Is Deconstruction a Dirty Word?
Cindy Olnick 00:00
Today on Save As:
Guadalupe Flores 00:01
Funny thing is that this reuse of materials in new construction, it’s not new. Man has been doing this from the dawn of time.
Cindy Olnick 00:17
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of the field through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:29
And I’m Trudi Sandmeier. So Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:34
Yes Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:36
Today we’re gonna have a little bit of a controversial conversation here on Save As about deconstruction.
Cindy Olnick 00:42
Yeah, I gotta tell you, we’re going to the upside down. This is bizarro world for Cindy. The Andy Rooney of Save As. I’m just saying, the whole idea of taking buildings apart, you know, is sort of antithetical to what heritage conservation is about on one level. So it just seems like the opposite in a way, but I know that’s very simplistic.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:04
Yeah, it’s a much more nuanced conversation, I think. So, I had a conversation with Guad Flores, who is a recent graduate of our program, about this topic. He sort of ended up talking about deconstruction almost accidentally. He started off with a whole different topic and he kind of shifted in focus as he worked through his research and his writing, and turned out to be really an analysis of deconstruction and how it fits into our field.
Cindy Olnick 01:37
Yeah.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:45
So buildings have a lifecycle. And you know that we can’t save everything, and we know that and nor do we want to necessarily. So, in this bigger conversation about sustainability, and about how do we identify and keep the things we really want to keep, and then what do we do with everything else? We’ve already cut down trees, we’ve already mined things, we’ve already done those things. Why don’t we use them again?
Cindy Olnick 02:00
I know, it’s one of those things that just, it makes so much sense until you take a step back and look at the reality of our situation with development. And you know, it’s just faster and cheaper in the short term. And you know, we have a really hard time as humans, thinking about the long game.
Trudi Sandmeier 02:20
Yeah. But if anything that is coming out in the news today about climate change and the realities of what’s happening, we can no longer afford to play that short game.
Cindy Olnick 02:29
Climate, public health, air quality, environmental justice, so many other issues. So let’s get to it. Let’s hear Trudi’s conversation with Guad Flores.
Trudi Sandmeier 02:45
Welcome, Guad to Save As. Thanks for coming on our podcast. Why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself?
Guadalupe Flores 02:51
Well, thank you for having me. My name is Guadalupe Flores. I’m an architect. I’m a recent graduate of the Master of Heritage Conservation program. But I’m also a graduate of the School of Architecture with a Bachelor of Architecture. I have my own practice, and I’ve been doing architecture for over 28 years.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:16
What kind of work do you do in your practice?
Guadalupe Flores 03:19
Primarily, I my focus is education, K through 12, and higher education, and health care, hospitals, those kinds of things.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:29
So, you are out in the world as a practicing architect, what made you decide to go back to school and get a degree in heritage conservation?
Guadalupe Flores 03:39
Well, it was a rough time, because during the last recession of 2008, I was out of work. At the time architecture was in very bad state. And so I had time on my hands, so to speak. So, I decided to use some of that time for personal development. So I decided to look into getting into the program. And the reason I decided to do that is because I currently live in a 1924 house that’s in the Bungalow Heaven District here in Pasadena, and I was also representative to the Pasadena Historical Preservation Board. For me, it was sort of like a natural thing to pursue, as far as what am I going to study.
Trudi Sandmeier 04:32
How long have you lived in your house in Bungalow Heaven?
Guadalupe Flores 04:35
Twenty-four years.
Trudi Sandmeier 04:36
How did you end up there?
Guadalupe Flores 04:37
When my wife and I first got married way back in ’93, she was still was in school. And so we lived in downtown; we would have to venture out for groceries, for movies or shopping. Gradually our weekends were spent in Pasadena because we would come up, have lunch or go to the movies or grocery shopping. So, when it came time to look, we’re like, why don’t we just look to find a home in Pasadena? My wife found the district. And we had a realtor, and so he says, I have this house that’s coming on the market. But it’s not quite not on the market yet, right, so you can go take a look. So he gave us the idea. So, as we were driving up, she was driving, and I looked out the passenger side of the window, and I looked at the house and said, “Okay, I’m done.” I knew that was going to be my house. So, we parked and we came back. We fell in love with the house just by looking through the front windows. Yeah, that was it. It wasn’t until after we moved into that I saw, it’s like the house and I’m going, “Oh, my God, whatever did you just get into?” Just because it’s an old house, it had a lot of deferred maintenance. It was kind of a mess. And so we’ve done some work to it. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. One of the things, like my father-in-law says, when we bought the house, he tells me, he’s like, “I hope you’re, you’re like this house, because she’s never gonna want to move.” My wife is like, she alway, puts down roots fast, and then it’s hard to change.
Trudi Sandmeier 06:08
Yeah, but that’s the kind of neighborhood it is. It’s a place where people come and they don’t leave, they set down roots.
Guadalupe Flores 06:14
Oh, it’s a great neighborhood. We actually know our neighbors. Everybody sticks around, we have very little turnover.
Trudi Sandmeier 06:22
So your house is almost going to have its 100th anniversary, here, coming right around the corner. Excellent. I hope I get invited. So what was the title of your thesis Guad?
Guadalupe Flores 06:28
Throwing a party. The thesis is “Deconstruction: A tool for Sustainable Conservation.”
Trudi Sandmeier 06:43
Okay, so let’s dig in a little bit to, what does that mean? There’s a couple words there that we should probably define. So what is deconstruction?
Guadalupe Flores 06:53
So, deconstruction is think about it as the manual disassembly of a building, sort of like construction in reverse, for the purpose of salvaging, building materials, with the intent of reusing. If you remove a two-by-four, and you put it in a new building, for example, then the function of that two-by-four continues to be a two-by-four, you don’t turn it into some scaffolding or whatever, you know. So the idea is that you take it out of one building, and then you use it in a new building, with the same intent, the same function.
Trudi Sandmeier 07:38
So how is it different than salvage?
Guadalupe Flores 07:41
So then, salvage, for me would be that you remove it, and then you don’t necessarily use it for the same purpose. Because once you salvage it, you can then up cycle or down cycle it, right. So like, if you take that same two-by-four that you salvaged and then you downcycle it, you turn it into a chair or something right? Salvaging is recycling. I think that the intent is when you deconstruct that you’re actually going to use that material…
Trudi Sandmeier 08:12
In new construction.
Guadalupe Flores 08:14
For that same purpose.
Trudi Sandmeier 08:26
How did you end up with this thesis topic? Where did this come from?
Guadalupe Flores 08:31
So my original intent was to do embodied energy. All the energy that was used for a particular building component from extraction, or harvest, to transportation, to processing, to manufacture, to transportation, to final installation in the building, in this case. So it’s all that energy that was used for that particular component for that, to put it in its final spot kind of thing.
Trudi Sandmeier 09:10
I know that the amount of energy used in the calculations that people look at in terms of global energy use, that the building production side of things uses an enormous amount of energy, like 40% of all energy used, or more comes from the building industry. And that’s from harvest and construction and transportation and all of these things. So this is a big part of the sustainability conversation, for sure.
Guadalupe Flores 09:42
But it also includes the operation of those buildings. So it’s not just building the buildings, but it’s also operating the buildings,
Trudi Sandmeier 09:49
All the energy that goes into keeping a building functional.
Guadalupe Flores 09:53
Yes.
Trudi Sandmeier 09:55
So you were looking around for a thesis topic in the embodied energy area and that was right about the time that I heard from a guy who was looking to do a project for a grant proposal for the LA 2050 program, which was about thinking about green building and sustainability, how to create a better city by the year 2050. And he was interested in really doing a close analysis of a project of deconstructing a house and using those materials to build a new one as a sort of template for projects that would follow. And so I hooked him up with you.
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Guadalupe Flores 10:36
And so I looked into it, I spoke to the contractor that was doing the deconstruction and they agreed to share their research information, and photographs and all kinds of stuff. So that was great.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:50
The house that you looked at that was being deconstructed, was it a landmark?
Guadalupe Flores 10:54
No, no, the house was not a designated structure.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:01
Was it old?
Guadalupe Flores 11:02
It’s a 1907, two-story, American Foursquare style house.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:08
So it started off with this single house project that you kind of thought that, you know, okay, here’s a kernel that I can use. And then you build on that by really exploring this idea of deconstruction, where it came from and where it’s headed. So the team deconstructed the 1907 house, and then what did they do with the materials?
Guadalupe Flores 11:32
As part of the grant program research, the contractor was going to take those materials that were removed from the 1907 house, and then incorporate those materials in a new 2017 house. So they loaded up trucks of lumber, of brick, and then they were transported to a construction site in Mount Washington. And a new home was built, bringing some of those materials.
Trudi Sandmeier 12:06
Why is it a challenge for people to reuse existing building materials?
Guadalupe Flores 12:13
Well, you know, the funny thing is that, that this reuse of materials and new construction is nothing, it’s not new. Man has been doing this from the dawn of time. It’s just now that materials are more plentiful. So, in earlier days, materials weren’t so readily available, there was no Home Depot, right down by the lake or whatever. And so people had to use whatever materials they had on hand. And when a building or whatever structure became non-usable, they would take those materials and incorporate them into new material. So material reuse through deconstruction is not a new concept. It’s only now as a result of the green building movement, that that it’s found a new audience kind of thing.
Trudi Sandmeier 13:02
So why do we not deconstruct buildings more often?
Guadalupe Flores 13:06In my opinion, it was the result of the postwar years where everything was modern, new shiny, and so not a lot of people wanted old things. So the new mindset was new and shiny. And so we tended to discard quickly.
Trudi Sandmeier 13:29
But, you know, wood has been used in houses, even mid-century houses, and it’s a building material that may or may not even be visible, it might be concealed behind walls, or whatever. So why wouldn’t we just be doing that all the time?
Guadalupe Flores 13:47
Well, the other unfortunate thing that came about is development. And so for a developer, time is money. So it’s easier for that developer, to raze that site, just get a big bulldozer and just drop it back to the ground and scoop it all up and then haul it to the landfill, than to try to get in there and meticulously extract materials for reuse. Because deconstruction is a labor intensive operation. Probably it takes us just as much time to deconstruct as that it took to initially construct it, because like I said earlier, you’re doing it in reverse. And so a lot of development, didn’t have that, or didn’t want to spend the time to deconstruct it, it was much easier for them to just
Trudi Sandmeier 14:38
Mow it down, yeah. So what makes wood from 1907 different from wood in 2017?
Guadalupe Flores 14:50
So wood from 1907 is probably old growth from trees that had been allowed to grow for a long period of time, before they were harvested. And so the wood from old growth forests is a lot denser. But the wood from today is from relatively young forests. The wood is not as dense.
Trudi Sandmeier 15:18
So the grain is is farther apart, right? And so it’s not as strong.
Guadalupe Flores 15:24
Yes, it’s not strong.
Trudi Sandmeier 15:27
So old wood is valuable then, because it’s stronger and more resistant to pests. Seems like a good thing to reuse.
Guadalupe Flores 15:38
Well, one would think. And, the old wood characteristics are better than the new wood, you know, aesthetically. Like if you were to use some of that lumber as a finished product, you know, you have you know, nicer grains and things like that. So there is characteristics, you know, structural aesthetic that are better in the old wood than they are in the new wood.
Trudi Sandmeier 16:28
One of the reasons why this is tricky ground for heritage conservationists is because, of course, to do deconstruction, it requires the demolition of the building. And that’s always sort of the last resort for us. So why would you write a thesis about deconstruction in heritage conservation program? How does it play into this conversation?
Guadalupe Flores 16:50
Well, that’s tricky. I love old buildings. You know, I live in an old building. And I’ve always enjoyed older buildings. You know, it makes me sad when older buildings get demolished and for no particular reason, or they get abandoned and dilapidated, and nobody takes care of them. In my thesis, I try to make it clear that deconstruction is always a last resort. And so even buildings reach an end of life in their cycles. Those older buildings have character-defining features. It would be a shame just to like say, okay, just throw it in the trash, some of the plaster work some of the medallions and things like that, you know, they should try to be saved. Some of the millwork, you just can’t find certain things.
Trudi Sandmeier 17:44
Moldings.
Guadalupe Flores 17:44
Moldings, and things like that. Some of the quality of those materials is much better than what you can find today. And it makes no sense to just throw it out in the trash, you take it out and find another home to use it in. The deconstruction of the 1907 house, I think that was very straightforward. And I actually was present during some of the deconstruction. For me, it was very gratifying to see that some of the lumbers that were were removed were actually incorporated into that new construction. I’m sure there’ll be some people that will try to use that as an argument to them, it’s like, well, we don’t want it anymore and we can deconstruct it, so we can save this and then that they can use that as a reason for removing an older structure. So I make sure in my thesis, no, this is not a tool to assist you in removing historic structure. Some cities are already incorporating deconstruction into their building codes. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Tell me about a couple of examples.
Guadalupe Flores 18:53
So the one that has led the charge as far as municipalities enacting an ordinance is Portland, Portland, Oregon. So they were one of the first to incorporate a construction ordinance requirement. And this particular ordinance also has a heritage component, meaning buildings of a certain age automatically get deconstructed. They don’t get demoed.
Trudi Sandmeier 19:23
But there are quite a few cities now who are incorporating this idea into their building codes.
Guadalupe Flores 19:29
Or are in the process.
Trudi Sandmeier 19:30
Does it link to their landmark designations or is there some linkage to age or to designations of any kind?
Guadalupe Flores 19:38
Yes. So, for instance, Portland, Oregon, has a heritage component saying that any house or any structure built before 1940 is automatically deconstructed. Baltimore, any structure built before 1970. Vancouver, British Columbia has 1950, and then others don’t have the heritage component.
Trudi Sandmeier 20:05
And it’s principally as a sustainability measure correct?
Guadalupe Flores 20:09
Deconstruction, because of it’s timing has fallen in that sustainability umbrella.
Trudi Sandmeier 20:15
In the past, have building inspectors and departments beeng okay with reusing lumber?
Guadalupe Flores 20:22
Yes. Actually, currently the California State Building Code allows for reusing materials. But it’s a, it’s almost like on a case-by-case building basis. And it also depends on the building inspector.
Trudi Sandmeier 20:36
When I think about salvage and the connotations behind that, and why I have such a reaction to that term, I think of it in terms of people pillaging a building, and sort of stripping it of all of its character-defining features for nefarious purposes, for sort of economic value, taking a beautiful stained glass window out of someplace and selling it or something like that. And, deconstruction is really different in terms of the goal behind it. So, I think there’s a lot of possibilities for these materials that are still kind of unknown, people are just not doing this as much as they should be.
Guadalupe Flores 21:21
Sadly, that’s true. But again, there’s such a reservation with conservationists. And so, until we get everybody on board as far as like, yes, that can be a beneficial tool that benefits conservation, that benefits, waste reduction, those kinds of things, then it’s going to not be looked upon favorably.
Trudi Sandmeier 21:45
So thank you Guad for spending a little time chatting with me today about deconstruction, and about your research and about the future of our field.
Guadalupe Flores 21:56
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Hopefully, it was exciting for you as it was for me.
Cindy Olnick 22:08
Thanks so much, Trudi and Guad for this great conversation.
Trudi Sandmeier 22:12
I think it’s always really interesting that we’re coming up now, to an era where so much of the built environment of Los Angeles was originally constructed. There was massive construction in the 1920s in all of Southern California. And not all of them are historic. And not all of them are in good shape, or are necessarily going to survive for another century. So what do we do with these materials? How do we handle the ones that are not historic, there is an inherent value in the age of those materials and their ability to be reused.
Cindy Olnick 22:52
And as we’ve said, we are by far not the only ones having this conversation so we’re going to put a bunch of resources on our episode page at Saveas.place including a Place Economics Report on deconstruction and links to cities that have these ordinances. So, saveas.place, the place to be. Also connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, and for now Twitter at Saveasnextgen, all one word.
Trudi Sandmeier 23:29
This episode was produced by the amazing Willa Seidenberg, with an assist from Trudi. Thanks to our intern Emily Kwok and the team at the USC Annenberg Agency. A huge thanks to Steven Fimbres for his fantastic help with our website, saveas.place. It’s looking awesome. Go check it out. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. Additional music for this episode is by Tom Davies. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
