Rubble: The Book

From the straight boulevards that smashed their way through rambling old Paris to create the city we know today to the televised implosion of Las Vegas casinos to make room for America’s ever grander desert of dreams, demolition has long played an ambiguous role in our lives. In lively, colorful prose, Rubble rides the wrecking ball through key episodes in the world of demolition.

Stretching over more than five hundred years of razing and toppling, this story looks back to London’s Great Fire of 1666, where self-deputized wreckers artfully blew houses apart with barrels of gunpowder to halt the furious blaze, and spotlights the advent of dynamite—courtesy of demolition’s patron saint, Alfred Nobel—that would later fuel epochal feats of unbuilding such as the implosion of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis.

Delving beyond these bravura blasts, Rubble also surveys the world-jarring invention of the wrecking ball; the oddly stirring ruin of New York’s old Pennsylvania Station, that potent symbol of the wrecker run amok; and the ever busy bulldozers in places as diverse as Detroit, Berlin, and the British countryside. Rich with stories of demolition’s quirky impresarios—including Mark Loizeaux, the world-famous engineer of destruction who brought Seattle’s Kingdome to the ground in mere seconds—this account makes first-hand forays to implosion sites and digs extensively into wrecking’s little-known historical record.

Rubble is also an exploration of what happens when buildings fall, when monuments topple into memory, and when “destructive creativity” tears down to build again. It unearths the world of demolition for the first time and, along the way, throws a penetrating light on the role that destruction must play in our lives as a necessary prelude to renewal. Told with arresting detail and energy, this tale goes to the heart of the scientific, social, economic, and personal meaning of how we unbuild our world.

Praise for Rubble...

"Wonderfully illuminating...Byles has built a fabulous work from centuries of tearing down."
—Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"[A] riveting book that is by turns sad, nostalgic and humorous, and fascinating throughout."
—Associated Press

"Urban design, it turns out, is as much about subtraction as addition. With matchless wit, Jeff Byles explores the American obsession with demolishing our architectural past. He’s the poet laureate of those unsung heroes: the 'unbuilders.'"
—Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities

"[A] live-wire, multilevel study that makes it clear that 'demolition has left a dynamite-and-acetylene imprint on our streetscapes and on our very souls.' But the book is much more than an exposé of urban planning’s greed-driven dark side—it's also a meditation on the wildly varying responses the erasure of architecture inspires."
—Time Out New York

"[Byles's] forthcoming debut, Rubble, is a cultural history of unbuilding—from Haussmann's Parisian overhaul to the collapse of the twin towers—that will make him a writer to watch.... Byles illuminates how we are what we destroy."
—Ed Park, The Village Voice

"In prose that matches the swagger of people who bring down buildings for a living, Jeff Byles has written a surreal saga of modernity's love of destruction. Rubble is a guidebook to the empty lot, that permanent feature of the ever-changing city."
—Newsday

"[A] colorful thematic history of the demolition trade.... Byles ably and pungently excavates the shadowy crannies of this underappreciated art."
—Publishers Weekly

"Rubble is an ebullient and informative look at a trade that lurks in the shadows."
—Preservation