Pass the Leftovers!

At 270 Park Avenue, the largest controlled building demolition in history is currently underway. Completed in 1960, the former Union Carbide Building’s 52 stories are being taken down one part at a time. This 1.5 million-square-foot structure, now the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, will be replaced by a new 2.5 million-square-foot super-tall tower for the same multinational bank. It appears to be a case of a big building that is not big enough.

Nevertheless, Union Carbide lived a longer life than most of the world’s 100 tallest buildings to be demolished. At fifty-nine years old, it has been both disparaged as a lesser version of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (up the street at 375 Park Avenue) and lauded as one of many Skidmore, Owings & Merrill–designed towers that have contributed to a clustering of mid-century corporate modernism. It is also considered a noteworthy design by SOM’s Natalie de Blois (rather than the more famous Gordon Bunshaft). Regardless of aesthetics and history, it is undeniably significant in terms of its raw material—a massive chunk of the city.

The demolition raises questions about the environmental and ethical consequences of this much material heading to the landfill: twenty million cubic feet. This whopping statistic is compounded by the irony that JPMorgan Chase undertook a full sustainability and energy-efficiency upgrade in 2011, making it the largest renovation project to ever receive a LEED platinum rating—less than a decade before demolition began. With its destruction now underway, the presence of such waste is difficult to comprehend. Its form is too abstract. Its geography is too diffuse. Its consequences are too long-term. Union Carbide will become absorbed into the six million tons of construction and demolition debris generated in New York City every year. If ever there was a building that could be qualitatively measured in terms of weight alone, it would be this one.

New York is a city whose built environment is characterized by the impermanence of its constituent parts. It is a site of continuous construction involving cycles of building construction and demolition—a weightless, full-time, full-tilt work in progress. Given this fast metabolism, it should come as no surprise that the city has a long history of noteworthy buildings ending up in the dumpster. From the Beaux-Arts ornament of New York’s original Pennsylvania Station being dumped in the swamps of New Jersey, to the bespoke bronze facade of the former American Folk Art Museum living on in the collections storage of the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art, the way buildings die reveals a tension between architecture as a cultural project and a material object. These disembodied structures demonstrate that material never simply disappears, even if a building’s cultural status as architecture may come and go. Rather, when a demolished building is understood as “matter out of place,” instead of just waste, architecture’s leftover parts take on different form and meaning through making, re-making, and un-making. Anthropologist Mary Douglas reminds us that what a society considers waste is a reflection of its values, which architecture has the agency to challenge.

Indeed, typically the success of an architectural project is measured by what is added to the world rather than what is removed. As a resource-intensive endeavor enmeshed with the real estate market and construction industry, building is an engine for, and measure of, growth. Newness is seen here as a precondition for architecture’s future-making capacity.

Nevertheless, with growing concerns about limited resources, this fixation on newness is counterproductive (and outdated). Today, architecture’s value seems suspended between the uncovering of buried pasts and the anticipation of an uncertain future. Indeed, to acknowledge that the material residue of human history has not just been temporarily layered upon the earth but has fundamentally altered our geology and environment is to recognize the need for alternative design practices that take on the core, existential challenge of remaking what artist Robert Smithson called the “rubble of logic” that twentieth-century modernity—and its means of production—left behind. Much of this worldview was made possible by demolition and energy-intensive processes yielding totemic monuments to progress itself. By creatively working with the leftovers of the Anthropocene, designers of the built environment should help us live with our waste rather than just making more new stuff on an imagined or real tabula rasa. To participate in this transformation, architecture must reimagine demolition, or more precisely, we must ask: Is there architecture after demolition?

Unlike obsolescence and ruination, demolition is typically a planned, immediate act of total erasure. Given this ubiquitous tool for remaking the built environment, should the discipline not endeavor to “flip” it from a destructive tool of the market to a productive force of design? Why should we have to choose between a pile of rubble and a landmark designation as architecture’s ultimate endgame when a building faces the prospect of demolition? Rather than such “all or nothing” propositions, can architectural value be determined by what we choose to do with a demolished building’s remains? To do so, we’d need to focus on building parts, rather than building wholes, disassembly rather than demolition, leftovers rather than waste. We don’t need to look too far for some counterexamples. In New York City, James Bogardus’s cast-iron building system was originally intended to be disassembled and reassembled (not landmarked). Within the canons of modern architecture, we can find that Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp was partially built out of demolition waste (that was then whitewashed to look new). In these material-based practices, construction processes typically understood to be peripheral to architecture’s field of interest, such as removal, relocation, redistribution, and re-assemblage, are leveraged to not only expand the limited terms of adaptive reuse, but radically detach architecture’s value from a permanent site, fixed building, or singular use type. Such a project could thus reposition the significance of architecture as an open system of material and cultural exchange extending across broader geographies, constituencies, and lifecycles.

As Union Carbide is taken down during the next year, it should provoke a reevaluation of architectural demolition. Its unmaking might also inspire a new kind of architectural imagination oriented towards alternative ideas of objecthood, permanence, and authorship. Instead of treating architectural waste as ruins without a future, such a speculative, future-oriented project imagines this rubble differently—as parts of incomplete wholes, in the process of being continuously and collectively transformed but never finished.