This “Ardeth” issue on Fragility explores what it means to build and live in a broken world. It asks:
How does the conceptualisation of fragility as a terrain for a new building ecology challenge existing models of design and production? And what are the new frameworks that can ideate future practices by which to engage and uphold this unstable disposition?
The concept of fragility expands on Jackson’s broken world thinking (Jackson, 2014; 2023) into a notion of broken world building; a positive catalyst of socio-cultural practices and renewed sensitivities in building that develop from responding to planetary boundaries in a creative and formative manner. Fragility identifies building as a verb. By foregrounding building as action, it emphasises the practices of making and draws in its social-, ecological-, material- and technological agencies. Building takes place in time, as it continually re-configures in response to change through measures of repair, care and adaptation. Here, building becomes an evolving practice of continual construction with the ability to suggest radically new starting points for architectural imagination and rupture its foundational ideals of permanence and durability. Fragility enables us to think of resources not as finitely extracted but as mindfully reused and cared for in their temporary nesting places of built assemblies, until they are, once more, circulated in new flows or designs. The cascading of materials (the practices of refitting, reusing, repairing, and recycling materials) is here pre-empted as integrated design strategies for the future preservation and recirculation of buildings as material assemblages. Strategies that enable materials to outlive their buildings as precious and significant resources. As such, fragility unfolds building as an interconnected entity. Revealing its heterogeneous construct of social, environmental and material dependencies, it calls for an intensified and careful engagement between humans and building to respectfully hone and honour this complexity as a valuable asset of our built environment. It asks: What are the evolving correlations between building and inhabitant, maker and repairer, what are the interrelations between specialists and laymen and how can these scale up to engage larger entities of the social, material and environmental ties that shape these relations? What is arrived at is an ethical proposition for a building ecology that exceeds existing circular thinking by fostering renewed attention to building’s dependencies, its temporal nature, its practices and its material flows. An ecology wherein fragility and impermanence are formative premises by which we operate. Here, care, repair and adaptation are key practices for addressing the fragility of our broken livelihoods and for anticipating strategies for future scenarios of living. Strategies that have the power to embody a persistent “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016: 4) while prompting new arts of living on a damaged planet. Building ecology upends our understanding of building as an endpoint, by suggesting a cyclic framework for the evocation of nested life spans that can be intensively engaged to form a new discourse in architecture. 

This “Ardeth” issue on Fragility seeks contributions which address the following key questions:

• Design dependencies:
  If architecture is traditionally cast in the image of the permanent and durable, how can new discourse, informed by ideas of fragility and broken world thinking, frame impermanence as a new starting point for architectural production? How can new principles of limited life-spans, cycles and reuse challenge the foundations of architectural thinking? How does a renewed awareness of architecture’s fragile social-, environmental- and material dependencies recast architectural practice as a building ecology? 
• Material Value:
  Can fragility become a new way of conceptualising circularity? Care and repair are key principles of the circular design framework conceptualised through processes of material cascading (the practices of refitting, reusing, repairing, and recycling materials). However, current industrial building practice cast these reparatory actions as consequences of failure. How can the conceptualisation of fragility allow us to understand care and repair as constructive middle-points fundamentally integrated with design? What are the new values that reparatory action can impose on resource and resourcing as both noun and verb?
• Material Practice:
  Fragility is already embedded into building practice. If mainly unseen and devalued repair, care and adaptation are mainly performed outside the pretext of design and by actors removed from the initial process of fabrication. How can we learn from existing processes of care and repair through the specifics of social- and cultural practices, surveying, building pathology and remediation, and how can these be translated into languages of design and processes of fabrication? How can giving significance to fragility challenge the ordering of our practices to foreground reparatory action as a design principle?