Reconstructing Architectural Waste

Cel

Architectural historiography has long celebrated what goes up, the creation of buildings, but has largely neglected what goes down: buildings’ decay, demolition, and disposal. Reconstructing Architectural Waste (RAW) remedies this oversight by making architectural waste the focus of historical analysis. Architectural waste here is not only the construction materials left behind when buildings are dismantled, but also a process sustained by archival silences and institutional erasures that remove such debris from the record. RAW thus begins at the end, with dumpsites, salvage yards, incinerators, and landfills. By reversing the direction of inquiry, it centers the infrastructures and uneven economies that survive a building’s supposed end. It draws on discard studies, material histories, and environmental humanities, deploying Charles Mills’ “white ignorance” concept to expose how the architectural canon conceals racialized geographies, toxic residues, and laboring bodies entangled in the ends of buildings’ lives. To do so, RAW applies four perspectives: Shedding traces how buildings are stripped of parts and worth; Drift follows how fragments migrate across scales; Salvage examines economies of reuse and repair; and Accumulation confronts the residues that settle in landscapes and lives when circulation stalls. RAW’s approach is driven by histoire croisée (“crossed histories”), a relational method that shows how building fragments, demolition practices, and historical viewpoints are transformed as they intersect. In tracking how the very categories of “waste” are remade through their crossings, it alone can uncover the connections overlooked by the historiography of modern architecture. The project culminates in a terminal literacy lexicon, an analytical framework that rewrites architectural history through waste. This approach compels the discipline to confront its entanglements with the environment and labor alike, and to imagine more sustainable futures.