Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold or silver. Unlike many restoration techniques that work to hide previous damage, this technique not only accepts but highlights the life of the object. As a philosophy, it treats repair as part of the continued story and life of an object, rather than something to disguise.

In her lecture at the University of Oregon, Arthi Krishnamoorthy draws a philosophical parallel between the Architecture of Reuse and the Art of Kintsugi.  An architecture of adaptation that reveals the signs and signatures of repair and reinvention, that composes a continuity in which the after doesn’t erase the before, makes places where people are invited to leave new traces, to make their mark.