Seminar ‘Maintaining. Architecture and maintenance, what we care about’
Insurance and Maintenance:
from vanishing line to breaking point
The focus of this third session is on the expert and the insurer. The session will provide an opportunity for the crossing of narratives and for a shifting of the gaze of practitioners as well as researchers.
Guest speakers:
Ludovic Patouret, expert engineer / cabinet GECAMEX (technical and financial construction litigation)
Michel Klein, Deputy General Manager, Mutuelle des Architectes Français assurances (MAF)
When it comes to architectural structures, insurance is probably more self-evident than maintenance. What does this preference tell us?
Insurance is an intransitive response to the client’s dual demand for zero risk and zero maintenance. It shapes our perception of reality (Anne Dufourmantelle, 2014, Eloge du risque). Like a translucent, protective film affixed to the envelope when the building is handed over to the client, the ten-year and structural damage insurance policies — unwittingly — contribute to making maintenance invisible and masking the need for it.
By mapping the contours of risk and operating within its boundaries, the insurance mechanism renders the future predictable in mathematical terms: insurance creates a horizon and defines a territory, providing the exposed activity of the architect with relative stability and a secure playground in an uncertain, ever-changing world.
Maintenance, on the other hand, remains outside the realm of design. It belongs to the realms of the unforeseeable and the invisible. It blurs the contours and disturbs the horizon that is projected onto the structure. Maintenance lifts the veil to reveal, in an imprecise chiaroscuro, the materiality of risk and the possibility of breaking points beyond probabilistic vanishing lines.
Assigned by the insurer to confront the test of reality, to investigate, analyze and formulate hypotheses of causality, the expert undoubtedly shares with the maintainer the same sensitive experience of the building’s otherness, a way of approaching structures in a singular dialogue with materials and technical arrangements. By stepping into the fold of techniques (B. Latour, 2011), the expert becomes both the witness of any form of alteration to the structure and the interpreter of the relationships woven around it, unfolding the mechanisms of attribution, regulation and organization put in place as the structure shapes its own mode of existence.
Date: Thursday, June 12, 5 to 7 p.m.
Venue: Agence SCAU – 35 rue Tournefort, Paris 5e
Participation is free but registration is required. Please register here.
Attendance is limited. Kindly let us know if you are unable to attend.
The seminar will be held in French.
Photo : Wim Wenders, Perfect days, 2023, Master Mind.
Organized by architectural agency SCAU and Jérôme Denis.
Learn more about the seminar’s objectives