To tend a building is to design in consonance with inevitable change — and to understand this change as a desirable expression of material properties, site dynamics, inter-species coexistence, and the behavior of buildings and their contexts over time.
When we consider what it means to repair architecture — to repair architecture that is broken; to repair the brokenness of architectural pedagogy and practice — we find an abundance of vocabularies. The first entry for repair in the Oxford English Dictionary provides the most familiar definition in this regard: “To restore (a damaged, worn, or faulty object or structure) to good or proper condition by replacing or fixing parts; to mend, fix.” But fixing, we would argue, can mean ossifying technics as much repairing objects and structures; like restore, it prioritizes past states more than future prospects.1
In the context of architecture and all its allied practices, allow us to propose two apposite definitions of “tend”: “to apply oneself to the care of”; and “to have a disposition to advance, go on, come finally, or attain to (unto, towards) some point in time, degree, quality, state, or other non-material category.” 2 (Not insignificantly, the word’s Indo-European root, ten-, means “to stretch.”) Tending thus points to an understanding of repair that is neither episodic nor incidental, and towards a capacious practice that takes a longer, largely non-teleological view of repair-related acts that are contingent upon the terrestrial tendency of things. As Georges Bataille once declared, “A philosophy is never a house; it is a construction site.” 3 Likewise, a design philosophy is never a house; in our view, it is more akin to a tended field.
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- 1. As a counterpoint, we would like to argue for another way to understand the genre of repair in our contemporary world; we would like to offer tending. Tending involves practices that transcend misleading distinctions of “new” and “old”; that call into question unconvincing boosterism for “progress” and “innovation”; and that resist the modernist desire to endlessly impose something “novel” onto the world. Indeed, these habituated distinctions reflect little more than the dutiful services architecture offers modern global capital and neoliberal consumption. 1 In contrast, tending, as we are defining it, resists the very idea of newness. Rather, tending presupposes mindful participation in a continuum of contingencies and possibilities. It focuses on beneficial next states that arise from the inevitability of converging histories. At its core, the practice of tending means learning to anticipate next states, and to nudge inherited circumstances toward beneficial outcomes.
