CUSTODIAN noun adj. custodial
I. a person who has responsibility for taking care of or protecting something. II. a person employed to clean and maintain a building.
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The custodian is defined both as the guardian of a building and as its janitor. The Custodial Subject explores exactly this dual nature of the custodian's role, but instead of as two discrete tasks the book considers cleaning as the means by which the custodian guards what he is charged with protecting. Taking private domestic space as its site of examination, the book looks at the everyday practices of cleaning and maintenance as the ways in which these spaces are qualitatively differentiated from the public realm. The Custodial Subject presents the first alternative architectural narrative of hygiene and cleaning to that formulated by the leading architects of the Modernist period, nearly a century ago. Instead of understanding domestic cleanliness and personal hygiene as a collective good, the action of cleaning is understood in its spatial dimension in which privately accumulated dirt is necessarily displaced into the public realm. What the custodial act is then posited to guard is not collective health, nor the material integrity of the architecture, but the very subjectivity of the private, domestic individual; the subjectivity of the individual who cleans.