Quote:
Originally Posted by Hayward
The environmental characteristics of Gang's plan are highly realistic. When I lived in Michigan alot of General Motors plants were building wetlands to treat all of foundry waste on site as well as develop a completely new habitat for vegetation and wild life. When a few of the plants closed because of consolidation or construction of new facilities, city's and counties were left with land that had gone almost completely back to a natural state.....possibly even better than the agricultural land the preceded industrial growth.
It's also possible to dismantle and recondition steel from some of these factories. Often times more modern facilities have been overbuilt or designed to be decommissioned, dismantled, and reassembled elsewhere.
I think this should be adapted to Chicago. It's creative, and even realistic. But visionary enough that it could put Chicago on the map for rethinking underutilized industrial areas that are found in almost every rustbelt city.
|
A lot of people, architects in particular, savagely overvalue the term "salvage." Often times it is not cheaper or easier to salvage existing materials for re-use in some new configuration of the building, and almost always the fact that these materials are in fact scrapped for re-use elsewhere, or recycled anyway, as part of demolition, is ignored entirely. From a cost standpoint, the maybe $100,000 - $150,000 you'd spend to just tear the damn place down will likely be exceeded in re-purposing existing elements into the new structure.
Re-using steel trusses from the factory is almost certainly completely ludicrous in this scenario. They were designed to carry roof and snow loads at most, which come to about 40 psf in Chicago, and may even have been less per code when the factory was built. The live and dead load combination they'd have to carry in the new building are going to be at least triple that. This is to say nothing of the sheer man and machine power it would take to dismantle them carefully, move them, rework them in the field for re-use in the new building (probably around $40/hour more than shop work) and then re-install. Equipment-wise, you're using all kinds of cranes and lifts and other equipment to basically de-erect a building rather than the one large excavator you're probably using to just rip it down.
You see this kind of thinking in the City all the time, and it almost always costs more. Re-using bricks is a constant waste of money. Yes, you don't have to pay forty cents for a new brick. But you do now have to pay somebody to clean all the old mortar off of them, move them and put them on palettes for re-use, which costs more than forty cents a brick. If it's a historical building, then OK, there's reason. But if not, I never much see the point, particularly with Chicago Common, which has to be some of the ugliest brick you'll ever see anywhere.
Probably my favorite is when architects want to re-use doors, but reverse the swing. This isn't so bad if you've got residential stuff and it's all wood (though that's still a lot of cutting and patching, too) but give it a try with hollow metal sometime and see how far you get. It's almost always cheaper to just demo and get new.
But practicality doesn't ever make much difference in these types of "Architectural Big Ideas as Art Projects" anyway. It solidifies Gang as a Big Thinker among the Architectural Intelligentsia, which is what she needs to do to advance her career at this point. She's on pace to be up there with Adrian Smith and Lord what's his name out of London, and comically enough, this is the kind of stuff that will put her there.
Prev
Linear Mode
