assemble / disassemble a complex object through animation

Howdy,

Say you want to have a tornado take apart a building made up of X number of sub-meshes, and vice versa (reverse tornado, assembles the building), or any other weird way (explosion, fall from the sky, etc) to take apart and put back together complex objects, in such a way that it can be replicated regardless of # of objects, or location in world space.

Anybody got any ideas on that?

Thanks in advance