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How buildings age, weather, and decay -- and how we keep them going by cleaning, maintaining, and repairing them -- is rarely addressed in design studios in schools of architecture. What if we were to acknowledge impermanence as an emblematic condition of buildings? Would this shift in perspectives bring to our attention issues we currently overlook? What if we considered what happens to building in and over time? Could exploring different kinds of time and duration (cycles of use, rates of material decay, stylistic currency, diurnal rhythms) enrich the design process as well as the design proposals that result? Would this awareness prompt us to keep daily cleaning, regular maintenance, and periodic repair in mind as we select materials, develop details, and consider finishes? This paragraph is taken from a recent architectural design studio brief that introduced daily cleaning, regular maintenance, and periodic repair into the mix. In order to give these issues sustained traction within the studio design process, professionals from the campus facilities management department as well as architecture firms participated in the studio. The conversations were surprisingly easy and quite enlightening -- every one, including the students was invested in thinking through and imagining what lay downstream in order to recalibrate or rework their decisions. The proposed panel discussion builds upon and extends this conversation by problematizing the continuities and disconnects between pedagogy (design instruction), practice (design firms), and maintenance (facilities management). The participants are: Roy Decker of Duvall Decker, an award-winning practice based in Jackson, Mississippi, that also offers on-going maintenance and maintenance planning to their clients; Jamie Ready, a civil engineer who oversees facilities maintenance operations for Georgia Tech; and Sabir Khan, a professor in the College of Design who teaches design to students in architecture, engineering, and industrial design.
