In April, a YouTube stream of the Nagakin Capsule Tower demolition, complete with a live chat, allowed far-flung viewers to bemoan its demise in real time. During ten seconds in August, ten thousand people watched more than eight thousand pounds of explosives raze a pair of three-hundred-foot-tall towers in Noida, India. A fifty-six-story commercial supertall will replace Hotel Pennsylvania, a Renaissance Revival landmark in Midtown; Michael Young of the blog New York YIMBY is carefully tracking its deconstruction. Marcel Breuer’s first binuclear house design, built for the Geller family on Long Island, was demolished in January; a photo record of the remains—the living room stonewall and fireplace—was published aside an elegy in the New York Times. Building demolition has become one of our favorite spectator sports; fittingly, we seem capable only of watching (and documenting) the brassy finales of these architectural notables.
A month prior to the Nagakin demolition, a few blocks from my apartment, Grand Prospect Hall, a 119-year-old, Victorianera banquet hall in Brooklyn, was demolished in relative silence. It is now the site of a luxury condominium development. Some websites, even a Wikipedia page, track these lesser-known levelings, though even they have their blind spots. It takes a bit of doing to learn that in the past year, 722 structures were demolished in Palestine, displacing 1,008 people. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to interrogate which buildings deserve dignity in death.