Gone up in flames and burned down to the ground – these 10 well-known statues, monuments and large-scale advertisements all fell to fire, if not fury.

“I like big fat men like you,” stated Eli Wallach’s character “Tuco” character in the 1966 film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, “when they fall they make more noise. And sometimes they never get up.”  The bandit’s brash insult was prophetic in a way: big statues and monuments (fat or not) often meet their demise rather spectacularly.

Unlike the film’s doomed Union Army sergeant, however, these fallen statues fell in the most dramatic way possible – covered in flames. Take “Big Tex”, a 52-ft tall statue and marketing icon who, for 60 mainly uneventful years, proudly stood at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas.

Big Tex underwent a series of renovations and improvements over the years, including the installation of an interior electric fan to puff out his western shirt. On the 2012 State Fair of Texas’ final weekend, a short-circuit in the fan’s electrical panel mounted inside Big Tex’s boot sparked a blaze that consumed the iconic statue in minutes flat.

Flickr member greychr was at the State Fair on October 19th, 2012 when the original Big Tex enjoyed a last “smoke”. By the way, Big Tex would rise again – a slightly larger (and presumably more fireproof) version was erected in time for the 2013 State Fair of Texas. Puffy shirt provided by Jerry Seinfeld.

Frazee’s “Big Tom” Turkey

Frazee, Minnesota is proud of its turkey farms and associated businesses, and the feeling is mutual. As such, a committee representing these stakeholders collected $20,000 in seed money and in 1986 the World’s Largest Turkey, dubbed “Big Tom“, took its place in the town square.

The 22-foot-tall statue rapidly wore out its welcome in Frazee, however, as it was easily damaged and repairs were costly. In 1998 a replacement turkey statue was commissioned. The original Big Tom wasn’t about to leave without a fight, though. As workers wielded a cutting torch to remove the statue’s wings, the body caught fire and the hungry flames quickly gobbled up the monument. Pity it wasn’t a statue of a giant green bean casserole, but we digress. Big Tom’s 20-foot-tall fiberglass replacement has thus far resisted the urge for immolation.

From Touchdown to Terminator

The Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, is a so-called megachurch with over 4,000 members, thus raising roughly $250,000 to commission the 62-ft-tall “King Of Kings” statue in 2004 was no big deal.

The resulting statue (dubbed “Touchdown Jesus” by detractors) featured a steel armature covered in styrofoam and finished off with a thin fiberglass “skin”. All was well until a severe thunderstorm struck the Monroe area on June 14th of 2010. During the storm, a bolt of lightning struck the statue, set the flammable styrofoam alight, and left only the spindly steel “skeleton” intact.

Naturally, those same detractors dubbed the remains “Terminator Jesus“. Mourn not, ye faithful… the Solid Rock Church’s Jesus statue was resurrected as “Lux Mundi”, sans the “touchdown” arms, and was dedicated in September of 2012.

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Going forward, buildings may not need to go out with a bang if this “non-explosive cracking agent” takes off. The destructive action is quieter and potentially cleaner way to take out structures, break down old infrastructure or excavate building sites.

Betonamit is boasted to be a non-toxic powder that, when mixed with water and poured in to drilled holes, much like TNT, but instead of exploding, it “hardens and expands, exerting pressures of 12,000 psi. Reinforced concrete, boulders, and ledge are fractured overnight with no noise, vibration, or flyrock.” It’s not the only such stuff, but claims to be the first (other brands include the cleverly-named Crackamite).

Like some kind of anti-concrete, the dry powder is mixed with water — thus activated, it is poured into place. It is advertised for indoor use, as well as bridges, dams, limestone, boulders and concrete slabs. Seems like great stuff for large-scale artwork of some kind, but there don’t appear to be many such applications as yet.

Geoff Manaugh of BldgBlog wonders, though, what happens when something goes wrong. He writes: “I’m imagining a truck full of this stuff overturning on a crack-laden bridge somewhere, just an hour before a rainstorm begins, or a storage yard filled with crates of this stuff being ripped apart in the summer wind; a seemingly innocuous grey powder drifts out across an entire neighborhood for the next few hours, settling down into cracks on brick rooftops and stone facades, in sidewalks and roadbeds. Then the rains begin. The city crumbles. Weaponized demolition powder.”

Has life in the modern world given you a simmering sense of resentment, anxiety and anger you wish you could unleash upon some highly breakable objects? Maybe you’re fuming over your job and fantasize about smashing a copy machine, Office Space-style, or maybe you’d like to give a certain public institution a piece of your mind. In Russia, you can pay by the hour to take out these aggressions on the environment of your choice – safely, legally and as violently as you like.

For a fee ranging from $150 to $450 depending on the complexity, ’Rage Rooms’ by Debosh can be customized to your liking. They’ll design your personalized smashable room to resemble your workplace, apartment or any other space you prefer, or you can bring your own breakables and clean up after yourself for a mere $50. Prices also vary by ‘difficulty level,’ depending on whether you want to smash some dishes and televisions or rent out a larger space with a group of friends, with more to destroy.

Founder Alexei Barinskiy says he originally owned a flea market, and was often left with too much merchandise that wasn’t selling. He wondered if he could find a way to get rid of it while still making a profit. Shortly thereafter, Debosh was born. They provide the space, breakables, hard hats, protective eyewear and highly satisfying sledgehammers, clubs and baseball bats to do the job.

“Destroyery is a kid of entertainment where people can do things they are restricted to do in everyday life, or maybe such things are just hard to do or they may have really bad consequences,” notes the website (translated from Russian.) “For example, at Destroyery you can smash a TV with a sledgehammer, take off safety goggles, dust down and go home pleased and relieved.”

“However, Destroyery is not just about crushing things with a hammer. You can come on your own or with your friends and experience a new feeling of freedom and permissiveness like when you were a kid, causing mischief and your mom went off on you for broken things at home or your dad smacked your ass for smashing a window.”

It’s kind of nuts, but it’s also hard to deny the draw. Maybe the idea will catch on in the United States, too.

In the wake of intentional demolition or unexpected disasters, the Mobile Factory system can be shipped inside just two cargo containers and begin to turn rubble from ruins into building blocks for reconstruction.

Developed in The Netherlands, the technology filters concrete from other rubble, which is then cast into interlocking blocks (like LEGO bricks) that require no joinery to form stable walls. These units can be stacked without specialized training or equipment, making it possible for communities to rebuild efficiently and cheaply.

The resulting structures are earthquake-resistant, held together in part by bamboo rods threaded through voids in a certain subset of the wall blocks (which can also be used to thread in utilities, including plumbing and electrical lines).

Since the system fits into a pair of shipping containers, it can easily be transported from site to site, building blocks close to where they will be used and reducing transit time and costs. The reversibility of this construction approach also means that temporary buildings can be erected quickly in the wake of a disaster. In turn, these can be disassembled or adapted easily in the weeks, months and years following an emergency situation.

Consider the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless. Over five years later and the country is still littered with 25 million tons of construction debris, which technologies like this can help turn into affordable housing. Indeed, the Mobile Factory organization is looking into expanding their work in Haiti, Peru and other countries in need of this tech.

“In disasters, you have piles and piles of rubble and the rubble is waste. If you are rich, you buy more bricks and rebuild your home,” said one of the organization’s founders. “But what happens if you are poor? In disasters it is the poorest people who live in the weakest houses and they lose their homes first. I thought, what if you recycled the rubble to build back better homes for poor people?”

Beyond wars and tsunamis in nations further afield, there are potential urban applications in densely-built places like the Europe and the United States: cities like Baltimore and Detroit spend vast amounts of money demolishing buildings (and in some cases: entire blocks), then clear the rubble and put it in landfills. This technology suggests an alternative: reusing on or close to the demolition site, reducing material and energy waste as well post-demolition transportation costs.

An abandoned concrete building in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon (known as The Egg) has been everything from a movie theater to a bomb shelter to a water tank, but this intervention would fill the gaps in its bullet-ridden shell with a series of lenses, reflecting images of the city into its cavernous void.

After a series of unsuccessful attempts to repurpose or restore the structure, architect and photographer Anthony Saroufim came up with an idea to give it a powerful temporary purpose, in part to tell the harrowing history of this war-torn city. His proposal is illustrated in the haunting brown-scale images throughout this article.

Scaffolding on the exterior would allow visitors to approach, walk up and around the egg, with circulation routes designed around gaps in the facade as well as civic features and landmarks to be reflected from outside.

The Egg was commissioned 1965 and designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam, but was intended to be part of a larger downtown tower complex: the Beirut City Center (original design and historical context images shown above not by Saroufim). It was to be surrounded with a mixed-use program malls and office spaces, a small piece of a large puzzle. Indeed, now known variously as The Egg or The Dome, the structure was never officially given a proper name independent of the larger development.

When civil war broke out a decade later, the plans were put on hold and many of the structures in the complex outside The Egg were destroyed in the conflict, partially or entirely. In the decades that followed, the structure was reused in a variety of ways, but always remained a large and monolithic work, much grander in scale relative to its surroundings than it was ever meant to be.

The camera obscura project proposed by Saroufim would involve inserting custom lenses all around the structure in the voids left from wartime impacts. In turn, these would project city scenes from surrounding architecture into the giant empty interior volume.

As an unrelated video project (above) illustrates, local residents are conflicted about the role The Egg should play in the next phase of the areas urban development, debating the merits of destroying or restoring it and leaving it to loom large.

Some architectural and urban design proposals (such as the one shown above) call for letting taller structures grow up around The Egg as was the original plan. For now, this  temporary installation project would give the Brutalist building relevant meaning in relationship to its historical context, bridging its storied past, unused present and uncertain future.