Ellen Wood

Under (De)Construction

Ellen Wood

Advisor: Rania Ghosn Readers: Yolande Daniels, Cristina Parreño & Roi Salgueiro Barrio

For each palette of Spanish glass or Pennsylvania steel that arrives at a Manhattan block under construction, a truckload of rubbled concrete and mangled steel debris containing the remnants of a pre-existing structure is hauled away. The building industry in New York City is a machine for material exchange — constantly importing materials in for the construction of new structures and exporting materials out in the form of waste, often to meet its end in outof-state landfills or recycled down as low-grade aggregates. And so, despite its seemingly reliable solidity, New York City’s built environment can be characterized as much by its willful impermanence as it can by its staggering monumentality. Buildings rise and then fall over a matter of decades, often reaching their premature obsolescence in the face of shifting ownership, real-estate speculation, and amendments in planning policy. Blocks are continuously transformed to make way for new developments, often soaring higher and expanding wider than their individual predecessors. And, as a city whose grid reached maximum capacity seventy years ago, nearly each new act of construction is preceded by acts of demolition.

Architects, as key stakeholders in the processes of building, do not often take part in the processes of unbuilding. This thesis speculates on a scenario in which architects take agency over the other end of a building’s life — its demolition. In doing so, salvaged and rubbled material are seen

as a resource for building, rather than as waste. Working within a city that has historically embraced change and innovation, this thesis imagines new relationships between these materials and the processes of architecture as well as patterns of assembly and disassembly within the urban environment.

Image 1 (top): Deconstructing Union Carbide, Ellen Wood, with original image courtesy of Getty Images. Image 2 (above top): Material Pallette, Ellen Wood, original images courtesy of MIT Libraries. Image 3 (above): Staging Warehouse (Midterm Model), Ellen Wood.