Break It Down
EAST PEORIA ― This semester saw a new 16-week certificate program in deconstruction offered at Illinois Central College, and it has already given students the opportunity to learn how much value there can be in what some would throw away.
On Jan. 21 the new deconstruction program, which has in-class instruction and online homework, began at Dirksen Hall on the East Peoria Campus. Its purpose is to teach how to disassemble unwanted buildings and sell the materials from which they are made. It is the opposite of what someone goes through to build a structure, hence the title “deconstruction.”
This is an uncommon subject of study, so ICC needed an uncommonly qualified person to teach it, and Chicago resident Anne Nicklin was chosen for the job.
Nicklin held several sustainability and architecture-related positions across the country before she was first connected with ICC a couple of years ago through her work with the Chicago-based Building Materials Reuse Association. She helped ICC when it was planning this deconstruction program, and she saw that she was literally in a good place to apply for a position at ICC.
“They needed to hire someone to come on,” said Nicklin, “and though Chicago is fairly far away, it’s a lot closer than most of the other folks who have this kind of expertise in deconstruction. Plus I thought it was a cool opportunity.”
On Sept. 4, Nicklin was hired to the full-time faculty position of deconstruction program curriculum developer. Now, she commutes to East Peoria each week to teach about the subject she knows so well, and her students appreciate her expertise.
“When I heard about her background, I thought ‘well, we’ve got the top dog in the nation,’” said Dave Kniep, 53, of Morton, one of the program’s students.
The material covered in class provides knowledge not only useful for deconstruction, but also handy for knowing how to best build a structure sustainably. Nicklin mentioned, for example, that Icynene spray-in foam insulation makes it nearly impossible to reuse the wood from a home’s walls because of the adhesive qualities of the expanding foam.
“It can be great in terms of energy performance, but it does take good wood and turn it into landfill material,” said Nicklin.
The students that comprise these first DECON classes have come for a variety of reasons.
“It’s nice that they offered the class,” said student Nick Beeney, 27, of Peoria. “The structural drafting class got cancelled, and that’s what I was trying to do. But then they offered this class, and I guess this one is more entertaining than structural drafting. This is my final semester to finish out my associate’s in construction technology.”
“I am just taking the two classes and seeing where it goes from there,” said first-time student Kyle Wright, 25, of Metamora.
“I am totally computer illiterate… and that’s kind of why I took this class,” said Kniep, “because I saw that it was [partially] online and I thought ‘this is going to make me learn the computer.’ I had never taken a college course before. My wife thinks I am going to get a job out of it, and maybe I will.”