Issue 14 · On Repair

On mending
what was
not broken.

Twelve essays on the strange comfort of fixing things, the things we break to fix, and what we learn in between.

From a violin maker in Cremona to a network engineer in Bangalore to a divorcée in Brooklyn repairing her mother's dining chairs — twelve writers consider the work of repair in an age that has stopped expecting things to last.

Edited by Helen Marstrand & Imani Okafor · Cover Plate IV (after Ruskin) by T. Belo

§ 01 — In this issue

Twelve pieces, ordered as they were received.

  1. 001 The Last Violin Maker of Cremona by Marta Bellucci pp. 6 — 19
  2. 002 A Letter from Bangalore, on Servers by Pranav Iyer pp. 20 — 33
  3. 003 Six Chairs, One Mother, One Summer by Ruth Cohen pp. 34 — 47
  4. 004 The Architecture of Ruins by David Park, AIA pp. 48 — 63
  5. 005 Mending, an interview with Jun Takahashi by Imani Okafor pp. 64 — 78
  6. 006 On Throwing Things Away (and Why We Don't) by Helen Marstrand pp. 79 — 88

From Issue 14

The Last Violin
Maker of Cremona

There are perhaps forty of them still working in the city where the violin was invented. Marta Bellucci spent three months with one of the youngest, who is sixty-three, and has begun to wonder what happens when there are none.

The workshop is on the second floor of a building that has not been painted since 1962. You climb a narrow staircase and pass a door marked Ulderico Bellucci — Liutaio, and you enter a room that smells of spruce and varnish and the slow, patient work of centuries. Signor Bellucci is already at his bench when I arrive, as he has been every morning for forty-one years.

§ 02 Letters
§ 03 Reviews