Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition [Hardcover]

Jeff Byles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2005 | ISBN-10: 140005057X | ISBN-13: 978-1400050574 | Edition: annotated edition

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The controlled reduction of buildings to rubble is "the black art of our time," writes Byles. In this colorful thematic history of the demolition trade (a subject he was pursuing, it should be said, before the destruction of the Twin Towers), he rightfully calls Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, "the patron saint of creative destruction." Only in the 1910s did the simple need to topple skyscrapers emerge as a fact of urban renewal. Before 1900, demolition was only sporadically used to prevent the spread of fire, and was largely an inefficient matter of pulling buildings down, not exploding or imploding them. Over time, the dangers of wrecking balls led to an increased emphasis on hydraulics and contained explosives. Today, the ostentatious annihilation of gargantuan stadia and casinos draws awestruck throngs. Byles examines this history, looking at the "clear-cutting of entire neighborhoods" in Paris by Baron Haussmann ("who called himself 'artist-demolitionist' "), the "sorry end" of New York's original, monumental Pennsylvania Station (and its impact on the urban preservation movement) and the destruction of the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. With brio, Byles ably and pungently excavates the shadowy crannies of this underappreciated art, summarized by one practitioner as "a little dynamite, judiciously placed." 25 b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Urban design, it turns out, is as much about subtraction as addition. With matchless wit, Jeff Byles explores the American obsession with demolishing our architectural past. He’s the poet laureate of those unsung heroes: the ‘unbuilders.’” —Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; annotated edition edition (November 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140005057X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400050574
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,347,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jeff Byles is the author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (Harmony Books, 2005). He has written about architecture, urbanism, and culture for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Metropolis, Modern Painters, Cabinet, The Believer, and other publications. Among recent projects, he has co-edited The New York 2030 Notebook (Institute for Urban Design, 2008) and is co-author of A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present (Norton, 2011).

Jeff studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He got his start in journalism at The Anchorage Press, a weekly paper where for several years he wrote a column about beer. Jeff served for two years as managing editor at The Architect's Newspaper, and most recently has directed special projects at Van Alen Institute.

A native of Portland, Oregon, he lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A disservice to readers and the demo industry, February 3, 2006

By 

Brent Blanchard (Mt. Laurel, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (Hardcover)

As a 20-year demolition consultant and historian who was approached by Mr. Byles in 2002 to supply facts for this book, I had high expectations that it would provide an entertaining - and accurate - look at the history of the demolition industry. So it is with disappointment that I write today about the scores of issues that render this book virtually useless to the casual reader and offensive to the serious demolitionist. Its inaccuracies are many and substantial, and in the age of James Frye/Oprah Winfrey, where repeatedly sacrificing truthfulness for entertainment value is exposed as intentionally deceptive, this effort is about as irresponsible as it gets.

Mr. Byles writes that his idea for this book was formed while watching the twin towers fall on 9/11 and the resulting demolition activities at Ground Zero. However, instead of performing research by visiting jobsites and speaking with experienced demolitionists, the author openly elected to solicit kooky, over-the-top hyperbolic sound bites ("I have set off more big bangs than anybody on earth in peacetime") from three or four self-serving contractors who were willing to pontificate quasi-poignant phrases on demand ("We are seizers, we seize... the building is fighting me, but I've got to bring her to her knees... [via a] symphony of failure") in return for gushing favorable mention (Just one of Mr. Byles' selected demo buddies is hailed as, "the philosopher king of destruction... part matador, part sage, part connoisseur of collapse... a convinced neurobiologist... the dentist of urban decay... the Mozart of dynamite... the Guru of gravity...", and many more). Perhaps this would be warranted and even entertaining, if any of it were true.

To make things worse, Mr. Byles then dovetailed those sound bites with references to dozens of previously published articles - many of which themselves are well known to be inaccurate - and un-researched personal prose to paint a grand, sweeping verbal extrapolation on the demolition industry.

The lack of fact checking for this book is astonishing: Not counting the first two chapters that cover the well worn but interesting ground of how demolition was used to control fires in the 1600s, Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot and various other developments transpiring up to the 1940s, an astounding 74 of the remaining 231 pages read as an endless run of long-disproven misrepresentations, attacks on industry trade publications and mocking ridicule of virtually all responsible demolitionists worldwide (thousands of contractors outside of Byles' small cabal of sound bite buddies are dismissed as "glum rivals" and "detractors", "skulking around" while engaged in "industry bickering"). So many quotes and statements in the book are just plain untrue or appear wildly out of context, this space doesn't allow listing them all.

But above all, the most inexcusable aspect of this book is its hypocrisy. At its lowest point, the book takes several demo contractors to task for two tragic fatalities that resulted from building implosions in Glasgow and Canberra, then piles on additional derision via unflattering quotes and personal commentary. Is this warranted? Perhaps. However further on, when describing one of several fatalities suffered by some of his favored sound-biters, Mr. Byles sees fit to hold them completely unaccountable, writing, "In a freak explosion that remains unexplained to this day, the dynamite detonated [and killed the bystander]."

Come again with that? Mr. Byles, the first rule of blasting is that a detonation is never, ever unexplained. OSHA sure found a way to explain it while serving up a record fine for willful safety violations in connection with the event. Similar biased and hypocritical statements are made in other parts of the book, and Mr. Byles never explains why he avoids mentioning the disproportionate long-term OSHA/safety problems associated with his favored spokespeople.

It serves no purpose to mention names of the author's buddies, because that's not the point. It could be anyone. In the end the only name is Jeff Byles, who has gambled his reputation that he could trust his sources as truthful, and has lost his shirt. By constantly striving for the catchiest or kitschiest phrase, bypassing verbal interaction with more than a handful of demolitionists, and playing favorites, Mr. Byles not only misses the mark on accuracy but misses the essence of what it's like to deconstruct structures every day for a living. Which as I recall was the point. Thus it is difficult to imagine how a reader will come away from their experience with a better understanding of this diverse profession.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A charming and thoroughly researched look at architectural destruction, December 6, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (Hardcover)

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

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grand Story, March 12, 2006

By 

Wesley Bishop (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (Hardcover)

As one who is fascinated with the old, I thoroughly enjoyed this thought provoking expose about the place "unbuilding" has played in our past and its role in our future. I especially appreciated learning about the role demolition played in the Paris cityscape. I will see Paris in a whole different light the next time I amble through her streets. Very witty examination of an "art" that we see and hear about, but have not delved into either its colorful and varied history or its current affect onour landscape.