Buildings are designed to be seen.
Rarely are they designed to be maintained.
The Cleanability Institute is the global think tank, research body, and academy advancing the science of how the built environment is cleaned, maintained and lived in across its lifecycle.
Cleanability is the science of designing spaces that can actually be cared for.
It sits at the intersection of architecture, facilities management, operational science, hygiene, sustainability, materials engineering, and human dignity. It asks a simple, unfashionable question: how will this place be maintained, and at what human and economic cost?
For most of the modern era, the answer has been: "we will work it out later." Later arrives expensive, unsafe, and quietly unjust. The Institute exists to change that.
The hidden costs of designing for the photograph.
Across 412 buildings the Institute has studied, an average of 34% of operational labour is consumed compensating for choices made on day one of design. Cleanability is not a soft concern. It is one of the largest invisible cost centres in the modern built environment.
See the case studiesA measurable language for the operational future of buildings.
A composite, weighted measure of how effectively a built environment can be cleaned and maintained throughout its lifecycle.
Operational throughput against labour, time, and resource inputs.
Measured hygienic, aesthetic, and safety outcomes after operations.
How the system treats the people who maintain it.
An intelligence layer for every maintainable surface on earth.
CleanabilityIQ unifies CI scoring, building assessment, predictive analytics and operational dashboards into a single platform for institutions serious about cleanability at scale.
Every sector has its own cleanability physics.
A discipline being formed in 32 countries.
Pilot projects, research partnerships, training cohorts and standards working groups are forming on every continent. Explore where the discipline is taking root.
Open the global map
From the Institute.
What happens when cleanability is taken seriously.
"Civilisation is held together not by what is admired, but by what is maintained. Cleanability is the unfinished sentence in modern architecture."
Help write the discipline that didn't exist yesterday.
Researchers, practitioners, designers, operators and institutions are convening at the Institute.