The City of Ithaca, New York has decided to embrace the concept of deconstructing a series of more than 100-year-old homes to make way for a new 300-unit housing development.
The project comes at the urging of Felix Heisel, director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell, New York, who has conducted research pointing to the economic and environmental benefits of salvaging pieces of historic structures, pre-demolition.
What is being called the Catherine Commons Deconstruction Project could serve as a template for other cities confronted with doing away with older and often historic houses and buildings that are loaded with one-of-a-kind milled baseboards, flooring, windows frames, fireplaces, and stairs and stair railings.
On its website, Cornell says the project is tasked with investigating the “circular potential of the local built environment by researching and proposing methods for material reuse and recycling, reversible construction, reactivating embodied values, creating green jobs, and reinventing the underlying business models of construction.”
The Ithaca/Cornell efforts comes months after the Steamboat Sky & Resort Corporation in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, opted to pick apart several buildings slated for demolition by preserving up to 300 lockers for reuse, along with electronics, lighting and other equipment, in the building.
Some 2,400 fluorescent light bulbs were sent to the Glenwood Springs-based Brite Ideas Bulb Recycling for reuse.
“Everything we could think of to try to reuse, repurpose or give away, we tried really hard to do that before the demolition,” remarked Sarah Jones, the sustainability director with Steamboat Sky & Resort, in an interview the Steamboat Pilot & Today.
Earlier this month the San Antonio City Council passed a deconstruction ordinance designed to save such salvageable building artifacts as doors, cabinets, molding, and fixtures in houses built before 1920 that are slated for demolition.
One report indicates that up to 2,800 tons of materials could be salvaged in San Antonio from just 50 demolished homes.
Beginning in January of 2025, the ordinance will apply to all homes tagged for demolition that were built before 1945.
While the total cost savings of deconstructed buildings and homes has not been fully explored, the Cornell effort, according to its website, hopes to study the prices fetched by salvaged artifacts on the resale market, as well as the “environmental and social costs that are typically not factored into construction and demolition budgets.”
By Garry Boulard
