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Feature from Environmental Building News
May 1, 2000
Deconstruction:
Back to the Future for Buildings?
A crew of five works steadily —lowering rafters, pulling nails, cleaning mortar off bricks, bundling oak strip flooring—turning an old building into carefully stacked lumber, palleted bricks, and windows organized by size. They call themselves a deconstruction services team. They take buildings apart in pretty much the reverse order of their construction and salvage for reuse as much material and as many building components as possible. Is this 1901 or 2001? Is this a technique of the past, limited to a small and diminishing number and type of buildings, or is it an innovative revival/adaptation with the potential of dramatically improving the resource-efficiency of both the demolition and the construction industries?
As far as
EBN can determine, the term
deconstruction took hold at the first Used Building Materials Association (UBMA) meeting in Canada in 1996. The term was invented or invoked to place an emphasis on disassembly and salvage for reuse—in contrast to
demolition which places emphasis simply on building removal. Although the term is sometimes limited to
manual disassembly of buildings, we use the term in this article to mean both manual and mechanical approaches —and to include the second step of reusing the materials.
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