Building Collaboration: A Case Study from Ithaca, NY

In Ithaca, NY, in January 2022, 11 residential structures originating from 1910 were planned for demolition as the result of the proposed Catherine Commons project, a development of 300 new housing units. Cornell University’s Circular Construction Lab, with support from community organizations including Finger Lakes ReUse and Trade Design Build, along with Bellingham, WA-based Building Deconstruction Institute, convinced the developer to deconstruct one of the structures. The Catherine Commons Deconstruction Project is unique as it allows a side-by-side comparison of demolition and deconstruction processes on almost identical buildings within the same economic setting.

Learn more about this project and the local potential of deconstruction from participating partners:

Diane Cohen is executive director of Finger Lakes ReUse, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded in 2007

to help transform waste into community value and has been working in used material management since

2001.

Felix Heisel is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell

University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center

for Sustainability.

Gideon Stone is a founding member of Trade Design Build, a local Architectural, General Contracting

and Fabrication firm which was founded in 2016 and bridges the gap between design & construction to

better understand the process of bringing sustainable structures through to built form.

Photo Credit: Jason Koski, Cornell University Relations (2022)