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The ‘D’ word.
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Demolition is THE dirty word, but when executed thoughtfully and strategically, taking down a building can be part of the agenda for urban development and revitalisation. It’s a heavily politicised subject — take M&S on Oxford Street as an example. But it’s simply not practical or logical to reuse all buildings, and no one wants a future where our built environment is frozen in time. The truth is we need to do beautiful demolition — make it less wrecking ball and more ordered, cleaner, greener — with more opportunities for material reuse until such a time that buildings are easily demountable and designed for disassembly. “We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau, a Dutch architect who has been working on a database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse. With now over 2.5 million square metres of building matter logged in his Madaster database, he is currently working with the city of Amsterdam to catalogue the components of every public building in the city. “Waste is simply material without an identity, he says. If we track the provenance and performance of every element of a building, we can eliminate waste.”
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