What Teardown Gets Wrong About Taking Buildings Apart

On a refurbishment job in Massachusetts a few years ago, I watched a site manager spend most of a morning arguing with a client about a brick wall. The client wanted it gone by Friday. The site manager wanted three weeks: one to strip out the services, one to take the bricks down by hand so they could be cleaned and reused, and one to deal with whatever turned up behind them. The client had, by his own account, spent the weekend playing Teardown, and in his head a wall came down in eleven seconds with a sledgehammer and some well-placed explosives.

He was not entirely wrong to be inspired. Teardown is one of the most thoughtful games ever made about the physical stuff buildings are made of. It is also a fairly precise catalogue of the habits that make real demolition wasteful and occasionally dangerous, which is why I now recommend it to people who are new to construction, with a long list of footnotes.

What the game models well

Teardown, released in full by Tuxedo Labs in 2022, builds every object in its world from small voxels, little cubes roughly ten centimetres across. Each voxel has a material. Wood splinters and burns. Glass shatters. Brick and concrete break into chunks and need heavier tools. Metal can be cut with a blowtorch but shrugs off a hammer.

The main campaign is a series of heists. Before you trigger an alarm, you get unlimited time to prepare: knock holes in walls, drive vehicles into position, build ramps and bridges out of planks. Once the alarm sounds, you race through the route you carved. The planning phase is where the game shines, because it forces you to look at a building as a set of materials and connections rather than a single object.

That shift in how you look is genuinely useful. Experienced demolition contractors do the same thing on a walk-round. They see a building as timber here, steel there, a concrete slab that will need breaking, glass that must come out before anything else moves. A player who has spent a weekend in Teardown arrives with some of that instinct already.

Where the physics departs from reality

The biggest gap is structural. In Teardown, a piece of building stays up as long as it is connected to the ground through some chain of voxels. A whole house can hang from a column one voxel wide. Weight barely matters; only connection does.

Real structures do not work like that. Loads travel down through specific paths, from roof to rafters to walls to foundations, and every element along the way has a limit. Remove a load-bearing wall and the floor above may sag gradually, crack suddenly, or hold for weeks and then fail. Engineers on a demolition job spend much of their effort on exactly this question: what is holding this up, and in what order can we remove things so nothing above us loses its support unexpectedly?

The second gap is what is hidden inside walls. Teardown's buildings are honest. A wall is the material it looks like. Real walls, particularly in buildings from before the 1980s, can contain asbestos insulation, lead paint, live cables nobody mapped, and gas lines rerouted by a previous owner. That is why real demolition starts with a survey and a soft strip, removing fittings, services and hazardous materials before any structure is touched. In the game, the order is whatever gets you to the objective quickest.

"Knock it down and start fresh" is the habit to unlearn

Teardown rewards destruction because destruction is fast and the debris vanishes from your concerns. Real sites used to work much the same way. Construction and demolition waste is one of the largest waste streams in Europe, roughly a third of everything the EU throws away by Eurostat's figures, and much of it is material that was perfectly reusable when it went into the skip.

The alternative is deconstruction: taking a building apart roughly in the reverse order it went up, so materials come out intact. Bricks set in lime mortar can be cleaned and reused, which is why reclaimed brick is often worth real money. Timber beams, roof slates, steel sections, radiators, doors and even some concrete planks can go back into new buildings. We have written about when that effort pays off in reclaimed materials worth the extra effort.

Deconstruction is slower. On the Massachusetts job, the hand-taken wall gave up a little over 1,900 usable bricks, which went into a garden wall on the same property. The client grumbled for three weeks and then, to his credit, showed everyone who visited.

The honest caveat is that deconstruction is not always worth it. Bricks laid in hard cement mortar often break before they come free. Some concrete frames cannot be taken apart in useful pieces. And labour costs can outweigh material savings on small jobs. But the default should be to ask the question, which is something Teardown, by design, never asks.

Designing buildings that come apart well

The more interesting lesson runs the other way, from the game back to the drawing board. Teardown's buildings are satisfying to take apart because their materials are visible and separate. Real buildings are easier to deconstruct for exactly the same reason.

Designers call it design for disassembly. Use mechanical fixings like bolts and screws instead of adhesives where you can. Keep layers separate, so insulation is not glued to cladding. Record what went where. Timber frame systems tend to do well on this front, which is one reason we covered them in what timber frame construction gets right about speed and waste. Our earlier look at resource chains in games and low-waste construction follows the same thread from the supply side.

If you want more on how games handle the built world, the games section has the rest of our writing.

Something to try before your next renovation

If you have work planned that involves removing anything, a wall, a kitchen, a floor, walk through the space this week with a notebook and list every material you can see, room by room, and mark which ones could come out whole. Then ask your contractor to price two options: strip and skip, and careful removal for reuse. Even if you choose the first, the conversation will tell you a great deal about how your contractor thinks.