Deconstructed Landscape:

Landscape, Architecture and Waste through the Lens of Building Mortality

Issue:

Building mortality, liminality, and reassimilation.

When a building dies, it has two different possible fates.  It is either eventually reconditioned up to modern habitability standards and then reoccupied, or, it is taken down via either demolition or deconstruction to make way for new stock.  Buildings die at different times for different reasons, however one could argue that a building’s death occurs well before it is demolished or renovated.  This thesis will explore the liminality between a building’s demolition and reassimilation and what impacts building mortality has on our perception of landscape, waste,  and architecture.  

Significance of Issue:

Construction and demolition, and by association architecture, create prolific amounts of waste each year. The building sector created 530 million metric tons of construction and demolition waste in the United States in 2013, 90% of which was purely demolition related (EPA. Advancing Sustainable Materials Management. 2013).  For scale, the United States produced 254 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW consists of residential and commercial garbage and recyclables) in 2013.   Between 1996 and 2003 New York City saw a $400 million increase in its sanitation budget due to the closure of its last remaining landfill in Freshkills, Staten Island causing the city to start exporting its solid wastes to other states(NYC Sanitation 2004).  Connecticut is running out of landfill space rapidly, in particular for C+D wastes and Massachusetts is considering a ban on the disposal of C+D waste products entirely(NYC Sanitation 2004).

Proposal of Method:

Temporary rebuilding on site utilizing recovered materials could serve as a way to avoid having to transport a portion of the materials off site to recycling facilities or waste facilities by serving as a creative way to store construction materials on site for future projects. Through  this process, we can begin to take a landscape up approach to building that could provide ways to blur the boundaries between building waste, landscape, and architecture.  The installations would be both performative and informative and would integrate with the landscape to allow the former house site to become a positive environmental influence by augmenting any existing positive ecological functions and perhaps providing additional ecological functions such as water runoff control, filtration, and C02 sequestration.  The architecture of the constructs would address the importance of aesthetics in ecological design and the impact that it has on public perception of waste and “green” design. The economics of ecological design through the reuse of existing materials would also be furthered by showing what is possible with the introduction of closed-loop material practices. The site-holistic designs could open a new social dialogue, which would address the value and utility of reused materials and their potential for positive environmental impacts.