Well, it just made me wonder because of the end of the Morrowind Main Quest, with the statue-crumble script. That's why.
It's an animation, actually; no script at all. You can see it in the CS.
While enabling and disabling activators like in Raven Rock and such would be the easiest way, it might look a bit odd or gimmicky if you are right in front of them, depending on what you want to do. For a burning shack, for instance, you'd have to do a lot of model swapping for a smooth transition. If you were to animate the destruction, it could look much better, and you could do more things, like blowing out chunks of stairs and having the chunk fly away without a complicated script.