Building a House

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When you want to build something new, sometimes something old has to be torn down.

About this creation

It is still a pretty house, but times have changed over the last 90 years. What used to be a little suburb has turned into a business quarter bursting with offices. The owners are planning to move into a quieter neighborhood after their retirement and a buyer for their home is quickly found.

The house is rather too small and lacks a flexible floorplan, so that it has to be torn down, making room for a new building.

Built with bricks and mortar and a lot of wood, a sizable excavator is quite up to the job.

Floor by floor the house is dismantled.

A construction pit is dug.

The ground is prepared with a layer of sand.

After the cellar is built from cast concrete, the upper floors are assembled using pre-build wall elements.

Quickly, the new building is completed. Integrated central heating and cooling is installed in the cellar. The offices are filled with desks and there is even a kitchen in the chill-out lounge in the top floor.

Photovolatic elements are set up on the roof. Finally, the garden, of which little was left after the big machines did their job, is replanted.

The excavator is movable along four axes.

The crawler crane provides two axes. You can see the hydraulic system pushing the crane boom.

Making of

This model started with the excavator, but I felt that it had to have something to do. So I gave it a house to tear down and a hole to dig.

The focus on action meant that I had to limit the size of the house so that it would not become the sole focus area. Thus, I just sketched a tiny corner of it. Still, what little there remained still had to give a sufficient impression of the overall building.

Strata are the current fad, but at this scale all I could do was to give some structure to the ground. But of course, the ground under a town has other interesting features.

While I might have omitted the road and the sidewalk, they put the project in context and make one imagine the surrounding city when, of course, there is none.

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