Interested in the duality between static building code requirements and the continuously evolving built environment, this thesis project explores the potential opportunities for obsolescence of one infrastructure to led to a new spatial configuration through a speculative demolition technique grounded in legal realities.
URBAN BLIGHT
Detroit, best known for its rapid urban decay from massive declines in the automobile industry, has experienced vast amounts of residential abandonment as a result of a population dwindle. Fallen into disrepair and deemed unable to fulfill the structures original purpose, large portions of the cities housing stock sits in obsolescence.
LEGAL REQUIREMENTS
Always in constant shift, built work moves from use, to disuse, and inevitably obsolescence. Despite functional lifespan, once a house becomes vacant in the City of Detroit the built materials of the structure must continue to fulfill maintenance requirements. Understood as a process rather than a static state, the raw materials of abandoned structures in the city continuously move further from code compliance.
DUSTIFICATION PROCESS
Often left incompliant to the legal requirements and without functional value, many houses in Detroit are highly susceptible to demolition by arson, neglect, wrecking, and scrapping and doomed to complete destruction. A new demolition technique, demolition by dustification, was created to re-imagine the future of building materials in vacant structures using aspects of existing removal techniques. Demolition by dustification is the pulverization of a bulk material to reduce the component to its smallest particulates of matter.
The demolition technique starts within the interior of the structure, allowing complete containment of the demolition inside the shell of the building and fulfillment of exterior maintenance requirements until the last layer of the facade is removed, resulting in the entire house reduced to a single pile of dust.
Dustification holds a juxtaposition between the legal desire for material permanence on the exterior of the house and material compositional impermanence on the interior of the house through accelerated degradation.
DUSTIFIED BUILDING COMPONENTS
Each element of a house was drawn and calculated for its dustified volume. The piles of dust take on a completely different composition from the original bulk material and allow for a spatial comparison of each building component as typically perceived and each component as compacted particles. Reconfigured and drawn into piles organized by material type, the dustification process disconnects the original functional value from the component and deepens the awareness of the component’s material properties.
SPATIAL RECONFIGURATION
The demolition by dustification process physically expands and compacts building materials as dust particles producing new spatial realities from an obsolete structure. The fantastical re-imaging of a vacant house from a simulated demolition technique is a speculative scenario in reaction to the inevitability of obsolescence in architecture. Deepening our awareness of the constant evolution of our built environment and harnessing its potential could be the key to transforming its occurrence from detriment to opportunity in the future of our cities.