Keeping up palaces for people: Corviale, Roma / Gellerup, Aarhus

As part of the international research project Cultures of Maintenance in European Social Housing, the public exhibition Keeping Up Palaces for People: Corviale, Rome / Gellerup, Aarhus aims to shed light on the maintenance of two large-scale reinforced concrete social housing projects: Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark (1961–75) and Corviale in Rome (1973–81). The exhibition will focus on the intertwining of contemporary maintenance with project intentions and built architecture in their respective contexts, presenting maintenance, repair, and cleaning as cultural as well as technical practices. From the role of maintenance as a catalyst for community-led initiatives, to the intricate sociopolitical dynamics involving the state, institutions, and European green agendas, to the informal maintenance practices that sometimes constitute the only effective forms of repair, care, and cleaning, the exhibition will demonstrate the challenges of maintaining these two projects. Originally conceived as public housing complexes, they represent an entire era of late modernist housing projects and the challenges they pose today.