JERRY HAUER, to put it bluntly, likes guts. Meaning viscera, innards, the stuff things are made of.

There is one story he tells in which this fascination is quite literal (more on that later). But another illustration, a bit more metaphorical, is hard to miss when you walk into his office on the 23d floor of 7 World Trade Center, otherwise known as ''the bunker,'' the $13 million bulletproof, hurricane-proof, blackout-proof emergency crisis center opened by the city last month.

Mr. Hauer's office looks nothing like a bunker. It has comfortable chairs and picture windows that frame the Woolworth Building. But in one corner there is also a big stack of mismatched bricks that attests to the unusual function of this office and the unusual fascinations of its holder.

As the city's chief emergency manager, Mr. Hauer oversees the response to building collapses, of which there have been no shortage over the last three years. And as he has sifted through piles of rubble, he has made it a point to squirrel away a chunk of each disaster. He has a brick from 540 Madison (office tower; partial facade collapse, Dec. 7, 1997), one from the entrance to the Selwyn Theater (collapsed Dec. 30, 1997) and from an apartment building at 172 Stanton Street (partial collapse; demolished Jan. 24, 1998). There's also a piece of steel about the size of a slice of bread, a cross section of the beam that fell from the upper deck of Yankee Stadium on April 13, 1998, forcing it to close.

When he found out someone was about to put the beam in a Dumpster, he almost lost his temper. ''I said, 'Don't throw it away! That was two weeks of my life.' '' Those weeks were, he adds dryly, ''loads of fun.''