The general maintenance of things is deeply present in Mexican culture and popular ideology. Whether due to its generalized absence in governmental planning, or deep individual entrenchment, conservation is a driving force that manifests itself mainly through the economic conditions of its time, and the financial capacities for its implementation. The conservation management of buildings, however, contains additional demands. Their current physical state and how they are transformed or preserved, serve as a guide to critically navigate the map of infrastructures and ideological systems established by institutional policy, reconfiguring the way in which different relationships with architectural heritage are constructed.

“Building Management: Consumed by use” analyzes the maintenance strategies that have been deployed to sustain buildings as well as the ideological forces —economic, social and political— that have produced them during the most prolific periods of construction in Mexico; presenting the incidental conservation mechanisms that have been uniquely shaped by culture, context, society or the perspective of individual inhabitants. In this sense, the exhibition explores the onerous mechanisms of management and preservation bureaucracy, while examining the creative and often inventive tactics of conservation practice developed by a building's users over time, with implications that extend far beyond a single historical era, case study, or geographic region.

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Through a selection of canonical modern and contemporary projects in Mexico, their current conditions are analyzed to expose the links between their construction and the context that produced them, as well as the transformations they have experienced in response to the desires of those who inhabit and value them, presenting the various maintenance strategies -conservation through use, internal adaptations, external interventions, concealed defects, or replacement- used to achieve this. The stories of these buildings are however told through a assemblage of official and personal narratives, introducing those who have lived and worked in these buildings, the architects and historians who have studied them, activists and collectives who have fought for their preservation, and iconoclasts who have wished them dismantled, to drop into architectural narratives of the city, long underway, and speculate on the possible futures that lie ahead.