We conceive of the subject of our project something we describe as a ‘building event’.  Our perspective on the highrises is to always attend to the multiple alliances (of people, building, systems, processes, institutions) that make, shape and perform a building. We call this ‘socio-technical effort’ and we hope that by attending to this effort carefully we might start to restructure the very terms by which we might know and co-habit with buildings of various kinds.

Concomitant with this perspective, our work has quite vigilantly resisted the constructivist force of labels like ‘architecture’, or ‘housing’. Instead always asking: what work makes these building events the way they are? Part of this has been to attend carefully to the social-technical encounter: be that one inscribed in the archive, translated into policy, enacted in everyday routines of maintenance, or performed through certain taste cultures. It has also been about taking seriously the agency of materials and to consider the social force of material characteristics: steel’s strength, concrete’s insulating capacities, or glass’s magical quality of transparency, steel’s propensity to rust, concrete’s tendency to spawl, how asbestos poisons, or how windows become dirty.

The project loosens the hold that both policy-linked and biographical accounts have over the highrise housing story [image_1]. Instead it inquires into the messier entanglements of people, systems, rules, technologies and materials that do the everyday work of keeping highrises together (making highrise ‘successes’) or pulling them apart (making highrise ‘failures’) [image_2] .