Towards an affects of care: a cross-national study of university caring practices during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This paper joins the conversation around care and maintenance through an account of affects of care in architecture. Affect and its binding power allows us to trace how care releases bodies, including the architectural body, into performative potentials – affect produced, exchanged and accumulated in care work. We present an empirical study across two universities (architecture studios) that provide insights into the complexities of caring and facilitating care by listening in to the multiple care-taking voices and care-engagements, within the context of COVID-19. We draw out the intimacies or bindings that are generated by and through such care acts in three interrelated ways: affective-material tinkering, stuttering temporalities and promise of care and its loss. In conclusion, we suggest how caring for a building is far from uniform and offer some future direction as to how an affects of care account can be helpful in studying diverse modes of (being in) the world of care in/through the built environment.

Resumen

Este artículo se suma a la conversación en torno al cuidado y el mantenimiento a través de un relato de los efectos del cuidado en la arquitectura. El afecto y su poder vinculante nos permite rastrear cómo el cuidado libera los cuerpos, incluido el cuerpo arquitectónico, en potenciales performativos: afecto producido, intercambiado y acumulado en el trabajo de cuidado. Presentamos un estudio empírico en dos universidades (estudios de arquitectura) que proporciona información sobre las complejidades de cuidar y facilitar el cuidado escuchando las múltiples voces de cuidado y compromisos de cuidado, dentro del contexto de COVID-19. Ilustramos las intimidades o ataduras que se generan por y a través de tales actos de cuidado de tres maneras interrelacionadas: retoques afectivo-materiales, temporalidades tartamudas, y promesa de cuidado y su pérdida. En conclusión, sugerimos cómo el cuidado de un edificio está lejos de ser uniforme y ofrecemos alguna dirección futura sobre cómo una explicación de los efectos del cuidado puede ser útil para estudiar diversos modos de (estar en) el mundo del cuidado en/a través del entorno construido.

Résumé

Cet article se joint au débat autour de la notion de « care » et de maintenance à travers un compte-rendu des affects du « care » au sein de l’architecture. L’affect et son pouvoir contraignant nous permettent de retracer comment le « care » libère les corps, y compris le corps architectural, dans des potentiels performatifs : l’affect que le travail du « care » produit, échange et accumule. Nous présentons une recherche empirique menée dans les studios d’architecture de deux universités qui offre des perspectives sur les complexités de la provision et de la facilitation du « care » en écoutant les voix multiples de ceux qui l’ont dispensé et se sont engagés avec lui au cœur du contexte de la pandémie de COVID-19. Nous décrivons l’intimité et les liens qu’engendrent ces actes de « care » de trois manières intriquées : le bricolage affectif et matériel, les temporalités bredouillantes et la promesse et la perte des soins. Pour conclure, nous suggérons que prendre soin d’un immeuble est loin d’être uniforme et offre une voie future pour l’utilité du témoignage de l’affect de « care » dans les travaux sur la diversité des modes (d’existence) dans l’univers du « care » dans et à travers l’environnement construit.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• architecture
• built environment
• care
• COVID-19

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Afecto
• arquitectura
• entorno construido
• cuidado
• COVID-19

MOTS CLEFS:

• Affect
• architecture
• environnement construit
• care
• COVID-19

Introduction

Recently, a growing scholarship on the built environment and its geographies of care, repair and maintenance has highlighted how design impacts maintenance and the performance and operation of care. Approaches at the building scale consider building elements (Macmillan, 2004), maintenance economics and sustainability (Martinez-Rocamora et al., 2015), while other research has examined the cleaning practices related to heritage architecture conservation and restoration. Scientific approaches to the care of buildings are commonly focused on offering economically driven design guidelines or quality indicator tools (Gann et al., 2003; Piaia et al., 2021). In contrast, in the humanities and social sciences, most prominently in the field of geography, there is a turn towards illuminating the invisible processes that sustain and maintain a building’s life poetically and artistically (Cairns & Jacobs, 2014; T. Hall & Smith, 2015; Sample, 2016; Jackson, 2014; Mattern, 2018; Weinstein, 2020), with a call for geographers by Moran et al. ‘to pay greater attention to the banal geographies of architectural assembly’ (2016, p. 416). In the past decade, geographers have responded by providing insight into everyday architectural spaces, material and social processes, and the politics of care and maintenance of the built environment (Cox, 2013; Juhila et al., 2016; Milligan & Wiles, 2010). Social and cultural geographers have considered the geographies of care’s expression through architectural processes – emotional, physical and relational – across diverse scales and contexts, from the home and small public spaces (E. Hall, 2013; Milligan, 2001) to local and regional contexts (Conradson, 2003; E. Hall & McGarrol, 2013), and cities (T. Hall & Smith, 2015). This article is situated within these discussions but is mindful of the practical, functional and efficiency of caretaking; it therefore contributes to this scholarship through an architectural perspective and joins the conversation around care and caring through the language of affect. It offers glimpses on the intimacies, attachments and bindings that are generated when bodies, objects (material and other-than-human elements) and architecture participate in creating diverse modes of (being in) the world of care.

In consequence, this article rethinks the practice of care in architecture through an account of affects of care. We present an empirical study across two universities (architecture studios) that provide insights into the complexities of caring. We do this by listening in to the multiple care-taking voices and care-engagements, within the context of COVID-19. This paper is structured as follows. Firstly, we introduce recent and emerging literature on care, caring spaces and cared for built environments. Secondly, we develop an account of affects of care particularly in and through the built environment. Thirdly, following the methodology, we present an empirical study of intertwined and entangled practices of care and caring that are generated by and through such acts with architecture. Three key themes are clear in the caring responses: affective-material tinkering, stuttering temporalities and promise of care and its loss. We conclude by thinking through how an affects of care account can be helpful for those wishing to study entangled care practices empirically in relation to our built environment.

Contemporary approaches to care and maintenance

Scholarship on care and maintenance sits within a dynamic and multidisciplinary field that explores bodies, processes, structures and forces of care within local everyday spaces and contemporary society at large. In order to place this study within such a vast terrain, this section offers a brief review of current and emerging trajectories of care and maintenance discourse at the intersection of architecture and geography.

Scholars in architectural and critical theory reveal how architects have neglected maintenance in favour of understanding architecture as an object – new, novel and unoccupied. By contrast, they foreground care and maintenance as essential for the endurance of architecture (Mattern, 2018; Sample, 2016) and an approach to architecture that is more sensitive to the mundane (cleaning, dirtiness, garbage), where ‘mess is the law’ (Till, 2009, p. xi). This includes understanding maintenance as part of an enduring bond between a person, a time and a place (Willoughby, 2013) as well as offering a relational, critical care approach that shifts our understanding of buildings to consider them as being in relationships with environments, people, flora and fauna rather than stand-alone objects (Tronto, 2019). Bates et al. (2016) additionally connect notions of caring as-, with-, through- and by- design (see also Criado & Rodriguez-Giralt, 2016; Daryl, 2016), illustrating the important relationship between care and design, as well as its historical neglect within architecture.

Offering a different angle on care and the built environment, scholars at the intersection of anthropology and sociology have drawn attention to the invisible racial discrimination implicit in corporate hierarchies where elites are mostly white and minorities are concentrated in low-level work (janitorial, custodial, maintenance) (Magolda, 2016; Wingfield & Skeete, 2016). For instance, Magolda (2016) asserts that janitorial staff not only clean buildings, such as those of the university, but are integral to their social life. Yet corporate managerialism has negatively affected them with job instability, underpay and a lack of appreciation, causing their civic disengagement (Magolda, 2016). This concern for overlooked care work and the labour of building maintenance that does not have a visible product, has been the focus for feminist and artistic-activist works on care, maintenance and repair. This includes explorations of the hierarchical imbalance between individual elites (white architect and client), and the caregivers who are forced to ‘improvise and negotiate [architectures] idiosyncratic orientations and accept its inefficiencies’ (Mattern, 2018). By centring caregivers, these works challenge dominant (white male) narratives of heroic innovation (Tronto, 2019; Ukeles, 2018; Weinstein, 2020).

Geographers have drawn much attention to the invisible care, repair and maintenance processes required across multiple scales (Cairns & Jacobs, 2014; Graham & Thrift, 2007; Jacobs & Merriman, 2011; Moran et al., 2016). At the urban scale, studies have concentrated on critical technologies that enable modern cities to function – electricity, communications, software and computer-supported work (Jackson, 2014); care of the social fabric of the city, including care for refugees and the homeless (Darling, 2011; T. Hall & Smith, 2015); and collective care that ‘flows through housing materialities, markets, and governance’ (Power & Williams, 2019, p. 7; see also Mee, 2009; Power, 2019). Consistent with this work is the argument that care processes are understudied but important since they are the main means by which the constant decay of the world is averted. Cairns and Jacobs (2014) explore what it means for a building to ‘live and die’, while geographers such as Edensor (2011) and Strebel (2011; see also Strebel et al., 2019) articulate how the small things that happen while caring (i.e. tripping over objects, falling over and making mistakes) can expose a lack of care, which requires the practice of architecture to account for loose systems in the post-occupancy stage that are ‘prone to error and neglect and breakage and failure’ (Graham & Thrift, 2007, p. 5).

Alongside these geographies of care, which relate to technology and the materiality of built environments, there is also the emergence of geographical work on the ethics of care, which maintains that ‘“care” is about more than care’ (Atkinson et al., 2011, p. 563). Explorations of what does and does not count as ‘good care’ (Cox, 2013) have covered human-to-human care, including often unseen home care, personal care for families, volunteering, community care services and trust (Owings, 2002; Thien, 2005; Zelizer et al., 2002), as well as the mundane sites and materialities of care, such as how care ‘come[s] into being’ through an ordinary chair placed in a women’s library (Williams, 2020, p. 4; see also Conradson, 2003, 2011 on spaces of care). Extending beyond the human, Puig De La Bellacasa (2017), advances Donna Haraway’s caring relationalities to highlight ‘messy relational entanglements’ with non-humans (2017, p. 76), while Steele et al. (2019) develop this more-than-human thinking through the notion of ‘empathetic care’ and the binding power of touch (of unwanted stray animals) (Steele et al., 2019, p. 412). Importantly, recent years have also seen works that shift Eurocentric care perspectives (see, e.g. Ngurra et al., 2019; Rey, 2021; Suchet-Pearson et al., 2013). They remind us of Indigenous caring, or ‘caring as Country’ (Suchet-Pearson et al., 2013), where care comes from places and their woven storying (Rey, 2021). Indeed, Ngurra et al. put forward a reciprocal caring responsibility: ‘people care as part of Country’ and Country cares for us (2019, p. 4).

While from diverse angles, across the research there is a desire to recognize the way the world and its structures are cared for and maintained, often through human and non-human entanglements, and create affective intimacies and bonding within the built environment. This article refines the discourse of care from an architectural perspective by tracing caring dynamics that result from affective-material tinkering, stuttering temporalities and promise of care.

Affects of care

In line with care and maintenance discourse, affect sits across diverse trajectories and disciplines (Clough, 2007). The affective turn within the social sciences and humanities has sought to look at the body, intensity, and felt experience rather than approaches where meaning, signification, discourse and power are key (Clough, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002). Affect is alternatively theorized as an autonomous ‘prepersonal intensity’ (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi), with an emphasis on the relational ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ between bodies (human, non-human or otherwise), as embodied practices and capacity (Bennett, 2010; Thrift, 2004) and as bodily emotions and expressions (Freitas-Magalhães, 2021; Thrift, 2004). While many scholars argue affect emerges through the psychic realm, others typically see affect as working through emotions and feelings (affect, emotion, mood and passion, are often used interchangeably), which are immediate bodily and sensual (re-)actions to other stimuli dispersed across cultures and time (Tomkins, 1995; see also Altieri, 2003). Affect has also come across in body and health geography scholarship. Our aim here is to provide a focused review illustrating key engagements around affective materialities, affective temporalities and the promise of affects, to generate an account of an affects of care.

A focus on affective materialities, which involves studying intersections between affect and new materialism, has offered possibilities for redirecting ‘our attention from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials’ (Ingold, 2007, p. 12). This exploration of the affect of matter (material affect) and effect of affect (affective materiality) is made possible by a raft of discourses centred on ‘materiality in-process’, including contemporary feminist and cultural theory (see, e.g. Barad, 2003; Coole & Frost, 2010; DeLanda, 2002). This thinking on new materialism is valuable to architectural and care discourses as it undoes the common-sense conceptions of matter as passive substance, favouring instead a conception of matter as actively engendering and characterized by ‘intra-activity’ (Barad, 2003, p. 817) and ‘intensive processes’ (DeLanda, 2002, p. 67). This produces a dynamic field of varying affects and, parallel to this, a space of affective materiality (Latham & McCormack, 2004, p. 706): matter, in this sense, is immanent and intensive. Unpacking care through material-affective tinkering reveals how caring is contingent upon and constituted through ever-changing relations that are both inter-active and fluid (Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010; Tsing, 2015).

Affective temporalities has been observed following a Spinoza-Deleuzian lineage where affect is ‘the change or variation that occurs when bodies collide or interact’; it is ‘“the transitional product” of such encounters’ (Colman, 2005, p. 11). Such temporal dimensions of affect invite understanding of affective formations and bodies sustained according to variable states of rest, speed and transition. These matter-temporal-bodies, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, can be anything – a body of sounds, light, a gust of wind, human bodies, all of which engage together in different relations and durations, and different speeds or slownesses (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 270). We use the term ‘stutter’ in this article following Deleuze (1994) in which he refers to the stuttering of the writer as a performative activity, ‘making the language … stutter’ through ‘an affective intensity’ (1994, p. 23). Deleuze suggests stuttering occurs when a language system ‘overstrains itself’ (1994, p. 26) and ‘suffers a pressure that delivers it to silence’ (1994, p. 27). Tracing affective temporalities of care through stuttering – amidst the changing levels, stringencies and durations of COVID-19 lockdown and its sudden relaxations – allows us to locate care and uncare, quite literally, through the built environment (through accelerating cleaning to forestalled care). It is in these stutters of care that the world opens up in ways that are not framed by familiarity, habit, scheduled practices or accepted histories and hierarchies but, instead, allow new relations to bloom and other caring practices to flourish.

Within feminist and queer writings, the focus is on more promising affects. For example, Woodward and Lea (2009) and Ahmed (2010) introduce aspects of compassion, hope and promise embedded in normative ideas, objects, bodies and localized contexts. Likewise, from an anthropological perspective, Stewart explores how the most ordinary things in everyday life ‘exert palpable pressures’ (Stewart, 2007, p. 3) – ‘ordinary affects’ that are ‘public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of’ (Stewart, 2007, p. 2). Situated alongside Stewart’s work, Berlant illustrates how we are attached to things in ‘optimistic’ ways (Berlant, 2011, p. 24). However, she also cautions that some attachments can be ‘cruel’ and compromising or, in her words, ‘an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 1). Such perspectives consider affect as a way of attuning to everyday ordinariness, conditioning and being conditioned by, the present but also towards a ‘promise of the future’ (Ahmed, 2002, p. 560). A promise, as Anderson affirms quoting Derrida, ‘must promise to be kept, that is, not to remain “spiritual” or “abstract”, but to produce events, new forms of action, practice, organization and so forth’ (Derrida, 2006, cited in, p. 89; Anderson, 2010, p. 175). Importantly, a promise is a collective, caring endeavour; it is through the ‘willingness to struggle with and for others’ that we can embrace a ‘we’ (Ahmed, 2002, p. 571; see also Anderson, 2014). This notion of care as a promising affect is fundamental to architecture and our everyday built environment experiences, as it helps us ground care in and through built structures and materialities. As Kopitz (2022, p. 39) proposes, care has a performative dimension whereby architecture – as process and structure – has the potential to be ‘understood as modes of expression to ascertain care as a value’. Such promise of architectural care operates through attachments and attunements with the everyday and the spaces we occupy, but also these attachments can languish, can change form, as circumstances change.

Drawing from these perspectives on affect, care work through affect in architecture is understood in this article as a site of expression and circulation of affects; their transmission and affection reveals the corporeal, sensual and temporal dimensions of interpersonal relations between care-workers, cared-for and non-human others partaking in animated and animating practices and spaces of care. Rather than understanding architecture as a ‘solid stable and reassuring’ object (Hill, 2006, p. 54), as a finished product that is handed over to the clients, this article attends to how a sense of care and responsibility is forged from the very instability of the building’s compositions which provides a site for affective binding (Ahmed, 2004a, p. 119) – a ‘towardness’ through commitment to the building, but also orientations of ‘awayness’, turning away from the building and its objects that need most care (Ahmed, 2010, p. 32; see also Ahmed, 2007, p. 123). From this perspective, to be involved in a building encompasses more than dwelling or working in it (passively), it also encompasses the active care (or passive uncaring) of it. Importantly, we consider these discussions by exploring real-life narratives from people who commit and care for architecture, bringing to the fore often unheard voices of maintenance and cleaning personnel.

Methodology and context

Caring practices are studied in the following sections through listening in to stories of people who care for buildings, including building surfaces and objects, and whose practices often go unnoticed. These stories are accompanied by voices from teachers and students who differently occupy and care for the spaces. The focus on conversations is to dismantle the exclusivity of conventional end-users and grapple with existing hierarchies and inequalities. The specific act of verbal exchange with the cleaners and listening in to their everyday experiences and sites of care, an area which has received little attention so far, allows for a rich understanding of caring practices. To explore these ideas, we look at the data collected from two built environments, in different countries (Caven et al., 2012, p. 368; Hantrais, 1999, p. 93). The comparison in two different national settings allows an examination through a variety of contextual and micro-variables. Specifically, the context of our study is within two architecture schools, one in Australia and one in New Zealand. These two countries share comparable, although not identical pedagogical and practice-based cultures. While in different countries, both schools of architecture are similar, in that their built environment and studio spaces are a result of design transformations through adaptive reuse of often neglected buildings. In the case of Australia, the architecture school is housed within once neglected brick wool stores. In the case of New Zealand, the architecture school resides within an office building that used to house the national airline.

Taking an interpretive approach in the qualitative paradigm, the data collected was divided into two interlinked phases carried out during 2022. The first phase involved eight semi-structured interviews, four in Australia and four in New Zealand; the second phase consisted of student surveys, which gathered 12 full responses from across the two schools’ fourth year architecture students. The first phase consisted of in-depth interviews with two caretakers (a cleaner and a maintenance worker) of the architectural studio and two teachers from each school. Some were interviewed face-to-face, while others were interviewed via Skype or Zoom due to health considerations because of COVID-19 (Coleman, 2012; Deakin & Wakefield, 2014). The topics discussed, through a set of open-ended questions, related to care-taking and caring orientations experienced pre-, during- and post-COVID-19, and were approved in advance through the university ethics committee. More specifically, the discussions explored how each participant approached and engaged with specific care practices from what Bogdan and Biklen specify as ‘their own frame of reference’ (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998, p. 3). In this sense, the qualitative interviewing process allowed the interviewees to explain and narrate their stories, in detail and in their own words, regarding their own experiences with care and maintenance practices, offering an in-depth account of how they place meaning on different situations that may arise through their distinct care-engagements (Tsing, 2015). The interviews lasted from 30 to 45 minutes and were audio-recorded.

Through the second phase, which occurred simultaneously to the first, post-graduate students using the architectural studio were invited to participate in an online survey which posed open-ended questions on their experience of care and caring orientations pre-COVID-19, during and after. In terms of data analysis, thematic analysis, in combination with meaning condensation and meaning interpretation, was applied to the transcripts and survey responses for both phases. The analysis drew directly on the framework of affect, materialities and temporalities, which allowed the researchers to select and interpret specific parts of the generated data. What needs to be noted in this comparison is that the division of labour at the schools is different. At School ‘1’ (Australia), all spaces, including staff and teaching spaces, are part of the Campus Services contracted cleaning team. However, at School ‘2’ (New Zealand), contracted cleaners only work in the common areas, whereas the studios are cleaned by the Technical Services team, comprised of permanent staff within the Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation. In the discussion that follows extracts are accompanied with coding for type of participant (C-for cleaners, M-for maintenance, S-for students and T-for teachers) to distinguish the various and multiple voices of care, alongside school numbers ‘1’ or ‘2’ to distinguish data collected from Australia (School ‘1’) and New Zealand (School ‘2’). In addition, student and teacher voices are given pseudonyms (a, b, c, etc.) in order to ensure their anonymity.

While this study is concerned with schools of architecture, the architectural studio context is the main focus because this is an environment that is repeatedly reported as ‘dusty’ and ‘dirty’, that is, neglected in the larger built environment of the university. This was heard from multiple student voices across both schools:

[the studio] is not the nicest environment to begin with, often too hot or cold, crowded, and there is always a thick layer of dust on the floor. (S2-g)

[Studio is] not ever vacuumed or mopped, always dusty … . [There is] just no real pride for the studio as the floor is exposed and doesn’t have an appealing finish, makes the space seem uncared for by faculty. (S2-c)

The studios … have always felt worn down (S2-e)

Pencil markings and knife scratch marks are on the studio tables. (S1-b)

Alongside the students voicing concern over the uncared environment of the architectural studio, studio teachers expressed their perspective on how COVID-19 and the unused studio space allowed the students to ‘take over’, noting how the place with ‘no real pride’ mentioned above, turned into a place of ownership and comfort:

… [when] there is lack of oversight from academics, the studio environment tends to get more um I guess the entropy takes place and there’s just stuff moves all over the place and students will always just make the environment comfortable for themselves. (T2-a)

Maintenance workers also highlighted the issue of how studios do not fit within the university’s framework of scheduled rooms, and, because of this, in School ‘2’, they fall out of the regular cleaning regime.

Affective intimacies and binding

Affective-material tinkering of care

In what follows, we consider care through intra-actions between caring and cared for human and non-human entities, vibrant materialities and intensive processes. COVID-19 is a prime example of contingent materiality-in-change – growing in agency through entanglements between and through different bodies and tinkering acts of care. To emphasize such intra-active happenings further, our study observed how the caring practices entangled with COVID-19’s contingencies critically address – to borrow Tsing’s (2015, p. 4) words – ‘awkward’ and ‘unwanted’ friction/rubbing between hands and fingers with other bodies (desks, door handles, keyboards and mice, desktops, photocopier, rubbish bins). Cleaners and maintenance people from both schools comment on these tinkering caring practices of high-touch points:

During shutdown … I think, and then we just had to maintain and sanitize and clean and look after, a proof priority was to sanitize, make sure everything was safe and touch points and all the desks and all things were clean and sanitized …to clean any touch point, anything that people can reach with their fingers … we wanted to make sure you could come to that door and touch the door handle. Right. And it would be okay to touch it. (C1)

… we did all the keyboards and desktops around the keyboards, all the high-touch surfaces. And we started this daily … And we cleaned all the high-touch common spaces. Photocopiers, keyboards, and computer desks. (M2)

These stories illustrate affective and material tinkering between surfaces, or high-touch points, objects such as keyboards, and the unwanted friction between these surfaces and the hand/fingers. Common to both schools is the way that these non-human materialities become active or are activated through COVID-19. The presence of the keyboards and door handles in the studio space allows us to experience and catch ‘a glimpse’ of that which Bennett expressed (in response to encountering the shimmering of a glove, dead rat, a bottle cap and a stick) as ‘an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert’ (2010, p. 5). As COVID-19 came into the studio environment, and the level of restrictions changed, caring practices reacted and responded accordingly. Here, things, objects, slip and fold together with human bodies, revealing similarities across the two schools:

… before Covid it was just a bit wipe bit and go on, but now we’re actually making sure we lifted up things and made sure we pulled chairs back and did all the chair backs and did all the, so it was actually a little bit more … more surface cleaning. (C1)

Because most of our surfaces are melteca, ummm they haven’t been affected at all, umm, we had to be careful with the keyboards and the mice, umm that we didn’t spray directly onto them. We actually sprayed onto the cloth and then wiped it, otherwise you’d get a residue build up on the keyboard. (C2)

This tinkering of care exposes how the humblest of things, such as keyboards, hold power. This is indeed, ‘the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). Through COVID-19, care has a ‘swarm of vitalities at play’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 32) and challenges the idea of one-directionality. The keyboard and chairs resist or orientate away from a cleanliness or COVID-less environment, which care and its practices promise to bring. What such stories bring is a case for care’s tendency or trajectory to a more indirect and open one where, as Puig De La Bellacasa reminds us, ‘[c]are is not one way; the cared for conforms the carer too’ (2017, p. 219). With such affective binding, what emerges are different arrangements with-architecture, which overrides fixed identities defined by categorical distinction.

There are, of course, other care-related affective and material tinkerings that were voiced through our study. Amidst states of unrest during COVID-19 and entanglements between cleaners, maintenance workers, teachers, students and their interactions with non-human bodies – birds, dirt, smell, viruses – we witness how care-taking tinkering sets in motion an affective dialogue and intimacy with the built environment. The first involves a story of the ‘odd dead pigeon’ voiced by one of the cleaners, illustrating further care-entanglements between animals, non-human bodies, including rain, water, and, importantly, how care is often attached to physical building components. At School ‘1’, the saw-tooth roof of the studio – designed originally to allow natural light into what was a former woolshed – becomes a place of much needed care:

We get a lot of pigeons, and they must find it nice to die on our roof. I think it’s every six months we get the roof and gutter audit where they’re cleaned and all the rest of it. But still you, you get the odd dead pigeon that floats down to the sump and blocks the sump. So then you get more leak coming in the building because, uh, the water’s built up in the, in the gutters. (M1)

It is precisely through such web of animal life/death form-material forces-maintenance that care circulates across human-non-human entanglements. This strengthens the notion of how ‘[a] more than human thinking with care would cherish every insight for alternative relatings to be found in the worlds of domestic, petty ordinariness’ (Puig De La Bellacasa, 2017, p. 88). Within the same school, the studio environment also holds toilets and a kitchenette for student and teacher use. As part of the cleaning and maintenance, these areas of the studio become primary spaces of care during COVID-19, mainly due to the lack of studio activity and vacancy of the space:

[During the lockdown, I] … flush[ed] every toilet … making sure [drain trap] were replenished, so [it] didn’t dry out and smell. … We have leaks on the floor from the back of the [toilet] pans, so you’d … you’d have to fix it. (M1)

… sometimes [the chilled and boiled water units] go into sleep mode if they’re not used for a while … [so we] give them a run through…then run the normal tap into the sink as well just to replenish the traps. (M1)

No matter how small, the material and care-taking tinkerings that often go unnoticed by the public can, in accumulation, be powerful in generating affective bonds between human and non-human bodies. Such tinkering and sense of care stir up amidst irregular and disruptive COVID-19 movements. Tracing the caring tinkering activities ‘materializes the surfaces and boundaries’ (Ahmed, 2004b, p. 191) of bodies, the very means by which materialities orientate away or towards other bodies, albeit temporally.

Stuttering temporalities of care

In our study of caring for the built environment across two architecture schools, we heard from the cleaners’ voices how COVID-19 escalated or otherwise changed cleaning practices in the studio space. This is especially evident in their accounts of irregular rhythms of care that were escalated or otherwise halted, exposing care’s entanglement with stuttering temporalities – assemblages slide across various spatiotemporal scales. Often, these accounts vary between the two schools, and the differences are accentuated as COVID-19 restrictions change. In School ‘1’:

[Pre Covid-19] 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM cleaners come in [and] they spend [four] hours in [the architectural studio] every day … emptying rubbish bins, wiping down tables without moving things around that people could be working on. … Everything, pretty much everything gets cleaned every day. (C1)

During shutdown … [be]cause we were trying to make sure that if someone did come in, it was safe … we’re doing those [cleaning practices] every couple weeks. (C1)

While in School ‘2’:

So basically, pre-Covid we use to clean the studios three times a year. (C2)

So we said we would clean the studios three times a week [during Covid-19]. And we cleaned all the high-touch common spaces … So that went on for quite a while, well alert level three and alert level two, by the time we go through half of alert level two, we had relaxed it from three times a week, or every day, to once a week. (M2)

Here, through the indeterminate, unknown capacity of a virus such as COVID-19, which percolated into the studio space, we see how caring practices entangled with temporalities challenge a stabilizing (and often monotonous) form of routine checks that often follow a logical, sequential and univocal trajectory. In School ‘1’, the four-hour daily care is reduced to once every couple of weeks; in School ‘2’, the care escalates exponentially from three times a year to three times a week. Indeed, we witness in these accounts from both schools what Bennett would describe as ‘thing-power’, or, in this case, the pushing power/capacity of COVID-19, a virus, to disrupt autonomous human-temporalities. It reveals ‘the curious ability of things – materials to act, to produce, albeit slightly, affect’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 6); the cleaners and maintenance workers, the main human-carers of the studio space, are enmeshed in the interwoven stuttering temporalities of other bodies. The affective entanglement of COVID-19’s stutter and caring practice is further traced through the keyboards at School ‘2’; we hear of the fluctuating care-times dedicated towards the keyboard cleaning, but also how these practices cease and become ‘a waste of time’:

During Covid, we would actually go up every um, was it every second day and clean the keyboards. We’d actually wipe down all the keyboards, mice and hard surfaces every two days … we would do second floor one day, third floor the next then level one the next day. So, it was just a rolling um cleaning process. And we’d go up at 8 o’clock in the morning and and do it. (C2)

And, then the following year, when we had the breakout by then people saying it is a waste of time cleaning high-touch areas and it is mainly masks. (M2)

One of the most common moments in caring may be when some care becomes ‘a waste of time’ – or simply unnecessary care. We could tie this to times of stillness that precede any caring action. Adey (2009) describes stillness in a manner highly relevant to such instances:

Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that see the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. (Adey, 2009)

The cleaners and maintenance workers experienced such stillness of apprehending and anticipating spaces and events – where both the tasks and time for care diminishes:

The unscheduled is a lot easier, it means we just have to do, well basically, walk around and just check to see because we just use clear pump bottles for the hand sanitizer, we’d see how much was in there. So we basically we just had to walk around and check things, umm so instead of say taking two hours for doing the full clean, it would maybe take us half that to do the whole building. (C2)

Such quiet, stilled times are frequently considered uninteresting, and even purposeless: through Covid-19’s often prolonged lockdown periods, unnecessary caring practices of walking around and checking things slowed down in frequency. However, as Schweizer proposes, even when bodies are still, these moments are not merely ‘empty intervals between instants’ (Schweizer, 2008, p. 789), but rather they contain the possibility of arousing affects that shift or press upon bodies. Disruptions and disjunctions of time in the form of pauses and breaks thus give rise to intimacies and bonding.

The above accounts, across the two schools, provide a dynamic perspective of care-time, moments of care that are still; where movements pause, futures are held in abeyance. It opens a path to reassessing care/caring practices through the stuttering process of non-linear differentiation as framed by Deleuze. It allows us to shift the domain on time of care framed by systematic, scheduled, linear temporalities, to a time of ‘dynamic metastabilities’ where time ‘has no history’ (Kwinter, 2002, p. 40). Here, we have sought to create a space to recognize care through stutterings, utterances, the unforeseeable and the unexpected, and, most significantly, how these care-stutterings hold capacity to orientate bodies towards each other in affective bonding – but can also repel bodies apart. These stutterings are also spatial – and in relation to the built environment and its spaces.

The promise of care and its loss

Thinking of COVID-19 and caring practices in their becoming, care is processual and relational (Barad, 2003; see also Ingold, 2007) and carries a promise. Despite COVID-19’s disruptive capacity, it gave rise to a sense of communal and collective care for the studio and for each other. The virus and the associated caring practices, together, accumulate a sense and promise of care and empathy. Importantly, promises are intimately bound to acts of communal and collective care or, in Ahmed’s words, ‘the concern with “the other”’ (2002, p. 560), and they also ‘call forth, demand, present action’ (Anderson, 2010, p. 175). We see these actions in forms of caring. Indeed, students directly voiced COVID-19’s capacity to generate action, some form of change and ‘create a desire for better care of studio’ (S2-b). This sense of conscious acts of care was heard further from students in School ‘2’:

While we were in the traffic light systems, I tended to be more diligent about wiping my desk/work surfaces down after a day’s work. Because I was very anxious about getting Covid. (S2-a)

I was more conscious of the surroundings I was touching especially the large tables in the studios because of how scratched the surfaces were. (S2-e)

There were also voices that illustrate the care with empathy that COVID-19 brought about – care towards other bodies, students and their peers:

I believe [Covid-19] has enhanced more empathetic/caring points of view towards our own and others health. (S2-a)

If people get sick, then their surfaces are often wiped down by other students. (S2-b)

These are caring situations where ‘care is emergent towards others known and unknown at particular moments manifesting within and beyond’ the studio space (Williams, 2020, p. 5). Alongside such desire to care, other voices revealed the lack of a caring area in the studio – a space to care for each other: ‘There is no real caring/chill out/crying area other than the toilet or in front of your desk’ (S2-e). Acts of caring and being cared-for, of empathy, are therefore intertwined with architectural spaces of care, raising questions of where care takes place – or what spaces afford this care – and moving beyond discussions of cleaning high-touch surfaces, desks and furniture.

COVID-19’s stutters imposed on the built environment (through sudden lockdowns and changes in levels) destabilized cleaning processes at both schools. We observed how the promise of care is turned into a conduit model as the baton is passed from cleaners to students (carers to self-carers): the former becoming providers of wipes, cloths and spray bottles; and the latter, active carers of the studio:

… once we were at level 2 we didn’t have to do the keyboards and mice anymore. We just had to make sure there was hand sanitizer stations, ummm, spray and wipe and cloths available so students could clean their own workstations if they desired. (C2)

And we provided a lot of self help material like wipes and spray bottles, and rags and things like that. (M2)

Here, the baton of caring and responsibility is passed on to students, and, depending on their desires, caring practices are continued or otherwise left untouched – and, more importantly, they become invisible. In both schools, an evident sense of care emerged, as did the development of ‘caring relationships with materials as they grow and evolve into forms’ (Appelgren, 2019, p. 2). This was expressed by a student from School ‘1’:

[Pre Covid-19] I cared for it by keeping my study area clean (the surfaces), not moving furniture around too much and binning my rubbish. I’ve kept the same approach as restrictions change, which is always to keep the surfaces clean, keeping distance where possible and wear face mask. So far I have not gotten Covid. (S1-b)

The contingencies and dynamic caring assemblages with COVID-19 discussed so far have illustrated the more physical and tangible aspects. However, our study across both schools also revealed the unseen materiality of fear that entangles with surfaces and objects and, eventually, permeates into the air, thus becoming enmeshed with unseen caring practices of the studios. We heard of this awareness and fear from students and studio teachers:

I am more aware of surfaces, so I avoid putting cutlery on surfaces and instead put a paper towel first. (S2-b)

You know what the biggest thing was that I had to constantly remind myself - do not take the students pen if you want to draw on their drawing. Do not touch the student’s pen. Like you normally, can I just pick up your pen and like, you know, it’s like no, you got to have your own because otherwise you’re touching their germy hands and then you have germ contamination. (T1-a)

We note how the unseen but felt fear subsides through the change of COVID-19 restrictions, which also saw caring practices subside, and some bodies becoming complacent. In some cases, complacency also turned to un-caring tendencies, with evident changing orientations and patterns found between bodies, before and after catching COVID-19, as one student remarked:

[Initially] more distancing from other people at Uni … [I] might avoid people who seem unwell (coughing etc.) [but] once I had had covid myself [I] was less careful after. (S2-d)

The fear of catching COVID-19 – associated with unclean, contaminated, contagious bodies – initially brought about affective binding between bodies to care for each other. But this shifts rapidly after one had caught the virus towards a a more self-centred caretaking – less fear and less care for others. Such a shift, from maintaining a conscious social distance for a collective safeness to care-less orientations, runs concurrently with COVID-19’s capacity to become an airborne virus:

But the um you know the real change that has happened in the built environment has occurred because students have almost all gotten Covid already at least once and what that has meant interestingly is that back in 2020 there was an enormous fear of touching surfaces and in 2021 that continued but then began to be ameliorated because science began to show that the virus was airborne and not caught from surfaces. So by 2022 nobody washes their hands or worries at all about touching surfaces. I’ve noticed in the teaching environment the students had no compunction whatsoever about touching surfaces or touching one another or being maskless. (T2-a)

We can trace here how the affective intimacies between material things – living and active viruses, such as COVID-19 - enmesh with the unseen forces (of fear, compassion, empathy) and promise of caring acts. As shown in these accounts, an ‘enormous fear for touching surfaces’ (T2-a), which was ameliorated over time, shifted to a fear for breathing in contaminated air and use of physical masks. Here, all matter has the potential to effect change – while remaining equally vulnerable to change – thus holds capacity to affect and be affected. Accepting relationality over human-centric perspectives and thus, focusing upon processes where ‘human beings and thinghood overlap’ (Bennett, 2004, p. 349), the accounts showed that through COVID-19 there was a shift between caring to a withdrawing from care: an un-caring though in-action.

Conclusion

Through material-affective tinkering between dynamic elements – human and non-human, animals, places, objects, ethics and politics, forces, desires and promises – we traced the often-mundane overlooked practices of care and maintenance within the ever-changing need to create and maintain COVID-19-safe built environments. We traced both visible, material and intangible practices of care across two schools and their architectural studios. A notable point is that the continual re-making of the buildings was achieved in very different ways between the two schools. Caring for a building is far from uniform. This article exposes architecture to an understanding not only of the interdependency and vulnerability of its practice but also, and more importantly, the issues of responsible, sustainable and affective needs; commitments; and care. The multiple stories relayed here illuminate the built environment as continually reconstructed, reoccupied, repaired and cared for, through material as well as often unseen caring affective tinkering. Notably, we have presented an affects of care from an architectural perspective, arising between human bodies, material matter, forces (such as fear), desires and built environments. The discussions focused on small local stories of how COVID-19 disrupted but also brought about an appreciation and awareness of care, empathy and compassion towards the studio environment – an affective binding. The above ideas have at least two implications.

First, architectural practice involves often small, boring and mundane activities that take place after the production stage. However, paying attention to small stories and events, or what Kraftl and Adey describe as ‘the nitty-gritty, material, localised details’ (Kraftl & Adey, 2008, p. 228) of practice, is crucial for two reasons: (1) these small, localized tinkerings can actively charge material environments with affect (through needs, commitments and caring) and (2) such explorations address the vulnerability of practices of architecture. Architecture is about the backstage, messy, at times dirty caring practices that occur in the everyday lives of buildings, as these can alter our own and the buildings’ rhythms of life. Second, affects of care provides room to recognize affect’s capacity to circulate around and in between bodies, at times sticking momentarily to objects’ surfaces, such as the keyboard and mouse. In so doing, affects of care cultivate expressions of caring, attention and social bonding; and, whilst COVID-19 temporally jolted caring practices backward or stalled them, it also potently propelled us forward into more caring actions. Discussing affinities between care, affective tinkering, matter-in-process, stuttering temporalities and the built environment develops an extended discourse of care that attends to architecture and design as alive and always in its becoming. Here, affects of care can productively remain as pure relation, a virtuality in an exposition of caring practices without its ontology being foreclosed by a teleological agenda. This article, in many ways, attempted to locate affective relations – occurrences of affective intimacies and affective binding that occur when bodies ‘rub’ and affect each other through caring within our built environments (see Taylor, 2004, cited in, p. 168; Thrift, 2005, p. 146). In doing so, it apprehended affect in and through care without recourse to an actual and functional, teleological and anthropocentric ontology.

To conclude, we focused on the impacts of COVID-19 as an active and affective materiality that has posed challenges to maintenance and care practices of our built environment. We bring to the fore the caring practices from real-life stories of, and lessons learned by, those who were tasked to reduce the fear of infection, stop the virus from spreading, and maintain antivirus-built environments. In doing so, this article offers insights regarding care through affect in relation to the complexity of a global pandemic, such as COVID-19, and its effects on built environment practices. In other contexts, future research could consider our communal, intimate and often binding life with other bodies (human, non-human), which requires care and generosity for others (including, for example, people, environments and objects) and for ourselves, which also extends to consider the importance of the design and layout of spaces.

Ethics information

The manuscript content is part of a research project which received ethics approval by the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment (SEBE) Human Ethics Advisory Group (HEAG), recognizing the project complies with the National Statement of Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2006 (Updated 2018), Deakin University, Project number: SEBE-2021-66-MOD01

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).