how often do you guys have to preserve the facade? that seems so silly. the rest of the building is gone, and it makes the demolition so much harder to keep the front of it standing. what a waste. who makes those decisions about what goes down and what stays standing? are the laws pretty strict? how old are the facades that you keep standking? are there any other parts of the building, like interiors and decorations, that you are required to preserve as well? Very interesting how you do it over there.
I'll try to answer as best i can:
We do not very often keep the facade, maybe one job per year in total. They keep the facade on structures from a certain time period, eg the jugend style, to preserve the impression of an area. It is not many old brick buildings around here, so they try to preserve as many as possible. They are from 1880-1930 approximately. It is not a big problem to keep it, just need some addional support until the building work is finished.
To be allowed to demolish, the curator (either on a city, county or national level, or all..) must agree to the work. They are not always very capricious, so they often end of with preserving strange, tumbledown wrecks/objects. They are not elected and have endless power, like a dictator... And they dont support the owners with any money either.
ointhead
if your living in an old building with the strictes regulations, you need to apply for any changes. Eg. heard of one living in old building from around 1750, who wasnt aloud to change the old wood banister to a modern duplicate, since this would be hard to see its new. End up getting the order to change it to plastic! sick. Another crazy example is a waterfall pipeline (full of lead, PAH and PCB) which the energy Directorate order the company to remove, is temporary preserved, in anticpation of any decision to what to with the nearby old tramroad... (we would really like that demo work, 62 degrees slope
)
This reply do maybe sound like it coming from a demolition worker