communication as maintenance

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Steward Brand’s How Buildings Learn. It’s sort of an architecture book for laypeople. My favorite chapter so far is “The Romance of Maintenance” which is misleadingly titled. Brand explains the aversive experience of contemplating, then doing, maintenance. The rub is that so often, good maintenance is preventative. You don’t change your experience of the building when you maintain it, if things have not already gone south. You’ve delayed or deleted the chance that they’ll go south later. 

This super appeals to a certain ops-y personality. The kind of person who used to religiously balance a checkbook when that was a thing one could rationally do for oneself. 

For everyone else, though, Brand is naming something real. Maintenance is a drag. He’s also right to point out, however, that it’s a sneaky lifeline. Good maintenance can keep a building beautifully sheltering the people that use It for decades, even centuries, beyond expectation.

A thought experiment I’ve been running for myself is imagining my relationships as buildings and certain kinds of communication as maintenance. What are the mundane things I can say to my people, things they may already know and I could worry they’ve heard enough of, that might be the equivalent of re-shingling a roof, replacing an air filter, flushing a sturdy but aging set of pipes? 

My guess is that the words of maintenance fall into categories like:

• Here’s what we’re here for

• Here’s how to be great around here

• I see you

• When I see you, here’s what I see

• Thank you

-Eric