This Old Recyclable House

Brad Guy started taking apart Cleveland a little after 8 o’clock on a Monday morning in June. Standing in the vandalized dining room of 6538 Lederer Avenue, he bent to the bottom of the wall and drove the end of a crowbar through the plaster with his hammer. He shimmied the bar behind the oak baseboard, feeling for nails. He was teaching his crew how to pry the wood loose without splitting it. Many of the workers who showed up that morning did not know what “deconstruction,” as this kind of work is called, actually was. Some assumed it was another word for remodeling — not realizing, or maybe not allowing themselves to believe, that no bulldozer was coming, that they would be disassembling this house by hand, down to the foundation, one piece at a time. They watched Guy wrestle with the baseboard for a while. He put down the crowbar and picked up a heavier one. “This is some old nice work that they did,” he said.

Guy is 49, with a round face and soft, nasal voice that’s mostly monotone but rises unsurely at the end of sentences. (When he hollers, “Break time, 15 minutes,” the worker next to him, thinking this is a question, will check her watch and say, “I guess so.”) He was a dancer and choreography student before being lured into architecture and is now the president of the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit in Pittsburgh that supports the fledgling deconstruction industry. He has spent the last 14 years as a journeyman architectural academic, conducting meticulous studies on how to efficiently dismantle the American house to reuse its materials instead of just clobbering it with a backhoe and sweeping it into a landfill.

In that time, Guy has deconstructed about 30 buildings, from row houses in Philadelphia to a 9,000-square-foot Army warehouse at Fort Campbell, Ky., where attack helicopters flew overhead and artillery went off as he stood on the roof dissecting it. While many deconstructors have far more hands-on experience, he is gathering scrupulous data about the process and organizing it all into research papers and spreadsheets that he describes as “five miles long.” Last year, he went back to school for a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon. “I’m basically an office worker,” he told me. He trained for this project in Cleveland with long walks and dumbbell exercises.

more from the NY Times