On Exhibit: “Deconstruction in Practice: Bridging Past and Future”

Camden Public Library is delighted to welcome Second Story Builders for their exhibit in the Picker Room during the month of October! This exhibit will feature multiple artifacts, 3D models, and more from their reclaimed-material construction and transformation projects. All are welcome to visit the exhibit during the library’s open hours. The public is invited to the exhibit reception and presentation on Saturday, October 10 from 2 PM – 4 PM in the Picker Room.

Historic preservation has often been understood as an effort to arrest change — to retain buildings, landscapes, and objects as physical evidence of the past. But preservation and permanence are not necessarily the same thing. Deconstruction presents another possibility: a building can be dismantled without being erased, its materials and artifacts recovered, its construction methods studied, and its history carried forward into new forms.

Second Story Builders works within this space between preservation and transformation, using deconstruction and reclaimed-material construction to connect the material heritage of Maine’s older buildings with the people, skills, and ideas that will shape what comes next. The exhibition considers what it means to preserve history not simply by holding onto the past, but by allowing what has value within it to remain active, useful, and meaningful across generations.

Among the work featured are materials and artifacts recovered from the Ephraim Barrett House, a ca. 1800 residence formerly on Chestnut Street in Camden, demonstrating how the contents of an historic building can be preserved and transformed for new purposes.

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Danny Salomon is the founder and principal of Second Story Builders, a mission-driven business advancing “circular construction,” a more resourceful and regenerative approach to building, in Midcoast Maine. Second Story carefully takes buildings apart to recover their materials — a practice known as “deconstruction” –, sells those reclaimed materials through its Radical Reuse Center in Union, and undertakes design+build projects around their continued use — a “Secondhand First” approach to new construction.

Before founding Second Story, Salomon ran The Hatchery, an innovation program at Camden Hills Regional High School, where he developed hands-on opportunities for students to explore design, fabrication, entrepreneurship, and the possibilities of working with materials that might otherwise be discarded. His work since then has continued to connect building, education, and material reuse — using the built environment as a place to teach, experiment, and bring people together.

Salomon holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois Chicago. At the heart of his work is a belief that the materials, buildings, skills, and knowledge already present in our communities can become the starting point for something new — and that their potential is unlocked when people bring their collective imagination, labor, and relationships to them.