Set the charges, and stand well back. No cell phones, please. This is very dangerous work, but it's been a long week for you, hasn't it? You deserve to spend your day working in Demolition City.
posted by Eideteker on Aug 7, 2009 - 39 comments

From Sheffield, England to Yongbyon, North Korea, nuclear plant cooling towers are coming down! And pretty much without a hitch. Things didn't go quite so well, though, for an old flour factory in Turkey, which just rolled over onto its roof. D'oh!
posted by flapjax at midnite on Aug 1, 2009 - 34 comments

Beautiful train stations that fell to the wrecking ball.
posted by gman on Jun 23, 2009 - 72 comments

Kajima's floor-by-floor slow demolition is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless....After all, seeing the video of a 20-floor building submerging into the asphalt as if it was liquid is something that belongs to a sci-fi movie. [more inside]
posted by Pater Aletheias on Jul 15, 2008 - 30 comments

The new terminal at Beijing airport is big. No, wait, I mean it's REALLY BIG. That is, REALLY FUCKING BIG. And there's plenty of other massive construction projects underway in Beijing, many designed by European architects. Like they say, though, if you wanna make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. And well, they seem to be doing a better job of that than these guys. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Feb 27, 2008 - 56 comments

gas: tractor pulls and demolition derbies. Music, a bar graph, and a clown [youtube]
posted by nervousfritz on Jan 15, 2007 - 15 comments

Medianera is the spanish word for the wall that separates two buildings. When one of those buildings is knocked down, the remaining wall often carries impressions left behind by the now-demolished living space. Flickr pools: [1] [2].
posted by monju_bosatsu on Nov 12, 2006 - 28 comments

In honor of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, here are YouTube videos of bridges being destroyed. Only this one is sad to watch.
posted by thirteenkiller on Sep 1, 2006 - 13 comments

At 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, one push of a button will bring down the 30-story Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, one of the tallest buildings ever to be imploded. Thousands will watch. Here’s a preview and detailed explanation of the process. Many locals remember the giant, 77-ton electric clock that once spun on the roof.
posted by punkfloyd on Mar 17, 2006 - 53 comments

The "D" stands for Demolition. In an attempt at building awareness of Detroit's rotting, decaying neighborhoods(as if one needed further awareness), the Detroit Demolition Disneyland project finds long-abandoned, neglected structures that the city has failed to demolish and paints them with Tiggerific Orange paint.
posted by 40 Watt on Feb 15, 2006 - 36 comments

Academics question the official explanation for the WTC collapse. This paper, with internal links to assorted videos and stills, argues that WTC 7, the 45-story companion building to the towers, appears to have been demolished by planted explosives, not the fire from the twin towers.
posted by craniac on Jan 21, 2006 - 256 comments

The Ambassador Hotel is no longer standing. Recorded here.
posted by tellurian on Jan 17, 2006 - 23 comments

KABOOM!
posted by grouse on Sep 13, 2005 - 44 comments

"A world within a store": For decades, JL Hudson's was the soul of downtown Detroit. A commercial giant housed in a mammoth structure, the legendary store was a symbol of the city's heyday and a Midwestern icon, but much more to the millions who shopped there. The growth of suburban malls killed Hudson's flagship store in 1983, and thousands of nostalgic Detroiters lined the streets to see it demolished fifteen years later. "The store is a habit, an institution, a tradition, an emotion, or all of these, depending on which Detroiter you talk to. It's regarded as a member of the family in countless homes." Macy's, eat your heart out.
posted by sellout on Jul 23, 2005 - 16 comments

Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And 'Inside Job' Was it real or was it Memorex? Will we ever know? Tin-Foil hat theories or good, hard science?
posted by mk1gti on Jun 14, 2005 - 131 comments

Another stadium bites the dust. Make sure to avoid the Veterans stadium, South Philly area Sunday, unless you would like to witness the destruction first hand. Next on the chopping block? (Insert desired stadium demolition). But coming new in 2004, Petco and Veterans replacement Citizens Bank Park.
posted by brent on Mar 19, 2004 - 10 comments

All Fall Down: Remember the famous explosion sequence in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point? Fiona Villela says: "Flying toward the viewer, these many shards of shiny bits and pieces that once served a utilitarian purpose when part of a greater object here exist in and of themselves in a purely dazzling spectacle. This is the only way Antonioni can see the beauty of American capitalism, as a rainbow of shattered objects lost in space and time. ". What is the (undeniable) pleasure of watching big structures, that took years to build, destroyed in a few seconds? And has September 11 taken the fun out of implosion voyeurism? [Via memepool; original post by yoyology; Real required.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Nov 21, 2002 - 18 comments

Here in Seattle, we have a thing for big, ugly buildings. Sports fans, in particular, have a thing for building expensive, retractable roofed stadiums. So in order to make room for another one, the city is imploding the Kingdome.
 
Bad news for Martini Design, seeing as how they're located across the street. Or good news, maybe, since they're probably getting a lot of trafic from their implosion site, with the streaming webcam, and the Flash game, "The Imploder." I still haven't been able to tear the thing down without taking a few innocent buildings down with it.
posted by endquote on Mar 14, 2000 - 1 comment