Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One

28 Jan 2026 - 28 Jan 2026

I haven't even read this book yet, but I know I will love it. SB has an uncanny ability to find an important topic that is somehow completely neglected, and makes it his own. All of his projects have something of that to them, but How Buildings Learn is the closest precedent. And these topics tend to involve time, or more specifically a kind of attentiveness to the real processes of time. Time and a sense of duty, of responsibility. That's the real topic, I suspect.

Something anti-sexy about the concept of maintenance. It is no fun, low status, necessary but unrecognized work.

Wonder if he talks about software maintenance? Prob not, it is not his wheelhouse and possibly less interesting than normal physical maintenance.

Wonder if he talks much about capitalism as anti-maintenance? Prob not. But his heroes are in the public sector, more or less (I think!)

I assume he does address this: if maintenance is no fun, it must be done for other reasons, and that requires something like an institution to support it.

History of Guilds was interesting. Their social and political role (apparently they were a drag on capitalism)

I realize I have no very good image of the transition from crude blacksmithing to the kind of tooling you need for industrialism (steam engine). What did that look like, what was the process of innovation?

This is more than a review, it also does some abstraction and original thinking about the universal rules of maintenance.

And here’s the crux of the whole problem—not only with Statue of Liberty, but pretty much all of life—maintenance is essential, and nobody enjoys doing it.

The Israelis and Ukrainians possessed a maintenance mind, whereas the Egyptians and Russians displayed a neglect mind. What constitutes these two ways of seeing the world? As I understand the argument, the primary differences come down to a sense of foresight, ownership, and agency.

On the organizational side, the maintenance mind favors bottom-up models over top-down command (think Israelis and Ukrainians)

There is something fishy going on here, although I pretty much am on his side. Ukranians have more of a maintenance mind than Russia, but that's just a surface effect of an entirely different organizational morale, I would imagine. Reasons for being in the fight in the first place. Maybe that's the point, "maintenance" is just a view of a whole host of interconnected virtues.

Least Village Has its Blacksmith