deconstruction

Following up on an earlier post... I'm quite taken by Jon Mooallem's article ("This Old Recyclable House") in today's Times Magazine on the art of deconstructing old buildings. Actually, maybe it's less of an art and more of a science: the article, a profile of "deconstruction" pioneer Brad Guy and his Building Materials Reuse Association, describes how the proponents of deconstruction are trying to figure out how to extract the maximum value from a building in its last days. Of course, the process also provides the added ecological benefit of recycling the building into new construction materials, which immediately places it under the uber-umbrella of "sustainability"—that term that I am growing to loathe more and more for its increasingly empty meaning. But what I like about Guy's experiment is that it inserts itself into the urban politics and market of demolition, thereby instrumentalizing the motivations that lay behind the sustainable urge. In particular, the most promising aspect of this model is Guy's claim that his brand of demolition is actually a manufacturing process, by which it generates reclaimed materials to be used in the construction of new architecture.