Counselling for architects whose buildings are demolished

A counselling group has been established to help architects cope with the 'trauma' of seeing the demolition of a building they designed.

The Rubble Club has been set up to highlight the number of buildings it believes are being torn down unnecessarily.

Secretary John Glenday said that nine times out of ten, buildings were torn down because they had gone out of fashion, rather than there being anything structurally wrong with them.

"But demolition is usually the least environmentally friendly option," he added. "When you consider the energy that has being expended putting something up, it is usually well worth the time thinking about whether it is sensible bringing it down."

Rules of entry for the club are:

• the building's architect must be alive and not party to its destruction;
• the building must be built with the intention of permanence, meaning exhibitions, shops and interiors are not eligible; and
• the building must be deliberately destroyed or radically altered, and so cannot simply burn down, for example.

Members of the Rubble Club so far include:

• Reiach and Hall, designers of the canopy over the Forth Road Bridge toll booths, torn down less than a year later when the tolls were scrapped.
• Hodder Associates, which designed the award-winning Berners Swimming Pool in Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, due to be demolished after only five years. 
• The designers of the Chungwha factory, an industrial white elephant built with £10m of taxpayers' money in Lanarkshire in 1996 before being pulled down within 10 years.