Maintenance
Maintaining buildings avoids the need to create more. It keeps value in communities, resources in buildings, carbon in the ground, and creates economic activity where the jobs are forever, local, and not boom-and-bust.
Looking after what we have honours the craft and skill of those who went before, it preserves our stories as communities, and makes people feel valued, retaining social fabric into the future.
Our maintenance plans look beyond the physicality of the building. Our Planned Preventative Maintenance Plans - the heart of the Building Passport - connect the building owner to sustainable supply chains, propose regenerative business plans, identify funding, shoew net-carbon impacts of making changes, and map to Feasibility Studies which look into changes and improvements to the building to help it adapt to the changing world around it.
A world which cares for materials needs new roles. This comic investigates what they might be: https://www.zozozosia.com/portfolios/architecture-without-extraction/
The Shearing Layers model shows us why we do it. This diagram shows the average embodied carbon by layer. It could equally show the social investment, or financial. A century of cheap energy has encouraged the idea that our materials are cheap and not to be valued or looked after. Understanding material lifespan, designing for adaptability, for maintenance, and for deconstruction can have wonderful impacts.