In 2021, the Society of Architectural Historians hosted the workshop Caregiving as Method to explore the role of caregiving in architecture. It was organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi of Barnard College with contributions from Jay Cephas, Lilian Chee, Elis Mendoza, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Itohan Osayimwese, Peg Rawes, and the authors of this series of three articles: Kush Patel and Delia Duong Ba Wendel. These presenters, whose papers were subsequently published, were joined in three panels — one each on the topics of Care, Repair, and Method — by moderators Can Bilsel, Garnette Cadogan, and Ana Miljački. The themes and questions animating the workshop were made especially timely by the pandemic but are, in many ways, ordinary engagements with questions of survival and support in contexts of social inequality. The workshop brought forward thoughts on caregiving by scholars whose historical work has been enriched, even defined, by their empathy for, and entanglement with, the care of others.

 

This article presents a transcript, edited for clarity and length, of the conversation on “Repair” that followed papers by Chee of the National University of Singapore (“Insinuations of Intimate Non-Histories”), Wendel of M.I.T. (“Unruly Sites of Repair”), and Cephas of Princeton University (“A Critical Closeness”), moderated by Miljački of M.I.T.

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In retrospect, it is clear that the presenters in all three panels grappled most centrally with a question that Cadogan posed early on: what does it mean to think of care as a way of pulling “something” closer, or pulling others closer to you?

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The dialogue that follows teases out the threads of an answer through bolded text. It is accompanied by a bibliography compiled by the presenters, that maps sources of inspiration for the conversations. We encourage readers to engage with it and the transcript below in any order. In assembling and emboldening those perspectives, this series seeks to model an act and method of care. It offers scaffolding for a scholarly commons: a means to read and draw connections to a range of work.