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According to author/journalist Jeff Byles, we can trace the modern history of building demolition to the Great Fire of London in 1666. With remarkable foresight, diarist Samuel Pepys declared that "unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire." Pepys then "hustled home and buried his wine and Parmesan cheese in the garden." When the Lord Mayor ignored the pleas of Pepys and others, citizen activists took matters into their own hands and with "axes, crowbars, ropes and chains" they chopped firebreaks throughout the city.
Of such fascinating bits is RUBBLE composed, a charming and exceedingly thorough researching of the subject of purposeful architectural destruction. In the last century, rubbling gained a macabrely festive reputation when entrepreneurs in Las Vegas realized that people would pay to see buildings fall. In a non-city that continually recreates itself, "old" hotels and casinos (30 years is antiquated by Vegas standards) can attract a bigger crowd for their collapse than they did for their opening night. The Vegas "rubble-rousers," as Byles cleverly calls them, have brought razing to a high art, with pyrotechnic displays and lavish pre-show advertising.
It's impossible to talk about how a building collapses (it's referred to as "implosion," even though that is, technically speaking, a misnomer) without remembering the World Trade Center's twin towers, the Titanic of the late twentieth century. The towers were skyscrapers whose demise was a sucker punch at the very notion of progress, financial hocus-pocus and technological mega-complexity. Eerie predictions of their ultimate fall were early voiced, with one pundit calling them the "arrogant twins" and another, Cassandra-like, declaring, "There are so many things about gigantism that we don't know." Their doom seemed a foregone and melancholy conclusion to their excess.
Another renowned teardown was the Berlin Wall, so poorly built, it turned out, that getting rid of it was accomplished in the main by the modern equivalent of the citizen activists of London's Great Fire. A 6,000-pound section of it was sent intact to Ronald Reagan for his library, undoubtedly making heavy reading.
Though there has always been demolition, it is only in recent history that buildings are built with their destruction written into the blueprint. Does this strike anyone as morbid, like tagging each newborn infant with its parent's choice of ultimate disposal? Where is Howard Roark when we need his tormented idealism? But the practice seems logical to a civilization that no longer prides itself on permanency. After all, demolition is a big-buck industry, and the fashions of the city-scape change at our merest whim.
Sophisticated subject matter, archly amusing, but sad, sad, sad.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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