City Lab profiles our Taking Buildings Down Competition!

“While to build is often perceived as an Apollonian pursuit, to destroy appears to be its Dionysian counterpart,” reads the call for entries. “Understanding that our built environment is the product of many forces, it can dialectically be reduced to the tensions between creation and destruction, addition and subtraction, and erection and demolition.”

Back in April 2014, the Storefront named David Bench and Jonathan Chesley the winners of the “Competition of Competitions” for submitting “Taking Buildings Down.” Both Bench and Chesley are on the jury for “Taking Buildings Down.” So is Annabelle Selldorf, principal at Selldorf Architects, where both Bench and Chesley work as designers. Other members of the jury include Jeff Byles (author of Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition), Keller Easterling (author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space), and more experts from the special intersection of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in design.

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