As many of you know (especially if you stopped by my office this summer), for the past several weeks I've had front row seats to a dramatic floor show: the demolition of CERAS. With destruction reminiscent of the Meyer Library/Green transformation (or a meet-up between Godzilla and Ghidorah), CERAS has come apart floor by floor, stone by stone, and piece by piece. From my office window, I've watched a parade of juraissic diggers, gargantuan dump trucks, and hose-wielding constructor workers dismantle that building, some days slowly and some days very quickly, over the last ten weeks. I thought I'd share below some images from this transformation. Consider it the next-best-thing to actually being there.
Above: CERAS as you might have seen it last. Mid-June, students are gone, and workers are prepping for the summer demolition.
Above: Here it is a couple of days later with the largest plastic sheet on the planet suspended from roof to foundation to protect passers-by (and Sweet Hall occupants?) from the dust rising up during the process of de-constructing the interior.
Above: From my office window at this point - not much to see, though I was happy that my tree looked protected by a construction fence. (For the dendrophiles out there, you can chart the health of the tree through the pictures -- it did well despite prematurely going partly into autumn mode mid-summer from the stress. In fact, I think it secretly loved all the extra water they were dousing the ground with during the entire process.) Within two days, the wind had partly disengaged the sheet from the roof, so that it fluttered erratically in the breeze, not only making it 85% less effective at protecting us, but also accentuating the impression of CERAS as an abandoned and neglected building (despite the worker bees scurrying around). You can see it starting to sag already.
Above: July 8 - The giant plastic sheet has disappeared, and it doesn't look like much progress has been made, but they were hard at work at the interior still. You can't really see it from this picture, but looking through the glass, you were starting to be able to see straight through the building.
Above: On July 20, the first of the Great Machines arrived. It stretched a few times but basically just hibernated for a couple of days. They were actually starting at this point to demolish the back of the building by the dorms, but you can't see that yet from the Meyer/Sweet side of things.
Above: Three days later, they broke all the glass in the front of CERAS (among other things).
Above: Over the next week, the exterior was slowly de-constructed. It was weird to watch the corridors and stairways sag and think, "I used to walk on those..."
Above: July 29. Honestly, the whole thing made me feel very sad.
Above: Again with the sadness. All walls, no middle.
Above: A few days later, a Very Hungry Dinosaur arrived to feast on the walls. This view is from August 5, from my office window. The sound of the demolition was persistent (booming and crashing), but even though I was so close, it was manageable. My dog-walking friend who lives in Branner, though, reported that she would have to leave her apartment at 8AM every morning to go across campus and stay away till after 4PM because of the noise and the way her entire space vibrated.
Above: Same day. Over the course of the morning, CERAS quickly went from a 3-story facade to a 1-story facade.
Above: Same day, preparing to take another monstrous bite out of CERAS.
Above: Two days later, this was the view. Now that the building is gone, my office was brighter than it's ever been, but it was hard to feel cheery with such destruction so prominently on view.
Above: By August, we entered the clean-up phase, which we still are in now. At first, the lonely digger was all by himself.
Above: But then he invited friends to join him to push rubble, sort, and load debris into big trucks. I didn't capture it well, but at times there were up to 4 different giant machines at work. They sorted all the rubble into different piles. I couldn't help thinking about where it was all going to end up. Out of sight, out of mind?
Above: This is from September 2. They're down to the foundation now with only the base of the walls still standing. That same day, a digger with jaws grabbed a discarded giant girder and, holding it horizontally, used it to push debris into piles on the ground, like a weird all-metal pushbroom. On the 3rd (not pictured), we moved to jackhammer mode as they started to work on parts of the foundation -- I worked that day to the sound of rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk against the concrete.
So what's next for this space? A new building? A new Meyer Green (CERAS Green)? An awkward vacant-lot-woodchip-area like the one where the Galvez Module used to stand? Unclear. I have no window into that to share with you, though I suspect it'll be a few years before a building goes up (if one does go up at all).
As I've watched CERAS be systematically dismantled, I haven't been able to help but think of all the Program Meetings and September Sessions we held in that space. CERAS was the first space big enough to hold our community comfortably -- from the 3rd floor modular classroom to the first floor flexible lecture space (CERAS 101), to the lobby where we ate and chatted, even to the rooftop where we used to hold our September Sessions receptions. But, as most of you know, I trend toward the sentimental, so these might be non-productive thoughts. I'm sure whatever comes next will be lovely and thoughtful, right?
If you've read this far, you deserve a happy ending to this story of rubble and destruction. To end on a bright note (while still sticking with the subject of space), I'll share something more cheerful: at the same time that CERAS was coming down, the Hume classrooms were being refreshed. You'll have to wait to see them for yourself when they're ready (they're not ready yet), but what I've been promised include new whiteboards, seminar tables, and ceiling fans! (Yes, you read right - ceiling fans!) You have to look to the small joys these days.
And so I'll leave you not with visions of debris, but memories of how CERAS welcomed us for so many years as well as hope for shiny new Hume rooms to greet us on September 22nd when classes start.
Memories of CERAS past
