After buying the vacant house next to her own in the interest of tearing it down to make room for a green space, sculptor Dee Briggs decided it deserved a sort of architectural end-of-life care she's deemed a "gentle demolition." "Taking the house apart—more or less in the reverse of how it was put together almost 140 years ago—will allow us to reuse most of the material to build something really wonderful on the site in the future," she writes on a Kickstarter page that seeks to raise $30K for the effort. As if to send the house off in style, Briggs also painted the entire thing gold, and created a website where it tells its story in first-person.
"I hope that at least a few people will make the conceptual leap to realizing that all abandoned, blighted houses once housed people," Briggs tells CityLab. Looking forward, she hopes to use the project as a case study that tracks the costs of a "gentle demolition" done to enable adaptive reuse.
· In Its Last Days, a House Turns to Gold [CityLab]
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