Conservation and maintenance of modern buildings. The need of long-term maintenance of building façades in metropolitan housing areas. A model-proposal for documentation, analysis and intervention.

Licentiate thesis, 2007

ABSTRACT Many European towns, as well as conurbations world wide include a significant amount of residential prefabricated buildings from the late 1950s, 60s and 70s. Housing often is concentrated to suburbs as a result of societal planning and development during this period. However, examples of prefabricated residential structures from these years in districts close to town centres are also occurring. In Göteborg the huge amount of multi-apartment blocks from the 1950s through mid-70s today are moving into focus of the responsible property managers partly due to an increase of major needs of maintenance and partly due to the substantial economic assets that these structures represent. National and international preservation bodies, non governmental organisations, and academia concerned recently have started processes to address and observe technical, material and structural aspects of industrialised suburban housing, as well as values and fundamental perspectives related to this kind of buildings and their built environment. In order to enhance knowledge about the material and technical aspects, as basis for identification of appropriate long-term techniques for maintenance, it is crucial to work out problem-driven methods for monitoring, documentation and analysis of occurring building-materials and related issues of their deterioration. Hence, this complex situation strongly indicates a need of holistic perspective for the design of a relevant instrumental approach for documentation purposes and the subsequent need for analysis. This thesis presents a tentative model for documentation and analysis based on photogrammetry and in-situ light microscopy, in combination with methods for laboratory analysis such as scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. This approach is argued to enable a needed overview of façades of multi-apartment buildings, their constituting materials, and related deterioration phenomena.