A reckoning with the maintenance of the built environment, a Sisyphean task

Abstract

Maintenance concerns most of the artifacts, referring simultaneously to the socio-cultural, technical and managerial spheres. Contemporary scenarios impose an overall rethinking, where key-topics such as tradition, consumerism, sustainability and digitization become pivotal in the search for suitable production models, between post-industrial and neo-craftsmanship, in order to have fresher references for the maintenance activities. In the construction field, maintenance is not limited to the objective of prolonging the duration of quality levels that only affect direct users, but also has important implications of a social and collective nature, in the case of both public and private buildings and spaces. Despite this and other specific features, the parallelism between building maintenance and manufacturing maintenance was fundamental in the last quarter of the 20th century, when the subject made its way into the technological culture of architecture, in search of references that could replace pre-industrial habits. In support of the theoretical rethinking of maintenance (an activity which, like the Sisyphean task, does never foresee a definitive completion), the article suggests some considerations referring in particular to the reinforced concrete: a structural material almost omnipresent in the built environment since the second half of the last century, which poses significant problems in terms of duration and not only. In conclusion, some possible developments are presented, distinguishing between newly constructed and existing reinforced concrete constructions.