her attention toward a subject at once forgotten and self-evident. The general absence of building maintenance in architectural discourse prompted her to urge a reevaluation of “terms like cleaning and preservation” and their “far-reaching implications for the conception, construction, and endurance” of the constructed environment.
Sample, a partner and cofounder of New York– based MOS Architects, offers a smattering of short case studies and brief meditations on problems related to this practically invisible yet encompassing problem. Many examples are taken from contemporary artists, like Jeff Wall’s large- format photograph Morning Cleaning, which shows a custodian washing windows in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, evoking the labor and attention that act as an invisible support to the immaculate Modernist site. Elsewhere, short narratives extract moments of maintenance from within modern architectural history. For instance, she describes the development of cleaning strategies for skyscrapers, from the puny clips that washers took to strap themselves, one window at a time, to the Empire State Building, to the integrated exterior scaffold of Skidmore, Owing & Merrill (SOM)’s Lever House, whose cleanliness became a kind of architectural symbol for the soap brand itself.
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