Our world is constantly breaking down, from our bicycles to our phones, to the buildings we live in and the ecosystems that make up the planet. We are constantly engaged in preventing things from falling apart or putting them back together after they have failed. Ten years ago, STS scholar Steven Jackson asked, “What happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points?”¹ In the last few years, this provocation has been picked up by architects, artists, and academics across numerous fields. It demands that we pay close attention to the impact of our actions, but most importantly, it allows us to reconsider how we approach urgent and complex challenges, from the reuse of waste, to the environmental impact of construction, to climate change. An outlook on the world that begins with breakdown or failure brings practices of maintenance, repair or salvaging to the forefront, and questions architecture’s longstanding obsession with novelty.