Upkeep, Repair, and Maintenance in Adaptive Interiors

Part 1: Upkeep: Keeping Up Or Working Toward A Sustained Social State

1. Move >> Interiority and Upkeep in Syrian Refugee Camps

Rana Abudayyeh

2.The Merits of Dust: Remaking the Interiors of 8-14 West Eighth Street and American Studio Art Practice

Lauren Drapala

3. Alternative Reality Creation as Liberatory Ideology

Nolonda Jones

4. Francisco Toledo and CaSa: Cultural Conservation through Activism and Institution Building in Oaxaca, Mexico

Amy Campos

5. Mixed Not Stirred: Diverging Outside the Confines of Racial and Disciplinary Boxes of Identification

Felicia Francine Dean

Part 2: Repair: The Resistance of Change through Acts of Care

6. In-between Surfaces: The Fragile and Failing

Susan Hedges

7. From Making Good to Repair

Andrea Sosa Fontaine

8. The New Historic House: Mending Historic Space to Center Black Life in the United States

Jessica Caldwell and Anne Coggan

9. Moving Interiors: Disassembling, Reassembling, Re-Installing

Anne Massey

10. Creative Repair: Sites and Strategies for Renewal

Keena Suh

Part 3: Maintenance: Adding Perceived or Functional Value through Acts of Rehabilitation

11. Infested Interiors

Evan Pavka

12. Recipe for Disaster: Keeping Up with the American Kitchen

Kathryn Rogers Merlino

13. Dalit Spatial Continuities: Dirt and the Construction of Interior-Exterior Binaries in Colonial India

Ushma Thakrar

14. Upkeep and the Ghost in the Machine: Bataille Bursts Banham’s Bubble

Cameron Macdonell

15. Ruined Testimony: Rogelio Salmona’s Abandoned Vision for the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Cultural Center

Juan Pablo Aschner and Mateo Pérez

Afterword: Time Is Our Most Precious Commodity

Sally Stone

Biography

Amy Campos is a Professor at California College of the Arts. She focuses on durability and design, and the impermanent, migratory potentials of the interior. Recent publications include Public Interiority (Routledge, 2024), Interior Design On Edge (Routledge, 2024), Interior Futures (Crucible Press, 2019), Interiors Beyond Architecture (Routledge, 2018), and Interior Architecture Theory Reader (Routledge, 2018). She received a BArch from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and an MSAAD from Columbia University.

Deborah Schneiderman is a Professor at Pratt Institute. Her scholarship and praxis explore the emerging fabricated interior environment. Recent publications include Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior; The Prefab Bathroom; Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space; Interiors Beyond Architecture; Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors; Appropriated Interiors, Interiors On Edge, and The Prefabricated Interior.

Keena Suh is a Professor in the Interior Design Department at Pratt Institute, where she teaches and coordinates courses across the programs at undergraduate and graduate levels, with a focus on interdisciplinary learning. She holds an MArch from Columbia University.

Karyn Zieve is Assistant Dean in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art & Design at Pratt Institute. She teaches classes that range from the introductory history of art and design sequence to topics in museum studies and the long nineteenth-century European art, design, and theory with a focus on cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, completing her dissertation on Eugene Delacroix, Orientalism, and Historicism.

"In a world with finite resources and with the demise of extractivist approaches with which to remove them, the refrain of ‘no more new build’ will preside over the future of the built environment.  The upkeep, repair and maintenance of the existing is an essential feature of these approaches. This volume provides a valuable overview of the thinking around how orthodox creative processes of the origination of the unfettered new are now reversed. As it states, working with the not new, cleaning, pedagogies of waste and the delegitimization of authorship in any construction are the only ways forward for a climatically challenged built environment in the 21^st century."

Prof. Graeme Brooker. Head of Interiors at the Royal College of Art, London and the author of ‘The superREUSE Manifesto’ (Routledge 2025).

"Upkeep, Repair and Maintenance in Adaptive Interiors is a valuable resource for design students, researchers, and practitioners interested in how care and stewardship shape the built environment. By probing often invisible forms of labor as well as the visible cracks that permeate life at all scales, the book makes an optimistic and timely case for thinking and making in a material world prone to breakage."  

Igor Siddiqui, Associate Professor and Program Director for Interior Design, The University of Texas at Austin; Editor-in-Chief of the journal Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture.