The capitalist economic system, with its emphasis on innovation, growth and progress, and its logic based on consumption, use and waste, has led to a ruthless exploitation of people and nature. The built environment plays a huge part in this: the construction and operation of buildings is responsible for more than half of the world's greenhouse gases. In Germany, no other sector consumes as many resources as the construction industry, while construction and demolition waste accounts for more than half of the country's total waste. There is therefore an urgent need for a more considerate approach to the built environment: instead of tearing down and rebuilding, we need to look after what has already been built and overcome extractive building practices.
This is where The Great Repair, a project by the architecture magazine ARCH+ in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg and the ETH Zurich, comes in. With an exhibition at the Akademie der Künste Berlin and further international venues, events and publications, the project presents over 40 positions from art and architecture as well as spatial practices that counter the creative destruction of capitalism with strategies of care, maintenance and repair. The starting point are everyday practices of care and examples of a more considerate building practice. The practices presented also point beyond the care of the built environment to ways of repairing socio-economic, geo-political and ecological contexts.
Alex Nehmer is a cultural scientist and editor at ARCH+. From 2015 to 2016 she worked for the House of World Cultures in Berlin on the publication series for the exhibition Wohnungsfrage, and in 2019/20 she taught in the programme Culture of the Metropolis at the HafenCity University in Hamburg. With ARCH+ she was co-curator of Cohabitation (Silent Green, 2022) and The Great Repair (Akademie der Künste Berlin, among others, since 2023).
Markus Krieger is an architect, editor and curator. At ARCH+ he worked on publications such as Wien - Das Ende des Wohnbaus (as typology). He was co-director of the publication The Great Repair - Politics of the Repair Society and part of the artistic direction of the exhibition and publication project The Great Repair. In 2020 he graduated from the Department of Architecture at the ETH Zurich. He lives in Berlin.
