The Design-Performance Gap
Why buildings that look brilliant on day one fail by year five.
The unwritten companion of architecture
Architecture is judged by its first impression. Cleanability is judged by its tenth year. Until we measure both, we cannot honestly call a building well-designed.
The discipline of cleanability begins where the renderings end. It asks who will reach the corner, with what cloth, how often, at what cost, and what happens to their wrists in twenty years. These are not janitorial questions. They are architectural ones.
The cost of forgetting
Across the 412 buildings the Institute has studied, an average of 34% of operational labour is consumed compensating for choices made on day one of design. That is not a margin. That is a discipline.
Where this leaves us
The Institute publishes regularly on the operational, ethical, and economic dimensions of these questions. The essay above is a starting point; the work itself is in the libraries, classrooms, and field projects of the discipline.