A "Gentle Demolition": When local art ignites community development

Before doing a routine demolition in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, one artist was inspired by the stories and the personal belongings of those who lived in that house before it was abandoned, reported Next City.

Instead of tearing the house down, Dee Briggs launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a “gentle demolition,” taking the building apart as carefully as it had been constructed, according to Next City.

In the Kickstarter campaign, Briggs wrote:

The House of Gold art project is a metaphor and it’s meant to remind everyone to see the value in people and places before they are gone. Simply put – I don’t want to throw this house in the garbage. I want it to live on and the first step of that life is a gentle demolition. Taking the house apart – more or less in the reverse of how it was put together almost 140 years ago – will allow us to reuse most of the material to build something really wonderful on the site in the future. A coffee shop, a bus stop, community garden beds - all sorts of cool stuff.

Years later, Briggs is using some of the former materials from the house to build a new coffee shop. Creative placemaking comes to mind with this project but when the House of Gold came about, that term wasn't in the artist's lexicon, explains Next City.

Her work, however, is included in the report, “Creative Placemaking on Vacant Properties: Lessons Learned from Four Cities,” which documents initiatives that used arts and culture "to remake vacant properties in ways that also model inclusive community development."

Read the Next City piece here.

Image: Kickstarter: Dee Briggs/The House of Gold