Fracture Demolition Software, makers of Fracture FX for Maya -a cross platform procedural event driven destruction tool, have posted a look at using Activation Volumes in FractureFX 1.4 to crumble a building to the ground.

This tutorial explains how to use activation volumes to crumble a building

Although still mentioned as being in “soft Release”, FractureFX is an extremely capable destruction plugin for Maya supporting Voronoi, Planar, and Noisy Splitting Plane breaking styles. Fracture FX supports all platforms for Maya versions 2009 to 2012, Linux, Mac, and Windows on 32 and 64 bit. Check out FractureFX for Maya for more information.