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Paper short abstract

Efforts to extend building life reveal the limits of defining repair as restoration. In construction practice, adaptation and modernization sustain structural continuity and question distinctions between repairing and building.

Paper long abstract

Professional and regulatory frameworks commonly define repair as restoring a predefined condition – a definition that stabilizes continuity as preserving what already exists. In the management of buildings, it forms part of maintenance regimes aimed at stabilizing an established state. Regulatory distinctions reinforce this logic by separating maintenance and repair from modernization, conversion or extension, which are classified as building practices.

This distinction shapes legal, financial and professional practice, influencing tenancy law, cost allocation and the remuneration of planning and engineering services. By anchoring repair to preserving a predefined state, continuity is equated with maintaining existing conditions. Yet this paper argues that under changing functional, technical or regulatory requirements, strict adherence to an earlier state may endanger a building’s continued use. A physical structure that cannot accommodate new demands risks obsolescence rather than preservation. Maintaining continuity may therefore require interventions that exceed traditional notions of repair.

In construction practice, however, the boundary between repairing and building is already less clear-cut. Many modernization or extension projects retain primary structural systems and substantial existing fabric while adapting buildings to new spatial or functional configurations. Demolition is avoided not by freezing a building in its original state, but by reworking and integrating existing structures.

If repair is understood as preventing material loss and enabling structural continuity rather than merely reinstating a former condition, adaptation and modernization can be recognized as extended modes of repair. Repair thus emerges not as the opposite of construction, but as a mode of constructing material continuity over time.