Designing For Destruction: Anticipating Architectural Dismantling Through the Act of Making

This thesis proposes that architecture should be re-examined in terms of its own inevitable future material demise. Architects are predisposed to focus on the making and construction of buildings, and seldom consider the questions of demolition, destruction, and disassembly. However a more holistic approach to the making of buildings pursues construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction as a cyclical material system where consumption is always followed by reuse. Such an approach would result in designs that are prepared for future disassembly. Urban processes should also be considered as cyclical systems, in which periodic demolitions, and even destructions, create the conditions for urban rebirth. The ideas discovered in this thesis will be applied to the design of a new headquarters for the National Demolition Association, on a site in Detroit.