Demolition
Jun 21, 2010
A couple of weeks ago the building behind my apartment started getting demolished. The view above is taken looking directly out of our kitchen window on the fourth floor, and was the scene found after day one of demolition.
The dismantling was done by hand for the top three floors of the five floor apartment building, each day showing a moderate but still impressive amount of progress. It was particularly impressive, because the few times I actually saw the workers working, they didn't appear to be doing much except pretending to work. But I digress. One day when I arrived home the remaining two floors had been levelled in one go by some heavy duty machinery. All that was left was a pile of rubble. That pile is now rapidly diminishing in size as the bricks and dirt are loaded up and shipped out to who knows where.
I have a fear that not much care has been taken to preserve the integrity of the materials used in the construction of the building, which my architect housemate tells me happened between 1890 and 1910. As the building was coming down I saw little thought being taken towards the beautiful old bricks, with the workmen rendering them almost useless for recycling by pulverising them with sledgehammers and later by driving over them with the aforementioned heavy machinery.
Same goes for the majestic wooden beams that made up the immovable frame of the building; workers took carelessly to them with chainsaws until they were in pieces small enough to carry and therefore too small to be used in any sort of meaningful construction projects in the future.
My housemate tells me that the energy that goes in to producing the materials for a building like the one that's just been demolished is equivalent to around 30 years of everyday energy usage by the future tenants of that building. I'm quite surprised that in a country like Denmark — usually one of the more sensible and sustainable societies in the world — such waste could be purportrated without someone with the means to do so stepping up and subsidizing the demolishers for the extra time it would take to dismantle the building carefully — a cost easily outweighed by the gains of then selling the materials at a premium to the vintage building restoration crowd.
The image below is all that's left, and soon there will be nothing. But there is a plus side to this whole incident — the space left by the building will be turned into a green courtyard for the inhabitants of the surrounding buildings to enjoy. A refreshing development when more often than not in the rest of the world it happens the other way around, where green areas are replaced by buildings.
