A European buddy visiting the states commented to me, some years ago, about how flimsy American construction was. "Back home we build things to last 500 years," and so on.
Part of that difference is that we don't want things to last that long. Expectations are that within 50 or 100 years this building will no longer be wanted in anything like its current form, so why build for longer? Just makes the teardown effort that much more expensive.
There's argument to be made for investing more in infrastructure like roads; but again there's a counter argument to be made in favor of the way things have evolved and are done now. Fresh roads are smooth and level and "fixing potholes" is never going to be cheaper or produce better results than occasional full refurbishments do.
Kind of a Laffer curve: Durable, low frequency but expensive maintenance vs flimsy, cheaply and often maintained and often rebuilt.
Perhaps, but even the old stuff needs to be constantly maintained. I grew up in Rome, the eternal city, and everything was constantly under scaffolding, and the cobblestones on the streets were always being redone.
There were some facades of buildings that I had never even seen until I was aged 10, and all of a sudden a square that I always thought dull would be revealed with the scaffolding removed and the building looking beautiful.
It’s just a Communist Eastern Europe vs. Western Europe thing. Western Europe’s history and historical buildings remained and will remain intact for centuries. Eastern Europe’s didn’t remain due to war and won’t remain due to lack of culture surrounding said buildings now.
None of this meant in an offensive way - just the way it goes sometimes.
Plenty of housing like it was built in the west, with the same tech. Not to mention all the cheap workers' housing of the industrial revolution most of which didn't last 150 years, never mind 500.
A lot of American buildings today are overfit for their initial purpose and hard to remodel / adapt later. In the past most buildings were simple rectangles with basements or pier and beam foundations and simple roofs which all help make a building easy to reconfigure. Today’s buildings are fast-fashion, and look and feel quite dated after 20-30 years.
Ironically this is partially explained by the increasing stringency of zoning and building codes which leads to the increasing professionalization of building design. It used to be much more common for a person to basically just build a brick box on their own or with a little bit of contractor help. Professional designers need to do “design” to build their portfolio and attract business.
Making cheap, flimsy stuff that you trash (or worse, abandon) and rebuild every few years is very wasteful of resources and terrible for the environment though.
Broadly, I agree. But the specifics depend on ... well, the specifics. If 20 years go by and there's new building techniques/materials that drastically reduce the energy utilization of a building, it's not unimaginable that it may be less wasteful to tear it down.
I would agree that this doesn't happen very often for something at least moderately well built; for the not-very-well built, I am not so sure.
Sure, in many cases that's the right thing to do. From the outside, however, major retrofits like that are going to look a lot like the construction that the article is taking about
Honestly, so much of America is suburban wasteland that I'm glad American buildings are so "disposable" and easily replaced. Once everyone figures out that, no, it's not a good idea to live so spread-out, hopefully cities will start to densify. Ahh, one can dream...
European warfare repeatedly destroyed valuable buildings "made to last 500 years" culminating in mass bombing in the Second World War. Meanwhile, super-advanced Japan builds houses that are expected to be torn down in less than 100 years, with a very different history of public destruction in the name of War.
That depends entirely on the specifics. The Japanese aren't so crazy they'd toss good buildings to the fishes once they hit the 20 years. They just don't put the same value on old building materials as Europeans and North Americans do.
There are obviously tradeoffs when building things to last a really long time, but people in the US aren't roofing their houses with crappy asphalt tiles that'll be lucky to last a couple of decades for ease of expansion.
Modifying a well-built structure is often easier than completely tearing down and replacing a poorly built structure too.
Part of that difference is that we don't want things to last that long. Expectations are that within 50 or 100 years this building will no longer be wanted in anything like its current form, so why build for longer? Just makes the teardown effort that much more expensive.
There's argument to be made for investing more in infrastructure like roads; but again there's a counter argument to be made in favor of the way things have evolved and are done now. Fresh roads are smooth and level and "fixing potholes" is never going to be cheaper or produce better results than occasional full refurbishments do.
Kind of a Laffer curve: Durable, low frequency but expensive maintenance vs flimsy, cheaply and often maintained and often rebuilt.