The online news site WestportNow reports on every teardown scheduled to occur in the tony Connecticut town. The pile of rubble above was once a 1954 ranch style home.
Teardowns are certainly controversial, and for good reason. The waste typically goes straight to a landfill and often, what replaces the small scale ranch or cape is a monster McMansion that is out of scale with its neighbors and has no reference to the vernacular architecture in the region.
My preference is to renovate and remodel, but taking an outdated, obsolete house down in order to build a new home more appropriate to the way famlies live today is not always wrong. If the demolished material is recycled, reused and/or diverted from landfills, a well designed home, scaled respectfully to its neighbors, can give a family a home that works best for them. The neighbors benefit too in increased home values. An entire neighborhood can be transformed with the addition of one well designed home.
What are your thoughts on teardowns??
The waste associated with teardowns is amazing. I watched a house up the street come down and thought of all the old douglas fir joists and studs that were headed for the landfill. http://houseitemsandroomsilike.blogspot.com/2008/11/interesting-to-watch.html The old wood that was in the house is much better than what is used in new construction.
That said, it was very expensive and time consuming to go the deconstruction/donation route, like we did. If I had it to do over again, I would still choose deconstruction, but I would have insisted that the builder find a way to reuse the lumber that came out of our old house in the renovation.
McMansions. Not very inspiring. I think they bring down property values for adjacent houses.
In our area we are finding, although not as common due to economy, tear downs are popular. We are a remodeling firm in Silicon Valley. IN our projects we are beginning to be more conscious of what we do with the materials we remove. For example: we recently gutted a nice Saratoga, CA home and discovered hundreds of feet of clear redwood that had bee painted. Honestly in the olds days we would have probably sent it to the landfill. We are saving the material and plan to use it in our new studio we are planning. Re-use of material is also changing the methodolgy of designing. It seems to be a more fluid process as material discovery affects the design on the fly. I find it exciting.
Finding new uses for old materials is a lot of fun actually. My dining room floor is reclaimed ipe wood decking pulled from a project’s dumpster. We had it re-milled to be the proper thickness and T&Gs added. It is a great flooring for a family with three kids and two dogs. Ipe is about as hard a wood as it comes.
You can see it here:
http://fivecat.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/a-friend-for-life/
Thanks for the comments.