Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition

by Jeff Byles

From the straight boulevards that smashed their way through rambling old Paris to create the city we know today to the televised implosion of Las Vegas casinos to make room for America’s ever grander desert of dreams, demolition has long played an ambiguous role in our lives. In lively, colorful prose, Rubble rides the wrecking ball through key episodes in the world of demolition. Stretching over more than five hundred years of razing and toppling, this story looks back to London’s Great Fire of 1666, where self-deputized wreckers artfully blew houses apart with barrels of gunpowder to halt the furious blaze, and spotlights the advent of dynamite—courtesy of demolition’s patron saint, Alfred Nobel—that would later fuel epochal feats of unbuilding such as the implosion of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis.

Rubble also delves beyond these bravura blasts to survey the world-jarring invention of the wrecking ball; the oddly stirring ruin of New York’s old Pennsylvania Station, that potent symbol of the wrecker run amok; and the ever busy bulldozers in places as diverse as Detroit, Berlin, and the British countryside. Rich with stories of demolition’s quirky impresarios—including Mark Loizeaux, the world-famous engineer of destruction who brought Seattle’s Kingdome to the ground in mere seconds—this account makes first-hand forays to implosion sites and digs extensively into wrecking’s little-known historical record.

Rubble is also an exploration of what happens when buildings fall, when monuments topple into memory, and when “destructive creativity” tears down to build again. It unearths the world of demolition for the first time and, along the way, throws a penetrating light on the role that destruction must play in our lives as a necessary prelude to renewal. Told with arresting detail and energy, this tale goes to the heart of the scientific, social, economic, and personal meaning of how we unbuild our world.

Rubble is the first-ever biography of the wrecking trade, a riveting, character-filled narrative of how the black art of demolition grew to become a multibillion-dollar business, an extreme spectator sport, and a touchstone for what we value, what we disdain, who we were, and what we wish to become.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, Urban Planning

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jeff Byles is an author and journalist who has written about architecture, urbanism, and culture for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Metropolis, Modern Painters, Cabinet, The Believer, and other publications. His book Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition was named a Best Book of the Year by The Village Voice and Time Out New York.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is less a history of demolition and more a batch of profiles of important and strange people in the demolition or development field. The characters are vivid - the Volks tearing down early 20th century New York, Haussmann plowing through Second Empire Paris, and perhaps the most interesting, the Loizeaux family, a much mythologized demoltion family. But Byles is way too determined to make these people seem like artistes, 'demolitionists' as he has it, and he misses the real point in all these stories. These men are far less important than those funding the demolitions or determining the paths of destruction. But I guess Robert Moses and Louis-Napoleon have had their biographies. And what of the things demolished? It's not until nearly half way through the book that Byles attempts to show the great losses (in architecture anyway) that progress can bring, and his over wrought and over excited prose ruins nearly everything he touches. In the hands of a subtler writer these stories could've been haunting, but they come off like comic book synopses and Nickelodeon histories.

Byles is at his best when describing the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York, or the Devil's Nights of Detroit (which I thought were a fictional creation of Glen Hirshberg) the night before Halloween when, in the 70s and 80s Detroit's urban populace set upon the city's many abandoned buildings with torches and sledgehammers - and white suburbanites came to view the spectacle. There's a lot of sociology here that Byles, in his attempt at levity and, one would assume, book sales, skims over in favor of boring and winding platitudes.

Rubble contains a chapter on Vegas demolition and some of the people and ideology behind America's demo craze is made clear through hyperbole. Vegas is more a caricature of America, than part of America, after all. Byles's section on September 11 is thoughtful.

The most powerful image in the book is not Byles's, however. It is Walter Benjamin's angel of history, who soars backward into the future. "Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet." This from Benjamin's On the Concept of History.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some places it was more interesting that I would have thought. Other places less so. But overall a good read.

[Rob Kitchin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rubble is a popular history of sorts of the industry of demolition. In many ways it’s a curious book, blending high brow magazine writing with quasi-academic verse, thus mixing newspaper-style reporting, and its emphasis on facts, figures and spectacle, with the high philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, and others. The style of writing kind of works, but it does drift into pretentiousness in more than a few places. Some of the case material is fascinating, for example in relation to the Haussmann clearances of Paris, the razing of Pruitt-Igoe ghetto in St Louis, and urban clearances of Detroit where 161,000 buildings were demolished between 1970 and 2000. However, the book suffers from a number of problems that made it quite difficult to persevere with (though I did make it to the end). First, the structure is quite chaotic, jumping backwards and forward in history within and between chapters. In fact, I could see no logic to the ordering of the material. Second, the book is almost exclusively focused on the U.S. with the occasional foray into demolition elsewhere, notably Paris and Britain. The kinds of ‘urbicide’ discussed have been widespread across the Western world and elsewhere such as in Eastern Europe, particularly in the period of Soviet control. Third, the book concentrates on demolition in the twentieth century. This is perhaps unsurprising given it was in this time period that it grew to become a well organised, multi-billion dollar industry. That said, people have been building and then knocking things down and clearing the debris away for as long as they’ve been urban dwellers and it would have been useful to delve much more into demolition in the period prior to the twentieth century (which admittedly would require widening the geographical remit significantly beyond the US).

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's so much fascinating information here - he essentially takes events that anyone who's read a little urban history knows, like the Hausmann plan and building removal in Detroit, and fills in exactly how and by whom they were carried out.

Buuuut it's a postmodern cultural analysis, not the historic or journalistic account I was expecting...like, I'm pretty sure if you added up all the named people in the text, you'd get more French philosophers than historic preservationists. There are many times he almost gets at something policy related, like how the spectacle of public housing demolitions affected public opinion, but stops short. And then...there was one statistic in the first chapter that made me go "that can't be true...I don't think we can even measure that" and the citation was of an unsourced aside in an unrelated article, so my heightened BS radar after that kinda colored the rest of my reading (oh, so many quotes that sound like they're from primary sources, and are actually secondhand at best). It just felt like all the things I like least about academic writing without the rigor.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fascinating subject -- how buildings are demolished and how all that stuff is carted away, with many good historical anecdotes and warnings about environmental damage, plus a lot of emphasis on explosive demolition. But as a piece of writing, I fear it was a little too long-winded and rambling. It could have used some partial demoliton of its own.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly written, incredibly informative, wonderfully snarky at times. I'd read anything and everything Jeff Byles writes. Of particular interest to me were the chapters on Detroit and Paris. If you share my interests in architecture, sociology, and public history, I highly recommend checking this book out.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything is disposable.

[Magnoire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok book. Author is for retaining old buildings. A little preachy.

[Tim Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Book!

[Ily · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is about the history old demolition world.i used this for my research as well...good start for a student like me...happy reading ^^

[Deusprimus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history. The discussion on the revitalization of Paris almost made me cry. Neither older, nor newer is always better.

[Text Addict · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. You have no idea, seriously. There's amazing, fascinating stuff in this book.