This section on block-checking suggest learning from those who routinely study buildings. The concierge provides for an analysis of the building, it is through his methods, observations and reasoning that we learn how people are involved with buildings, how buildings come and hold together, and how viable the hight-rise is.

The UK National Sustainable Tower Block Initiative estimates that there remain today nationwide 4'000 high-rise blocks built under the UK post-war mass housing program, homes with a potential to house approximate 800'000 people.[4] Some of these buildings have now been privatized and refurbished, many will be demolished. This housing stock has to be serviced and maintained be these through council employees, chartered building services or even resident groups.

But concierge and care-taker work is not only an important and significant investment for social housing landlords. In the UK, consensus on higher density and compact housing has been reached.[5] Policy makers and urban planners expect denser housing to optimize land use under conditions of intensifying housing demand, offer a range of environmental advantages and having the potential to offer affordable housing solutions in areas with severe housing shortages.

There are a range of architectural solutions to medium and high density living, and many of them restructure the ratio and relationship between private domestic space and the quasi-public (collective) spaces of the development. More shared access will have to be serviced, more residents will have to be supported, and denser – more complex and probably bigger – buildings, housing estates and the related urban environment will have to be maintained, cleaned and monitored. The work of service professionals such as concierges, doormen, care-takers, and wardens will not simply continue to be central to run urban infrastructure in appropriate ways, but it is an essential dimension of contemporary city life.

Attending to routine building maintenance from a praxiological perspective this section has begun making visible some of the 'seen but unnoticed' stuff that is so crucial for tall buildings and big infrastructure to run in appropriate ways. Although strongly focusing on the work of the concierge, this section ends up being also a small project about alternate ways of looking at and writing about buildings. This not to say that there is no text highlighting the importance of repair and maintenance and emphasising how the afterlife of building was neglected and overlooked in many ways. Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn: What Happens after they are built"[6] is certainly the most idiosyncratic piece of writing in this regard. Brand's book is a marvelous archive of carefully arranged and dated photo sequences, illustrating various states of buildings in time and how buildings change through repair, maintenance, demolition and decay.

The approach presented in this paper certainly adds to this literature in that it has a concern for explicicating what the verbal, gestural, technological and material resources are that building workers use to either induce a passage from one state of the building to the next or to keep up the state of a building.

But strictly speaking it also works against this type of account. The videograms in this paper demonstrate that concierges and probably others, who work and live in such buildings, do not orient to and address states of buildings. Rather than to a static object it is very clear that concierges are assessing and managing incidents, while being concerned with progressing their work. The concierge practices a living building, an architectural drama that is performed simultaneously by the never-ending interruptions, troubles, disturbances and the answers he finds to these problems.