Buildings are glued, screwed, bolted, cemented, and regulated, but buildings are not permanent, nor resolved upon construction. Often considered as fixed and site-specific, completed works of architecture resist modular thinking. However, this perspective limits our understanding of both history and potential. Space and Place are still relevant in architectural thinking, but this research seeks to simultaneously zoom further in, to the provenience of developing sites, and further out, to the provenance of materials, for new perspectives. 

The destructions of Maison du Peuple (Brussels, Belgium) and Militærhospitalet (Oslo, Norway) were a means to an end for mid-1960s progress. Development plans once assumed their disposal, but international dissent turned the quick demolitions into systematic deconstructions. Hard-fought battles between those wishing to demolish and those hoping to preserve lead to the partial deconstruction, decades-long storage, and ex-situ spoliation of the buildings. Material disappearance catalyzed the accumulation of documentation; archives related to Maison du Peuple and Militærhospitalet are preoccupied with their interludes. 

If architectural history tends to recount the motivation and conception of buildings, then this thesis aims to canonize their afterlives. Demolition is already integral to architecture and implicit in its history, but scholars have repeatedly noted its near-absence in architectural history. By asking how rather than why these buildings were demolished, this thesis shifts focus from conception to reception, from beginning to end, and from author to owners. 

The research is supervised by Mari Lending and is part of the larger OCCAS project Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.