Truncations

Years ago now, a university friend told me of a woman – probably someone his mother knew – who had had her smallest toes surgically removed so she could wear the kind of shoes she wanted to. I guess we could call this a cosmetic amputation as opposed to regular amputation where a limb or part of one irreparably damaged is removed. I can also think of strategic amputation to stop the spread of disease. (There’s a dramatic strategic amputation in the final scene of that 1999 Arnold Schwartznegger movie End of Days where good cop cuts off his own hand that, handcuffed to Satan for some reason, is the only thing stopping Satan from falling into some bottomless abyss.) There’s also “lost a limb” if a limb or part of one is missing because of some accident, incident or attack. We have many ways of describing human bodies that are no longer complete.

With buildings, we know what destruction means. Demolition usually means something more controlled although, confusingly, there is also controlled demolition. Dismantling emphasizes the salvaging of components while disassembly implies later reassembly somewhere else. Unconstruction isn’t a word. Deconstruction is already taken. De(con)struction is both confusing and pretentious. We just don’t have a word to describe the intentional removal of part of a building. Understandably, removing part of a building to make it a smaller doesn’t happen as often as adding new parts to make it larger. We have the word expansion but we don’t use the word contraction. The word subtraction is often used in architecture schools, often dubiously close to the word volume and, if it weren’t for that, it’d be the word I’m looking for because it’s the clear opposite of addition that describes a simple physical extension of a building. I’m going to settle for truncation in the same sense as it’s used in solid geometry. But why would one truncate a building? What does it look like? Let me show you.

Urbanization doesn’t always creep or encroach into rural areas. Sometimes it happens violently, such as when some infrastructure (that is usually a road) being forced through and making everything else adjust to it. The aerial photograph below was taken about this time last year. To the bottom is the Wenzhou-Kean University campus, the blue dot being where I often am. Along the western boundary is a five-lane dual-carriageway road called Xinshuang South Line that, heading north, first passes through the Linan Tunnel and then a bit further north, the shorter Mt. Yantou Tunnel. Tunneling through mountains isn’t something done lightly as it demands a balance between the most effective route, the easiest possible route, and the least destructive route. The elevated road running sideways is the G1513. The three areas A, B and C are where buildings have been truncated.

This slideshow shows what happened over the past 15 years.

It would be far easier to make a new intersection underneath the flyover but the Xinshuang South Line had to be lowered about two meters to ensure the overpass clearance for a major road. Xinshuang South Line and Jiaoxiao Road would not intersect and this is why the temporary diversion met Xiushuang South Road some distance to the south, and why the permanent connecting road meets it some distance to the north (at a set of traffic lights). The image below also shows how the market building is truncated right up to the permanent connecting road.

This the completed road beneath the G1513 at the end of May, 2025.

The images below show turning the corner from Jiaoxiao Road and going north along the new diversion towards the new intersection. On the right is the most recently truncated building. It’s still raw.

This market building in area A has been about 30-40% truncated and, for the most part, the “truncations” will stay that way. Gaps will be filled and new walls built to re-enclose space as a kind of a healing process and any new additions will be in accordance with the new situation in which the building finds itself. The next area is area B between the G1513 and the Mt. Yantou Tunnel. Some buildings can’t not have been demolished.

Some of the first buildings on the west side of the road going south are these three below, from south to north respectively. The building on the left below is a classic truncation. The middle building was truncated and enclosed with a new blue front that extends up to cap the roof. This is the building that first alerted me to unconstruction. And I think it’s fine.

It looks like a facade but it’s just the new front of a truncated building. It’s unpretentious because nobody tried to make it mean anything but that.

I’ve never seen anything quite like the apartment building to the right. Access balconies have been truncated because somebody still saw some utility even in the unenclosed space. The uppermost balcony is inaccessible and seems to exist only as a roof to the lower one. One simply wouldn’t design a building to be like this. All that has happened is that someone has responded to some new circumstance in a way that preserves as much of the existing building as possible. Much like modern dentistry does and for the same reason.

The other side of the road is less spectacular, with the road cutting diagonally across the existing street and building pattern. The norm on this side of the street is to truncate to the nearest complete structural bay and to fill in the remaining gap with a low storage structure that extends either as far as the existing property boundary or the new one.

The same happens in Area C further on. The triangular space on the left, below, was probably a neighboring property boundary, while the one on the right belonged to the building to the left, as the blocked doorway implies.

This relatively recent building only just avoided being truncated. I suspect it’s just luck – it’s unlikely the road and tunnel were shifted to accommodate this building.

All along this side of the street in Area C you can see evidence of truncation. Sometimes it’s brutal as in the first image and sometimes it’s subtle as in the last where only the shadow of a former roofline remains.

The other side of the street has small village houses. I’ve never been a fan of community murals. I’ve always doubted whether large amounts of brightly colored and poorly drawn artwork could make all that much difference in terms of community building once the painting is over. At least this mural below was monochrome I thought, and didn’t include happy people and sunshine. It slowly dawned on me that this mural it is a memorial to the houses that were demolished and the neighbors who moved elsewhere. It is not a representation of some aspirational future but of a community that once was. Why else would one do it?

In the image below, the uppermost roofline of the mural on the middle house was once an actual roofline. It’s an actual remnant – not painted and, for all I know, the inspiration for this mural. I’ve never really believed that a representation of something is a substitute for the real thing and this mural is no exception. I like to think it represents something that endures longer than some of the buildings did. The logic of urban development is cold and brutal. Some buildings survive for a bit longer than others. I think that’s what these buildings that were spared are showing us. It’s not a mural for the sake of one.

• • •

At the beginning of this post, I said I thought the word deconstruction was unsuitable to describe buildings that have been truncated but only because the word had already been used to describe something else. There’s more to it that that. One of tenets of literary deconstruction is that a fragment of a text can be used to reconstruct the complete text – an idea that Italo Calvino had a chapter of fun with in his 1979 If, on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Architectural deconstruction stayed well away from this idea and so we had buildings that represented deconstruction in the sense of either moving towards – but more often away – from some somehow compete state that we were not left with much of a sense of. These truncated buildings are not like that. They’re the real thing. We can see what that once complete state once was. Take this first building below. The once complete building has had the existing corner truncated to make way for the power poles. This is my least strong example b because, if the power poles were already there, it’s quite likely the new building would be exactly the same.

It’s different with this second building. You wouldn’t design it with a new front – effectively a mask rather than a facade – if something traumatic hadn’t happened to the original front. This facade/mask could also be seen as the truncation being self-healing which is a really useful response that organic entities have to trauma.

The apartment building is the strongest example. You simply wouldn’t design a building to look as if it was once complete but had had some parts removed to leave spaces with limited (truncated?) functionality. It would be possible to fake the look but then we’d have architecture and not the pure vernacular deconstruction we see.

Revisited this week:

The Notebooks of Ludwig Kurz