Re-engineering Destruction

Demolition of buildings is a pretty cool sight: the careful placement of charges by experts that, with a combination of brute force and cunning, brings down huge structures like wounded giants. But even the process the building demolition is ripe for innovation and improvement (as is the process of building construction; please see the blog entry Lean Construction).

The buildings are deconstructed by jacking up the building, removing the lowest floor and then dropping the entire building.

One interesting method is by the Japanese company Kajima, that uses a method called daruma-otoshi after a Japanese game that makes players take the bottom parts of a column-using a hammer-without disturbing the rest of the parts above. It is difficult to describe so a video is worth a thousand words: http://youtu.be/jwf9LoS9Xt8