With trendy, urban designers calling for “salvaged” wood, barns across the U.S. are being deconstructed and turned into brewery bars and kitchen tables, says NPR.
Large-scale farmers rarely use the historic barns anymore, since they’re too small to house massive combines and 5,000 milk cows. Instead farmers are selling the tumble-down buildings to deconstruction crews, who turn around and hawk the wood for $5-$10 a square foot.
But “[t]his is a finite resource,” says Mark Bowe, who stars in an HGTV show called Barnyard Builders, “so it seems like every building we take down, we deplete our livelihood.”
Architectural preservation groups like the National Barn Alliance are aware that history is being lost as these historic structures disappear. The organization is calling on people to photograph and document their barns before repurposing them.
“Preservation in the past has really sought to preserve the great, grand mansions of important white men, but we’re so far beyond that now as a discipline,” says Danae Peckler, an architectural historian with the alliance. “We start to look at average landscapes that really tell the American story. And the farm is one of those.”