FIELD NOTES
What a demolition site teaches you about a building
By Plinth Studio · Feb 2025 · 2 min read
Nothing teaches you construction like watching a building get taken apart.
We try to be on site for at least part of every demolition or strip-out, even when it's not strictly necessary. The reason is simple: a building under demolition shows you its actual history, not the one on file.
You find the previous renovation nobody mentioned — a steel lintel where the drawings show none, a stud wall built where a load-bearing one should be. You find out which materials aged well and which quietly failed behind a finish that looked fine right up until it didn't.
It changes how we specify. We've seen enough timber frames rot invisibly behind the wrong vapour barrier, and enough 1970s ‘permanent’ finishes fail in twenty years, to be skeptical of anything marketed as maintenance-free.
The building always tells the truth eventually. We'd rather hear it during demolition than during a leak.
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