That's not really an accurate description of wooden-framed construction. For one, there's a lot more structure to it than just bricks and plywood, and it's also safer against earthquakes and other environmental damage.
The author admits to the limited comparison. I have a few other reasons:
1. We actually care if our buildings are insulated now and withstand earthquakes.
2. People are so wealthy here they don't have to get it right, they can always pay to do it over again. They don't care to put in the research to make sure it is done right. [0]
3. Corollary to #2, we don't need our buildings to last 100 years because we expect the area to be overtaken by increased density by then?
[0] CSB: Person tells about friend that bought house in Las Vegas just prior to 2008, has enormous cooling bill because house doesn't have overhang to protect southern exposure from the sun and HOA won't allow her to alter it. Asks why the government doesn't protect her. I ask why she didn't do a little more due diligence before spending $300k. He hadn't thought of it that way and considers it.
I'm pretty sure they don't care about insulation that much at Dartmouth. There's a huge steam plant on campus, and all the brick dorms are equipped with old-fashioned steam radiators that have two settings - over-bearingly hot, and "boil my pot of ramen noodles." It's common to see the dorm windows wide open when it is -20 F in February, with students trying to regulate the temperature to a livable level.
The masons and architects have a lot more to care about these days. Even so, they should have gotten the flashing and water flow right (even cheap 80s houses usually have slanted window sill).
Those reasons help explain why brick is a less desirable building material now than it was a century ago. This decline in desirability means that brick won't be selected for the most ambitious, highest-budget projects today, where it was the preferred choice back then.
4. The 19th century buildings which were shoddily built (the majority) have been torn down. It's the same bias that makes people claim old appliances were built better than modern ones.
The article's author is not wrong. The average 1980's brickwork building is built less well than the average 100 year old building. However, 100 years ago buildings probably were built worse on average than today. Both of those statements can be true at the same time.
People used to be able to repair old appliances. Now, they basically last two years(durable good), and we throw it out. I'll take repairability, over modern, in appliances, and even automobiles. I used to be able to fix my appliances; I just throw them away now. I wonder what the net cost is to the enviornment? I currently have a dryer that never stops beeping. A washer that never really cleaned clothes, but only uses a small amount of water? A three year old dishwasher that needs a expensive computer board, and a pump. Parts that are more expensive than a new machine.
I was renting a place that had a washer and dryer set from the early 60s. It worked wonderfully, until one day the washer wouldn't cycle properly. I tore it apart and there was a stack of plastic gears that ran the state machine for the various cycles, one them was worn.
I didn't have the means in 2000 to disassemble the gear pack and a replacement couldn't be found and god I tried. The land lords endedup scrapping both machines and replacing it with shoddy new stuff that didn't work as well. A total shame.
Or having Google Tango or a sufficiently smart computational camera that can take a picture of the defective part have it repaired by some mechanism either automatic or the fiver of mechanical fixups, have it printed and shipped (drone, carrier pigeon, USPS, etc).
One of my hopes is that public good corp will rise of the consumerist ashes and start to produce items that can not only be repaired but that can be collectively refined just like a codebase. Imagine if there was an open source, end user repairable washing machine, that when a flaw is discovered it is fixed and tracked in a public ledger?
Could it be survivor bias? What if the cheap shitty hundred-year-old buildings are torn down or covered in plaster or siding, thus leaving only the good specimens?
Many cheap brick buildings from 100 years ago are gone, where the high quality ones are more likely to remain.
Also, steel Lintel are often used over windows in brick buildings. They don't last as long, but are fine for cheap construction that is not expected to last. AKA the kinds of building that are unlikely to be around in 100 years.
not only that, but back in the day brick was the fancy expensive option, today it isn't. those with big budgets and ambitious design goals choose other materials (steel, glass, etc.)
wood is definitely cheaper than brick but i have a hard time believing that a brick building will be more expensive than one made of steel and glass. the architecture, engineering, transport, etc. is where most of the cost comes from, not the building materials.
Depends a lot. If you can just install prefabricated elements large elements, steel is not that expensive.
On the other hand every brick has to be laid by hand. Good bricklayers are scarce because brick has not been in fashion. And therefore they are expensive. Bad bricklayers are slow.
Actually that confirms the point; the old building was clearly state of the art for the time, and the new building is a cheap rush like student dorms sometimes are.
No, there are many buildings in London surviving that were built simply to get the money when they were demolished to build railways but it never happened, and they are still standing. 19th century buildings were mass produced, not always very well.
Examples? Presumably you're not claiming the Citizens Bank building from TFA is such a building, and mass-produced 19th century buildings might look quite different from it.
I dunno, there's a lot of cheap 1880s "workers cottages" around here which have nonetheless been built with a lot more style and care than the average new building.
Survivorship bias means that the only objects available for comparison are ones that bias the comparison. For example, the brick buildings from 2,000 years ago were built way better, because look at this brick building still standing that was built 2,000 years ago, look how great it is! Of course, the bad brick buildings built 2,000 years ago can't be found because they crumbled a long time ago.
Yes, but when you have entire rows and city-blocks of colonial-era buildings standing, and entire cities of century homes where many new office buildings have gone up and been torn down in the meantime, it's hard to just point to survivorship bias. These aren't a few isolated cases, but large contiguous seas of old buildings.
I would imagine that well-built buildings are not evenly distributed; well-off individuals and businesses, who could presumably therefore afford to build nice buildings, would likely congregate near each other.
My last house was built in ~1936. It was cheap for the time, but the entire estate of houses it sat in was complete - virtually nothing had been removed. The form of the buildings had changed somewhat (extension for bathroom instead of toilet in the garden), but the brick walls were incredible and the internal timberwork (joists, frames, etc.) was all hardwood of a quality that would be very expensive now.
My current house was built in ~1985. The brick quality isn't bad, the walls are much straighter, but the wood is cheaper and the materials thinner and lighter. It might be the case this place will last 100 years, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's a middle market house, for the time, not cheap but not high end.
While survivor bias is important, where I live (London) the main reason houses from 100 years ago aren't around now is simply the war. The stuff from then that's still about - including "cheap" factories and other stuff - is now wildly fashionable and still well-built. Stuff built in the 50s was laughably awful and a lot is gone, stuff from 60s and 70s is going the same way. There are definitely other things going on.
I think one thing is buildings are now are built closer to their required engineering tolerances. In the past many building were massively over engineered, while modern buildings seem to be built for their exact expected lifespan.
The one thing I really hate about most modern buildings here in Australia is the ceiling height has been reduced. A lot of modern buildings have ceiling heights around 7’ while old buildings will have ceilings of 10’ to 12’.
The regulation is about energy efficiency of new-build construction, not how much you have your heating on. Partly it's a green thing, partly it's pragmatic, in that the UK has failed to invest in serious power generation for decades and faces the real possibility of brownouts in the not too distant future.
Plants are approaching EOL and they haven't been building new capacity to replace them. They've thrown a bunch of money at wind, but I think that's been more of a handout to (traditionally Conservative-voting) landowners than a viable strategy.
UK since middle ages was already infamous for having cities (specially london, but not just london) that have energetic problems and rely a lot on coal (and now other fossil fuels), leading to the infamous killer fogs, and to the victorian fashion (in victorian era, people tried to use stuff that would not have issues in a highly polluted air, for example extremely thick and dark curtains, so that people don't notice you aren't washing them a lot...)
Across Europe there are strict standards for building efficiency. This is not just about insufficient infrastructure, it's to keep energy waste in check. People want as cheap a house as possible (which I understand, it's hugely expensive and most people have to make serious sacrifices) and when having to choose between not terribly energy-inefficient and full-height bedrooms, they'll often choose the latter. Which is unsustainable in the aggregate. Hence, tight regulations on energy efficiency.
Isn't that just implying that most energy is artificially cheap, relative to its externalities?
Why can I own two new homes with 8' ceilings and heat them both(even if I don't live at one for 90% of the time), but I can't own one new home with 12' ceilings?
"Isn't that just implying that most energy is artificially cheap, relative to its externalities?"
Yes it is. But if you're going to charge 'real' price (even assuming you can), people with the least disposable income will have to pay disproportionally more for their energy, which is a a basic need in 2015. Plus it would cause ripple effects that are impossible to predict. So the prudent way of mitigating this is with targeted policies, like building efficiency. It's a political decision. Of course one might say 'we should charge everything at the full rate and let the market sort it out', which is a fine position (one I personally lean towards, for as much as that matters) but it's irrelevant to the fact that there are many groups that don't agree. So what we have now is a system with many groups pushing in various directions, and 'patches' for situations where that causes unwanted effects that all parties can agree on (well, a majority can agree on) should be mitigated somehow.
"Why can I own two new homes with 8' ceilings and heat them both(even if I don't live at one for 90% of the time), but I can't own one new home with 12' ceilings?"
So to come back to the issue at hand, I can also buy a 10MW heater, put it outside in my garden and have it 'waste' energy 24/7. We don't have laws against that (afaik). But our policies rely partly on the assumption of economically rational actors, which to a degree and in the aggregate is the empirically verified reality.
In other words, for ever policy I'm sure one can think of 100 ways to stay within the law yet violate the spirit of the policy. That's just the nature of governance, and it works fine in the vast majority of cases. Law is not a closed rule-based system like computers are, and that's fine.
(actually that last part is up for debate; even Montesquieu (who was the guy to come up with the original theory of 'balance of three powers') was of the opinion that perfect law should be just that, and that judges should do nothing but apply rigid rules to facts. But that's getting way more off topic than is reasonable...)
Well, "should" or "shouldn't" can get too complex to analyze.
There's no god given set of rights -- what we get to do is what the era/society/legal system we live in allows us.
And what's moral/good to do even outside or against what's allowed, is a matter of philosophy.
People expected to be able to smoke even on an airplane in the 70s. Nowadays not so much. Asking someone not to smoke "within 30 ft of this building's entrance" (a common sign), would seem as ridiculous to them as the regulation of heating to you.
The difference being that I don't pay a tax to the people who are inconvenienced when I smoke. Suppose everyone in an area set a price that they would be willing to smell cigarette smoke during their meal. If I pay them all that price, why shouldn't I be allowed to smoke? And some people would set it at +infinity, which is fine too, which would mean I don't get to smoke.
With heating, the government is placing a +infinity price on heat retention for buildings(with ceilings > 8'), but isn't actually enforcing that price in any other manner. Why not just charge progressively increasing amounts for electricity/gas expenditure? Right now, I can have a 100% legal, heat-efficient home, and heat it day and night by leaving the windows open. I wouldn't do that because I don't like to waste money, but that is just like I would not live in a house that was extremely energy inefficient.
Basically, if I want to pay for tall ceilings in my house, shouldn't I be able to, assuming I pay the appropriate amount?
>With heating, the government is placing a +infinity price on heat retention for buildings(with ceilings > 8'), but isn't actually enforcing that price in any other manner. Why not just charge progressively increasing amounts for electricity/gas expenditure?
Because they just want to impose a rule for what they believe is better for the environment.
They don't want to make it into a market product.
>Basically, if I want to pay for tall ceilings in my house, shouldn't I be able to, assuming I pay the appropriate amount?
That just makes it into something the rich can do while the poor can't. While indeed it also servers to lower the number of people doing't it -- it's not what any society that holds to high esteem any values besides net worth would want to do.
And I'm not just talking about the "tall ceilings" thing here, which might or might not be reasonable, but the more general question "shouldn't I pollute/waste as much energy as I want if I pay enough for it?".
Somethings we don't allow people to do at any price. Like kill people. Even if the victim also agrees. I, for one, don't believe payment trumps any morals in principle, and I wouldn't want that to be the case.
Whether it happens in practice (e.g. bribery etc), that's OK. But I wouldn't design a system where that's accepted and celebrated too.
It's a the result of new of building code, which has minimum energy efficiency requirements. Residential energy efficiency is projected via heat loss calculations among other things.
This is exactly right - it is done to reduce the building cost.
Of course having a ceiling this low is terrible for natural cooling so you then have to run air conditioning all the time costing far more in the long run. I live in a 1920s building with 11’ ceilings and I don’t have or need air conditioning because the place stays cool enough even through the height of summer.
Huh, I grew up in a house with ceilings no higher than maybe 7'2" (though that was not usual for buildings) and am 5'11" and wouldn't dream of calling it "claustrophobic". My father is even a couple inches taller. I guess it depends a lot on what you're used to.
Meanwhile my current residence has ceilings so high that I haven't bothered to install some LED bulbs that I have lying around since I don't have an easy safe way to reach the light fixtures.
I am sure different people feel differently, but for me low ceilings are a non-option. In a climate like mine high ceilings avoid the need for air conditioning.
You can get special poles for changing high bulbs. I have seen them before, but I can't remember what they are called.
Seriously. And it's not just the seven-footers who'd have issues. I'm 6'3, and I'd feel claustrophobic in a home with 7' ceilings. I'm above average in height, but, like, not wildly so. I certainly don't think I'm an outlier or anything.
Assuming you are a male in the USA you are in the 95th percentile [0] by height. And if you are 7 feet tall then you don't need to worry about low ceilings in council housing because you are probably an NBA [1] player.
That opens the question of expected lifetime of a house though. The interior might need to be ripped out and plumbing or sewage etc retrofitted, but in plenty of cases there is simply no reason why the foundation, framing, or other things can't be retained. Which, given the value of high quality timber, seems like a goal worth striving for, rather than disposable houses.
From a purely economic perspective a building that lasts more than 50 years is probably not worth doing. In theory you could invest the initial savings and replace the whole building in 50 years from the income.
The downside of pushing the engineering to the limit is the builders often cut corners to make their own savings so that the building does not even make 50 years. Plenty of new buildings here in Australia are having major structural issues after only 5 to 10 years because of this.
Agreed. I was a victim of this in my former home in Adelaide.
It was a newly built townhouse complex so we were a body corporate. Within 4 years of building completion, we were suffering from rising damp and completely loose paving in the shared driveways. The paving was too high relative to the damp proof course and the base wasn't prepared properly.
It took a couple of years of legal stuff to claim on the building warranty.
Having been through this, I now are more acutely aware of how dodgy new building are around Australia. New apartments especially.
There is no way I would ever buy a new apartment. One of my friends is a builder and the number of horror stories he tells me about current building practices is near endless.
It is absolutely criminal how much we let builders get away with, and since building inspectors are no longer independent (the builder pays for them) everything is stacked against home-buyers these days
It's unlikely that the design and layout of a house will remain up-to-date over 50+ years. People's expectations change, see for example the role of a kitchen in a house. 50 years ago, the kitchen was were the wife cooked. Now kitchens are open, connected to the other living spaces, and very much the central point in the house. Re-doing the plumbing is one thing, dealing with that sort of changes is another.
High ceilings help when you don't have air conditioning. They are nice aesthetically but unnecessary and even detrimental (more air volume to cool) when you have it.
High ceilings not only avoid the need for air conditioning (my home has 11' ceilings and no air conditioning), they make you feel better in the space. When I am in a building with low ceilings I feel totally claustrophobic and tense - this is not something I want to feel in my own home.
Feels like nitpicket but: volume of air is in itself not a problem. There's not a whole lot of energy in air. The issue with heating/cooling is the surface area.
With active heating/cooling, what really helps is better insulation. In Scandinavia and Germany people are insulating walls in new houses with 40 cm rockwool, or the equivalents thereof.
My experience in the US is that 8' ceilings are pretty much standard. I've helped build a few stick-built additions and houses, and when you are buying stud timber in bulk, it comes precut either to 96" or 92 5/8" - which, with standard 2xX top and bottom plates, works out to be 8'.
There's a saying that goes something like: "Any idiot can build a bridge. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that is just strong enough to stand given the weight it's meant to bear".
A lot of older structural "engineering" was figuring out how much material was required, then multiplying it by 80 just in case.
Yes they do, if you pay for it. I know several brick factories that will make you those 'high-quality' ones. But they don't stock them (instead they make them custom if you want them) because the demand is so low due to the 100% price difference with other bricks that, realistically, serve they purpose just as well.
It's unlikely survivor bias - Montreal is full of really shitty build "plexes" for example. They are not falling apart - there is a 'brick works' for them - remove whole brick facade and redo it again. Those "plexes" are rarely torn down in fact. At the same time bank buildings on the same street are very sturdy and never seen 'brick works' since the birth. I tend to think 'plexes' used to be cheap [and crap] and banks, factories [but not schools!] are expensive and good. Construction errors on those 'plexes' are abundant and repeated over and over in today's plexes, yet those are OK with building codes.
In Portland, Oregon, there are whole neighborhoods of 80-90% buildings from the 1880s through the 1930s. There still may be some survivorship bias on a whole-neighborhood level since those were mostly the middle-class areas with higher building quality. But if you compare those buildings to those built recently for the middle-class market, the craftsmanship is obviously different. And urban buildings for wealthy people have recently sidestepped craftsmanship entirely with minimal geometric styles of architecture. There's not a lot of room for ornamentation when the external walls are entirely glass.
The craftsmanship is obviously different, but is it better? I hear the argument that modern houses are all going to be just awful in a few decades. Yet I heard the same argument in the 70's and 80's, and those houses seem to be aging just fine (aesthetic choices aside). A stick built house built in 1970 is 45 years old at this point!
Today's track houses have MUCH improved insulation, much stronger moisture barriers, and are much more efficient than even the nicest houses built 100 years ago.
I just don't believe that construction has regressed the way we all seem to think it has. Of course I type this from a 103 year old house which is awesome, but drafty :)
> A stick built house built in 1970 is 45 years old at this point!
When I was living in London a couple of years ago my house there was a former council house built in the 70s - so it was built to be as cheap as possible. Other than being tiny and having thin drywall everything else was fine.
The problem with the "survivor bias" argument is that it allows for a lazy denial of actual trends in things: sometimes stuff does get worse.
The same applies to "every generation thinks the next generation is horrible". That may or may not be true, but sometimes there are horrible generations.
Even then Germany was a parliamentary system where the Chancellery goes to the biggest party or coalition in parliament. And the NSDAP was the biggest in the elections in 1932-11 and 1933-3. There were enough idiots who voted for Hitler and his party in those early years.
He got voted cancelour by a majority.
That is as democratic as it gets. And yes, this should attack anyones assumption that the people always vote for the best.
Thats why there are non-voted pillars of power in a good democracy, that can not correct a bad course, but can at least keep it in check.
Not when it comes to this particular issue: build quality between 1800s and today has declined.
If anything, a whole bunch of perfectly decent old buildings have been torn down. Because they were no longer of any use (prolonged vacancy is the worst for any building), not because they were falling apart.
Somewhat of a tangent. Good architecture has three properties: it's useful, it's robust, and it's beautiful. That's a three-legged stool from antiquity, and I firmly believe architects and builders sat on it for centuries. Modernism was an ideological project that discarded two of these legs: only utility was important. the pursuit of beauty was either for old-regime bourgeois or for unenlightened proles, and robustness was not all that necessary for the beancounters anyway, eternity is not a concept for the godless machine age.
Is is also fairly recent that the architect needed to take on all aspects of architecture. For example, architecture training was often taught in the fine arts faculties. The structural issues then were then taken on by the master-builder. It worked, the latter had a wealth of experiential knowledge, an architect didn't need to tell him how to frame a window, or ensure water didn't drip along the wall. The architect becoming first a licensed professional in need to defend his title, then some sort of artist willing a new pristine creation in the world, claimed more and more roles. Now every detail needs to be in the plan almost, less room for correction by skilled craftsmen (who also are thinning out..).
More significantly, it took a fair bit of time for modern methods to enter into construction. Structural steel and skyscrapers along with many other "modern" inventions date to the 1880s. Modern "stick" housing began largely in the 1940s.
You can find catalogs of old housing, literally, in Sears Roebuck catalogs, detailing design and construction.
Every component in a building today save plumbling, windows and electric is inferior to its complement in 1915. The bricks are of lower quality (to the point there is a thriving market for used bricks), the wood is garbage, and quality of labor has shifted from skilled craftsmanship to glorified assembly work.
My home was built in 1927 as a cheap starter home (upstairs was delivered unfinished for buildout when the owners had kids). It's build quality today would only be seen in a custom home with a very wealthy/particular owner and cost a minimum of $750k. (Current value of my home is around $250k)
The entire floor both upstairs and down is tongue and groove 2x6 planking... vs today's 3/4" OSB.
For being over 50 years old, the "skeleton" is in outstanding condition. There are some very minor foundation issues that I've been slowly fixing with a little elbow grease, and that's about it.
If the drywall and electrical were redone, this thing would be in better condition/quality than a large percentage of BRAND NEW homes on the market today.
I am going to take a guess and say that we are not reading a commented written by someone involved in construction. HVAC anything? I'd love to see you sell a house for 750k with asbestos wrapped around all the vents. Vermiculite versus blown in closed cell poly? Poly versus waxed floors? LVLs? Exterior fasteners? Lead paint? Can you imagine how much longer this list would be if I was not content to stick to residential construction?
I could go on and on. TLDR Housing materials have significantly improved since Calvin Coolidge's time. Oh yeah, I forgot Contruction Adhesives...
The only brick buildings you can still look at from the 1800s are the ones that were built very well - all the shoddily-constructed buildings from that era have since disappeared.
Yeah, the dorm in the linked article is totally better than that building. So while there are good buildings from that era, let's not kid ourselves, there were also a lot of horrible buildings that are rightfully no longer around. I would be willing to bet that the average quality of new construction is better now than it was then. If nothing else, the pervasive use of aluminum/vinyl siding and tar-asphalt shingle roofs yields buildings that better withstand the elements that old-style painted wood.
We have the same issue here in Australia. The quality of recent brick work is terrible, even the bricks are worse. It seems brickies are unable (or unwilling) to lay bricks anymore.
Is the brick actually holding up the building? In many modern buildings, it's just a veneer, about 1cm thick. The steelwork holds it up. The new Box.net HQ in Redwood City looks like a brick building, but it's not; it's steel and concrete with about 1cm of brick on the outside.
There's some nice work being done with brick today.[1] Some of this is gentrification, built to fit in with existing brick buildings, or to imitate them in new construction. All those examples have recessed windows, although not structural stone lintels. Many lintels today are precast stone and decorative; steel is carrying the load.
Robotic bricklaying is here.[2]
In earthquake country, you really don't want tall brick buildings where the brick is structural. San Francisco is very anti-cornice; in even minor earthquakes, overhanging masonry cornices tend to fall off and kill people.
This was my thought as well. The modern building is likely just using the brick as veneer, even if it is full-thickness brick. It's likely concrete walls with brick layered over it. The fact that the brickwork is poorly done likely doesn't matter except aesthetically. If all the brick fell off the building would still be standing.
The newer building is indeed ugly, and the brickwork looks cheap and poorly done. But that doesn't mean the technology has declined. It means the technology has advanced to the point that the brick is just ornamental.
I fully expect that the brick is structural in those examples. My university had brick dorms "the bricks". They had brick exterior walls and cinder block interior walls. The brick walls were brick on the outside and the inside and only one brick thick.
If the interior walls are cinder block, I would expect the brick to be purely aesthetic. Cinder blocks don't need brick next to them for strength if built correctly.
If there are cinderblocks on the inside, then the outside layer isn't structural. Depending on how old the building is, it might serve a purpose for insulation - either an 'air gap' or to sandwich proper insulation material between two layers. But the building will stand without the brick. This is actually the 'normal' way of building anything under, say, 4 stories in most of Western Europe.
The article uses the word "façade" 7 times in reference to both the older and newer building. My takeaway is the emphasis on "technology" in the article is on form rather than function.
I think even some old (100 year old) buildings w/ "full sized" bricks (not 1cm veneer) are still wood-frame construction w/ brick non-structural outerwork.
The article mentions that it's not a wood-framed building, I think implying that it's a true layered (multi-wythe) brick construction:
My analysis doesn't even address brick problems associated with the switch from multi-wythe brick construction to brick veneer over wood framing. (Andres Hall is not a wood-framed building.) Although buildings with brick veneer over wood framing are usually better insulated than old multi-wythe brick buildings, they are frequently plagued by an entirely new category of water entry problems due to flashing errors, clogged air spaces, and missing weep holes. But that's a topic for another article.
I was excited to find your robot brick layer link, but it didn't look that great. There was still a chap doing some of the finishing work sitting alongside. I prefer the idea of programming the robots, leaving the site, and then returning to find your house complete! The 3d printing using concrete made more sense. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-p...
Buildings from 100 years ago that still stand today necessarily must have been those that were most carefully constructed or those that have been thoughtfully preserved. This creates a biased comparison between the highest quality buildings of the past and an average (or perhaps worse than average) building from modern times.
This article could conclude that not all brick buildings today are superior in construction to the highest quality buildings built 100 years ago, but making a more general statement would be a fallacious extrapolation.
And to bring that idea home: contemporary flimsy construction is also a function of local building codes. In 2004 I was in a Florida house built in 1988 which structurally resembled a concrete bunker outfitted with heavy duty crank windows. This was required construction at the time. A hurricane showed up mid August with 140 mph (225 kph) winds and two things in particular were impressive: how well the structure survived the hurricane essentially unscathed (other than damage to it's pool cage screening) and witnessing how well palm trees folded their foliage to weather the onslaught. Apparently after 1988 they had lightened up on the building codes and cheap 2X4 frame construction was allowed for two story dense pack condos in the surrounding area. These did not fare so well. In one case a large pine tree was snapped at the base and hurled through the side of a frame condo complex like a battering ram, demolishing the whole structure. The complex had been evacuated before the hurricane struck so apparently there were no casualties. The moral of this story is that if you mandate good construction then that's what you get. Leave loopholes for cheap construction and that's what you'll get (and it won't suffer the rigors of time very well).
If you are curious about this topic you should bring it up with some architects from different countries. From my understanding there are indeed regressions in building quality in some countries but it's not entirely clear what causes it other than decisions that have been made at the time.
In particular the brick did not decrease in quality but the way they were built did. For instance for a while people paid less attention to protecting buildings from water damage to achieve more interesting designs.
A particular crazy architectural style that suffers a lot from this is British brutalist architecture.
Brutalism gets everywhere in modern british arcitecture. The idea that any archtiect should be designing a flat foor bulding in, say, Scotland is totally bonkers.
It's a beautiful ruin, but it seems never to have been a properly functioning building. Artistic success, total waste of resources for church that built it.
I would love to know the mindset and thought process of Brutalist architects and admirers who see that and see beauty whilst the majority of the rest of the world sees a broken down leaking eye sore.
We are so far apart it is like trying to understand and alien.
I have seen a scant handful of Brutalist building that I consider fine works of craft but the gob smacking majority are pitiful piles of concrete and exposed trusses.
I don't think I've ever seen a Brutalist building that I consider good. Worse still, stupid architects get them heritage listed so we can't even replace them with actually useful buildings (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Offices,_Belconnen)
I have a theory why it's like this. In 1800's architects we're often painters first. Their day job was to paint portraits and signs and whatever was ordered. There was quite lot of painters around, only few of them made "art" and only the best got to draw buildings. The architect would then work the design together with mason. Civil engineers of the time we're busy building railroads.
Then at the end of the century, photography happened. In hindsight it's called "the crisis of art!". Suddenly architects could no longer apprentice by painting stuff for customers. You needed a school for architecture. The teachers would of course be old architects, who hang out with painters. So they sucked that "we can't sell portraits anymore, let's go crazy!" attitude.
In the 1940's you still had some old school guys. During this time some factory owners still thought that paying an architect was investment. You got a factory that would sell your product, keep your employers happy and make you proud. Here is factory building from that period. http://torshammer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Kabelfabrike...
Now architecture has not been based on anything for century. Or maybe seeping fashion trends of modern art. Most big money people use architect just to "pretty up" the facade of a building as afterthought. If even that. Nobody trusts architect to make anything coherent or beautiful.
At the same time architects need to jump on any opportunity to get some international fame. Because that's the only way you can ever succeed with such career. This breeds eccentricity. Which makes the whole thing worse.
To justify not using and architect, you might word that as "saving money". To be consistent with that, you cut costs in labor and materials. To the point of making actually bad buildings.
No amount of repointing could make the modern joints as even, or as narrow, as the old ones. Though to be fair I don't think the modern builders were even going for that look.
Modern builders rarely go for the tightly fitted brick look. It's possible to get brick and concrete pavers with precise dimensions and cement them tightly together, and this is common for brick and stone paving work. Walls could be made that way, but seldom are.
There are some other great explanations in this thread (survivor bias seems very plausible), but I'll throw out another based on my experience with other construction trades: economics.
If you look at old buildings, you tend to notice that they also have a lot of intricate plaster-work that you never see anymore. Why? Because it used to be much cheaper to hire skilled labor than it is today. You can see a similar trend every year in the Christmas Price Index, which tracks the cost of the items in the 12 Days of Christmas song. The prices of goods tend to stay stable, while the price of labor tends to increase significantly.
For our brick buildings, I tried to find the best numbers I could, and here's what I came up with:
In 1894, bricks cost about $5.70/thousand [1], which is $165.51 in today's dollars
Today, you can get bricks wholesale for $220/thousand - and that's what I found online, I imagine an actual wholesaler is less. [2]
That's an increase of about 37%
For the bricklayer, the average wage in 1891 was $4/day, which is about $110 in today's dollars [3]
Today, the median bricklayer pay is $24/hour [4], which is $192 per 8 hour day.
That's an increase of 75% in the real wages of the bricklayer, and it means that the rate labor costs have increased is double the rate of material costs.
In 1891, it may have made financial sense to pay for a bricklayer to make intricate, high quality buildings. In the past few decades, it's likely that's no longer the case.
I think you're on the right track but your comparison fails to take into account the productivity of the bricklayer. A good bricklayer today ought to be more productive than an 1891 bricklayer, because he has motorized mixers, vehicles to move bricks to the right place, laser lines to level his rows, etc. Even in a craft that seems legendarily nontechnical, you have to give some credit to technological advancement. But it's still probably not enough to fully compensate for the 75% increase in labor cost.
You couldn't possibly hire the bricklayer directly today. The bricklayer would be hired as a subcontractor by the general contractor who would apply a surcharge.
Yea, and I see this as one of the main reasons, the quality of work is declining instead of improving (due to technical advances). In my country, when you build a building today, you hire a builder company. This company does no building themselves. They buy the parts of the building from subcontractors and some times the subcontractors buy the service needed from sub-subcontractors. And the company that finally does the job, some times, they even do it not with their own workers, but hire some cheap temporary staff to do the work.
So finally, who is to blame, when the window is not even? The builder? No! He did nothing. The windowing subcontractor?? Technical yes, but practical he just used hired workers. Some times ago, it was possible to say: Here we have a good company, with good reputation, the workers are proud to work for it ... Today, it is just a blaming game -- and when one of the subcontractors is sued because of bad work, they file bankruptcy, because there is also no financial basis -- the companies are just empty shells.
What also adds up to this is, that on every level of this game, only the price of the service is evaluated today -- not the quality. I also saw cases, where the builder company was a big one with great reputation, but the execution was awful! The reason: Bad contractors.
Another reason in my country is, that the requirements for workers in the building sector have been deliberately drastically lowered by the government, to make way for even cheaper work.
Today, (at least in my country) one that wants a house for his family to be build, has no means to decide, if the company will succeed and make a good house or will build a horror house. In most cases, there will be several topics where the execution was bad or really bad and you can call yourself lucky, when the additional costs after the house was finalized are moderate.
There are some really bad cases, where families thought the house would be ready in time and canceled their rent-flat just to be on the streets afterwards, because their house was not ready even months after the deadline. Some where never finished.
Where are brick buildings being torn down left and right? I challenge the survivorship bias argument as where I live in the US east coast multiple cities push for historical status on buildings past a certain age in order to retain character.
My 1950 brick building is 1/3 constructed from re-used brick. Many houses built in the 1960s in my area are also built of reused brick. There must have been some degree of brick teardown going on.
Even now we have trouble with people stealing brick buildings. Unused houses are sometimes set ablaze by brick thieves, then later they come in the night and cart off the bricks.
This is a problem in parts of St. Louis, MO. The brick is of high enough quality that people will steal them for resale from abandoned buildings. Naturally, this leads to the building collapsing which causes even more issues for surrounding area.
The small house I live in is 100 years old, and built of brick. It is a tremendously (over-)engineered building: two layers of brick even for interior walls, exterior walls are around 1 ft thick, and four massive chimney-breasts (although two were sadly removed by previous owners).
My theory is that they just had enormous amounts of cheap labour 100 years ago, and you'd never be able to build such a building today because it would be far too expensive.
In my experience the timber in buildings that old is of the sort that would be hard to find at any price these days, and ruinously expensive if you could. Single thick, long, flawless pieces used in places where several thinner, knot-filled pieces would be used today.
Exceptional (by modern standards) material, used in quantities that would be considered excessive even in nice construction these days.
This is of course why reclaimed building materials are a thing (in the UK anyway). I could go to a place not 10 miles from here and buy a cast iron fireplace that was previously in a home very similar to mine. The irony being that a previous owner of my home probably chucked my fireplace in a skip in about 1980.
Survivorship bias and structural integrity aside, I suspect it's all about the cashflow.
The bank was built in 1891. The FDIC wasn't around until 1933. The appearance of wealth and institutional stability was a very important marketing tool to late 19th-century bankers wanting patrons to trust them with their money.
The dorm houses kids fresh out of high school who can't / don't want to live off campus. I'd guess the building is attractive enough to most people to avoid negative attention, and -- as the article indicates -- it obviously isn't swaying money away from Dartmouth, so why bother?
Alright, too many mentions of survival bias and too much skepticism. There're large parts of some cities that are almost exclusively constructed from brick. It might be bias or it might not be.
It's clear that nowadays buildings are made cheaply. For example the construction of the regular American suburban "stick" house is just the cheapest and the quickest way put up walls and a roof. What you get is something that's badly insulated (both from weather and sound) and just isn't very strong, and the technique is getting traction in other parts of the world too, replacing concrete, beams and brick.
That would imply that there's no issues with the newer design when the article clearly showed where the wrong choices have affected the durability of the building.
More broadly on this subject, I recommend that every software engineer read the book How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand. It's a book about the lifecycle of buildings, design compromises, and how buildings are altered and repurposed over their life. It's a fascinating way to think about software as well.
...but comparing a bank (a building that in 1891 had to LOOK expensive) and student flats (a building that has to BE cheap) results in the rather underwhelming discovery that because they had wildly different budgets with completely different aesthetic aims, they ended up with different built qualities. Shocking, isn't it?
If they want to make an apples-for-apples comparison, the author should come to the UK and compare our 1890 semi-detached with any post-70s new-build. There are certainly ecological issues with the older building (that are expensive to retrofit past) but the quality of building and workmanship is drastically better in the older houses.
And [at least in the UK] this isn't a case of crappy houses made of sticks falling down. With the rarest of exceptions, there is no "survivorship bias".
It's sweet that you think students get what their parents pay for. No. The briefest of glances lets you know exactly what Dartmouth instructed their architect to aim for: capacity.
The real reason it looks so poor is —as I did say before— their respective aesthetic aims. Dartmouth wanted something that looked New Englandy that holds dozens of students, while the bank wanted something that makes them look like they have all the money.
> "With the rarest of exceptions, there is no "survivorship bias"."
A lot of UK housing built circa 1900 - 1930 was not well built at all; Building regulations as such hardly existed and there was a lot of trial and error. Buildings did indeed fall down.
I didn't mean to imply that no 1900 houses have fallen down, just to say that the incredibly vast majority of them are still around today.
Look at any city and you will see rows upon rows of ~1900s terraces. Still mostly upright. These typically only fall down when you let the roof go.
This is in contrast to North America that at the same time was building their houses out of timber. Not only does the material need better maintenance, but the difference between tearing it down and building a new one and refitting is much less than with a double-layer brick build. People want to tear them down and build something better.
That's structural brick covered in stucco, which was pretty common in American cities in the 18th and 19th centuries. You see it a lot in areas with low-quality clay, since the resulting brick is porous and brittle, necessitating a stucco covering to protect it from the elements and not look awful. It might not be poor construction, just ugly because it's not intended to ever be seen. Of course, by design the stucco needs to be replaced every few decades, so who knows if it's been kept up.
That contrasts with the article's 1891 example of a building where the brickwork was both structural and decorative, requiring maximum attention to detail.
Reminds me on a recent conversation at a maker space:
How do you control it, a transistor and a oscillator?
Nah, just an Arduino.
So with micro controllers we loose a lot of applied knowledge of analog circuits and I suspect something similar is going on in architecture. The hours a architect spends on learning about modern materials is not spend thinking about brick works, and consequently a modern architect is a lot worse at building brick buildings than a architect one hundred years ago.
It may be due to the quality of the clay, or the lack of clay at all, for making the bricks. I saw a documentary on this just a few months ago aired by our local PBS station on this very subject.
> "Part of the blame, I feel, rests at the feet of the Modernist movement — a movement that idealized the cube and disdained roof overhangs. Modernist architects were ignorant of the entire concept of moisture management. The fact that thousands of Modernist buildings suffered water entry problems did little to deter architects from falling in love with Modernism and Brutalism. This tragic love affair contributed to the withering of age-old skills."
I believe this is a fair assignment of blame. It's analogous to the complaints people have about some modern web design - total focus on appearance at the expense of usability or technical quality.
The architects produce buildings that look good on paper, because that's what wins the contract. The next client isn't going to go to their previous building and do a customer satisfaction survey on the users. Nobody ever does.
Edit: Incan stone construction is one of the great examples of ancient 'over'building: precisely fitted hand-carved stone, good for five centuries. And Rome has plenty of 2000 year old brick buildings, especially the Pantheon dome.
This was a good article but I think the authors assignment of blame is misplaced.
In my opinion the reason contemporary brick construction is not up to par with 100 year old brick construction is the same reason contemporary washing machines are not up to the standard of washing machines 100 years ago: The emphasis in making things now is on speed and cheapness, the emphasis 100 years ago was on quality.
The college dorm building was certainly thrown up in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the price with a fraction of the labourers, than the bank building.
You assume too much. Also this article is addressing the construction quality and longevity of brick facades. I was referencing the construction quality and longevity of washing machines, pre-war vs modern.
Back then, you could only buy expensive high quality ones. Only a few people could afford it. Nowadays, you can buy cheap crappy ones, as well as expensive high quality ones. What's the argument here? If someone will let me spend the equivalent amount of what these old houses cost back then on a new brick building, I will have them build just as good as the old ones. Actually, I'll have them build better, because the woodworking of the windows will be much better, the moisture barriers will be better, the insulation will be better, the quality of the mortar will be better, the concrete slab will be better (actually, 'it will have a concrete slab'), the roof tiles will be of better quality, the heating system will not suck, I can go on and on...
Hm, I'd say both but quality first. The engineers aim was to make something that would last forever, the goal was that nothing would go wrong with it, but inevitably over the years something would and in that case it'd better be convenient to repair as the its so damn expensive you cant just buy another.
I'm not so sure... Some of the superior brick dorms on that campus built in the 20s and 30s averaged around a year of construction, and cost about $200,000, which adjusted for inflation, is ~ $2.5 million.
The most recent addition to the East Wheelock cluster (couldn't find the cost of the building in question) cost $8 million over two years. The newer McLaughlin cluster, with six dorms, took three years to build and cost over $40 million in 2006.
In Somerville, MA there is an area with some converted loft buildings including new construction loft-style buildings. The new building walls use masonry blocks (large grey blocks) for structure, with decorative brick on the outside. On the inside, there is a cavity for insulation and wiring, and an interior brick wall.
The masonry work is excellent, and is probably the best way to create a wall that looks like brick inside and out yet meets modern insulation demands. But it is a gratuitously expensive construction technique to try and make a building look old and classic. If you don't value that particular aesthetic, you would select other materials. If you want to pander to that aesthetic but don't have a premium loft budget, you might end up with crap like that dorm.
Because brick has become affordable for the common man and building techniques value speed? The average person building a house in 1915 would have a house built with wood siding because brick would have been out of his price range, even with the slave labor wages and lack of sufficient building regulations.
You can see the results of this all over NYC. A building down the street from where I live has had scaffolding around it for over 2 years as they replace the bricks (building owners have to test the bricks ever 5 years in NYC if their building is over 6 stories). This building was build in the 70s. I have no idea when they are going to be done.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread1. We actually care if our buildings are insulated now and withstand earthquakes.
2. People are so wealthy here they don't have to get it right, they can always pay to do it over again. They don't care to put in the research to make sure it is done right. [0]
3. Corollary to #2, we don't need our buildings to last 100 years because we expect the area to be overtaken by increased density by then?
[0] CSB: Person tells about friend that bought house in Las Vegas just prior to 2008, has enormous cooling bill because house doesn't have overhang to protect southern exposure from the sun and HOA won't allow her to alter it. Asks why the government doesn't protect her. I ask why she didn't do a little more due diligence before spending $300k. He hadn't thought of it that way and considers it.
Oh, and the insulation reduces drying of the brick to the interior, which can cause it decay within a decade if not done right: http://www.bluegreengroup.ca/bluegreen-launches-a-study-on-a... (though that's not the case here).
The article's author is not wrong. The average 1980's brickwork building is built less well than the average 100 year old building. However, 100 years ago buildings probably were built worse on average than today. Both of those statements can be true at the same time.
I didn't have the means in 2000 to disassemble the gear pack and a replacement couldn't be found and god I tried. The land lords endedup scrapping both machines and replacing it with shoddy new stuff that didn't work as well. A total shame.
One of my hopes is that public good corp will rise of the consumerist ashes and start to produce items that can not only be repaired but that can be collectively refined just like a codebase. Imagine if there was an open source, end user repairable washing machine, that when a flaw is discovered it is fixed and tracked in a public ledger?
Many cheap brick buildings from 100 years ago are gone, where the high quality ones are more likely to remain.
Also, steel Lintel are often used over windows in brick buildings. They don't last as long, but are fine for cheap construction that is not expected to last. AKA the kinds of building that are unlikely to be around in 100 years.
On the other hand every brick has to be laid by hand. Good bricklayers are scarce because brick has not been in fashion. And therefore they are expensive. Bad bricklayers are slow.
My current house was built in ~1985. The brick quality isn't bad, the walls are much straighter, but the wood is cheaper and the materials thinner and lighter. It might be the case this place will last 100 years, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's a middle market house, for the time, not cheap but not high end.
While survivor bias is important, where I live (London) the main reason houses from 100 years ago aren't around now is simply the war. The stuff from then that's still about - including "cheap" factories and other stuff - is now wildly fashionable and still well-built. Stuff built in the 50s was laughably awful and a lot is gone, stuff from 60s and 70s is going the same way. There are definitely other things going on.
The one thing I really hate about most modern buildings here in Australia is the ceiling height has been reduced. A lot of modern buildings have ceiling heights around 7’ while old buildings will have ceilings of 10’ to 12’.
My house is 1860s with a 12' ceiling. Those other places feel like claustrophobic rabbit holes in comparison.
Low ceilings minimize material costs and maximize profits.
They also minimise heat loss, which is strictly regulated in the UK. Hence that other annoying feature of many modern build - tiny windows.
Plants are approaching EOL and they haven't been building new capacity to replace them. They've thrown a bunch of money at wind, but I think that's been more of a handout to (traditionally Conservative-voting) landowners than a viable strategy.
UK since middle ages was already infamous for having cities (specially london, but not just london) that have energetic problems and rely a lot on coal (and now other fossil fuels), leading to the infamous killer fogs, and to the victorian fashion (in victorian era, people tried to use stuff that would not have issues in a highly polluted air, for example extremely thick and dark curtains, so that people don't notice you aren't washing them a lot...)
Isn't that just implying that most energy is artificially cheap, relative to its externalities?
Why can I own two new homes with 8' ceilings and heat them both(even if I don't live at one for 90% of the time), but I can't own one new home with 12' ceilings?
Yes it is. But if you're going to charge 'real' price (even assuming you can), people with the least disposable income will have to pay disproportionally more for their energy, which is a a basic need in 2015. Plus it would cause ripple effects that are impossible to predict. So the prudent way of mitigating this is with targeted policies, like building efficiency. It's a political decision. Of course one might say 'we should charge everything at the full rate and let the market sort it out', which is a fine position (one I personally lean towards, for as much as that matters) but it's irrelevant to the fact that there are many groups that don't agree. So what we have now is a system with many groups pushing in various directions, and 'patches' for situations where that causes unwanted effects that all parties can agree on (well, a majority can agree on) should be mitigated somehow.
"Why can I own two new homes with 8' ceilings and heat them both(even if I don't live at one for 90% of the time), but I can't own one new home with 12' ceilings?"
So to come back to the issue at hand, I can also buy a 10MW heater, put it outside in my garden and have it 'waste' energy 24/7. We don't have laws against that (afaik). But our policies rely partly on the assumption of economically rational actors, which to a degree and in the aggregate is the empirically verified reality.
In other words, for ever policy I'm sure one can think of 100 ways to stay within the law yet violate the spirit of the policy. That's just the nature of governance, and it works fine in the vast majority of cases. Law is not a closed rule-based system like computers are, and that's fine.
(actually that last part is up for debate; even Montesquieu (who was the guy to come up with the original theory of 'balance of three powers') was of the opinion that perfect law should be just that, and that judges should do nothing but apply rigid rules to facts. But that's getting way more off topic than is reasonable...)
There's no god given set of rights -- what we get to do is what the era/society/legal system we live in allows us.
And what's moral/good to do even outside or against what's allowed, is a matter of philosophy.
People expected to be able to smoke even on an airplane in the 70s. Nowadays not so much. Asking someone not to smoke "within 30 ft of this building's entrance" (a common sign), would seem as ridiculous to them as the regulation of heating to you.
With heating, the government is placing a +infinity price on heat retention for buildings(with ceilings > 8'), but isn't actually enforcing that price in any other manner. Why not just charge progressively increasing amounts for electricity/gas expenditure? Right now, I can have a 100% legal, heat-efficient home, and heat it day and night by leaving the windows open. I wouldn't do that because I don't like to waste money, but that is just like I would not live in a house that was extremely energy inefficient.
Basically, if I want to pay for tall ceilings in my house, shouldn't I be able to, assuming I pay the appropriate amount?
Because they just want to impose a rule for what they believe is better for the environment.
They don't want to make it into a market product.
>Basically, if I want to pay for tall ceilings in my house, shouldn't I be able to, assuming I pay the appropriate amount?
That just makes it into something the rich can do while the poor can't. While indeed it also servers to lower the number of people doing't it -- it's not what any society that holds to high esteem any values besides net worth would want to do.
And I'm not just talking about the "tall ceilings" thing here, which might or might not be reasonable, but the more general question "shouldn't I pollute/waste as much energy as I want if I pay enough for it?".
Somethings we don't allow people to do at any price. Like kill people. Even if the victim also agrees. I, for one, don't believe payment trumps any morals in principle, and I wouldn't want that to be the case.
Whether it happens in practice (e.g. bribery etc), that's OK. But I wouldn't design a system where that's accepted and celebrated too.
Of course having a ceiling this low is terrible for natural cooling so you then have to run air conditioning all the time costing far more in the long run. I live in a 1920s building with 11’ ceilings and I don’t have or need air conditioning because the place stays cool enough even through the height of summer.
Meanwhile my current residence has ceilings so high that I haven't bothered to install some LED bulbs that I have lying around since I don't have an easy safe way to reach the light fixtures.
You can get special poles for changing high bulbs. I have seen them before, but I can't remember what they are called.
Actually I think the pole is just the regular extension pole you'd use with a paint roller. You get a light bulb changing attachment instead.
[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf
[1] http://www.truthaboutit.net/2012/05/true-or-false-half-of-al...
The downside of pushing the engineering to the limit is the builders often cut corners to make their own savings so that the building does not even make 50 years. Plenty of new buildings here in Australia are having major structural issues after only 5 to 10 years because of this.
It was a newly built townhouse complex so we were a body corporate. Within 4 years of building completion, we were suffering from rising damp and completely loose paving in the shared driveways. The paving was too high relative to the damp proof course and the base wasn't prepared properly.
It took a couple of years of legal stuff to claim on the building warranty.
Having been through this, I now are more acutely aware of how dodgy new building are around Australia. New apartments especially.
High ceilings not only avoid the need for air conditioning (my home has 11' ceilings and no air conditioning), they make you feel better in the space. When I am in a building with low ceilings I feel totally claustrophobic and tense - this is not something I want to feel in my own home.
With active heating/cooling, what really helps is better insulation. In Scandinavia and Germany people are insulating walls in new houses with 40 cm rockwool, or the equivalents thereof.
A lot of older structural "engineering" was figuring out how much material was required, then multiplying it by 80 just in case.
An inspector said, "those are very good bricks from the 30s. They don't make bricks that strong anymore"
Today's track houses have MUCH improved insulation, much stronger moisture barriers, and are much more efficient than even the nicest houses built 100 years ago.
I just don't believe that construction has regressed the way we all seem to think it has. Of course I type this from a 103 year old house which is awesome, but drafty :)
When I was living in London a couple of years ago my house there was a former council house built in the 70s - so it was built to be as cheap as possible. Other than being tiny and having thin drywall everything else was fine.
The same applies to "every generation thinks the next generation is horrible". That may or may not be true, but sometimes there are horrible generations.
What do you mean?
But it might be this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ledootgeneration/
Or there was the boring generation of the 10's, compare with the more lively roaring 20s.
Or consider the 60s vs the more conservative 50s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_March...
In democracy people are not meant to "vote for the best".
They are meant to vote for what they want, as they judge it for themselves.
If anything, a whole bunch of perfectly decent old buildings have been torn down. Because they were no longer of any use (prolonged vacancy is the worst for any building), not because they were falling apart.
Somewhat of a tangent. Good architecture has three properties: it's useful, it's robust, and it's beautiful. That's a three-legged stool from antiquity, and I firmly believe architects and builders sat on it for centuries. Modernism was an ideological project that discarded two of these legs: only utility was important. the pursuit of beauty was either for old-regime bourgeois or for unenlightened proles, and robustness was not all that necessary for the beancounters anyway, eternity is not a concept for the godless machine age.
Is is also fairly recent that the architect needed to take on all aspects of architecture. For example, architecture training was often taught in the fine arts faculties. The structural issues then were then taken on by the master-builder. It worked, the latter had a wealth of experiential knowledge, an architect didn't need to tell him how to frame a window, or ensure water didn't drip along the wall. The architect becoming first a licensed professional in need to defend his title, then some sort of artist willing a new pristine creation in the world, claimed more and more roles. Now every detail needs to be in the plan almost, less room for correction by skilled craftsmen (who also are thinning out..).
Which began in the 1700s or earlier, with the Dark Satanic Mills.
More significantly, it took a fair bit of time for modern methods to enter into construction. Structural steel and skyscrapers along with many other "modern" inventions date to the 1880s. Modern "stick" housing began largely in the 1940s.
You can find catalogs of old housing, literally, in Sears Roebuck catalogs, detailing design and construction.
Every component in a building today save plumbling, windows and electric is inferior to its complement in 1915. The bricks are of lower quality (to the point there is a thriving market for used bricks), the wood is garbage, and quality of labor has shifted from skilled craftsmanship to glorified assembly work.
My home was built in 1927 as a cheap starter home (upstairs was delivered unfinished for buildout when the owners had kids). It's build quality today would only be seen in a custom home with a very wealthy/particular owner and cost a minimum of $750k. (Current value of my home is around $250k)
The entire floor both upstairs and down is tongue and groove 2x6 planking... vs today's 3/4" OSB.
For being over 50 years old, the "skeleton" is in outstanding condition. There are some very minor foundation issues that I've been slowly fixing with a little elbow grease, and that's about it.
If the drywall and electrical were redone, this thing would be in better condition/quality than a large percentage of BRAND NEW homes on the market today.
I am going to take a guess and say that we are not reading a commented written by someone involved in construction. HVAC anything? I'd love to see you sell a house for 750k with asbestos wrapped around all the vents. Vermiculite versus blown in closed cell poly? Poly versus waxed floors? LVLs? Exterior fasteners? Lead paint? Can you imagine how much longer this list would be if I was not content to stick to residential construction?
I could go on and on. TLDR Housing materials have significantly improved since Calvin Coolidge's time. Oh yeah, I forgot Contruction Adhesives...
The only brick buildings you can still look at from the 1800s are the ones that were built very well - all the shoddily-constructed buildings from that era have since disappeared.
Yeah, the dorm in the linked article is totally better than that building. So while there are good buildings from that era, let's not kid ourselves, there were also a lot of horrible buildings that are rightfully no longer around. I would be willing to bet that the average quality of new construction is better now than it was then. If nothing else, the pervasive use of aluminum/vinyl siding and tar-asphalt shingle roofs yields buildings that better withstand the elements that old-style painted wood.
There's some nice work being done with brick today.[1] Some of this is gentrification, built to fit in with existing brick buildings, or to imitate them in new construction. All those examples have recessed windows, although not structural stone lintels. Many lintels today are precast stone and decorative; steel is carrying the load.
Robotic bricklaying is here.[2]
In earthquake country, you really don't want tall brick buildings where the brick is structural. San Francisco is very anti-cornice; in even minor earthquakes, overhanging masonry cornices tend to fall off and kill people.
[1] http://www.bdcnetwork.com/7-emerging-design-trends-brick-bui... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppk4O7iyzPI
This was my thought as well. The modern building is likely just using the brick as veneer, even if it is full-thickness brick. It's likely concrete walls with brick layered over it. The fact that the brickwork is poorly done likely doesn't matter except aesthetically. If all the brick fell off the building would still be standing.
The newer building is indeed ugly, and the brickwork looks cheap and poorly done. But that doesn't mean the technology has declined. It means the technology has advanced to the point that the brick is just ornamental.
The article is using definition #1. I don't think the word is meant to imply anything beyond the literal, "the front of a building".
See http://www.carsondunlop.com/resources/articles/brick-houses-...
Does this mean there are robot Freemasons in our future?
This link seems more relevant: http://illuminatiwatcher.com/illuminati-freemason-symbolism-...
My analysis doesn't even address brick problems associated with the switch from multi-wythe brick construction to brick veneer over wood framing. (Andres Hall is not a wood-framed building.) Although buildings with brick veneer over wood framing are usually better insulated than old multi-wythe brick buildings, they are frequently plagued by an entirely new category of water entry problems due to flashing errors, clogged air spaces, and missing weep holes. But that's a topic for another article.
Buildings from 100 years ago that still stand today necessarily must have been those that were most carefully constructed or those that have been thoughtfully preserved. This creates a biased comparison between the highest quality buildings of the past and an average (or perhaps worse than average) building from modern times.
This article could conclude that not all brick buildings today are superior in construction to the highest quality buildings built 100 years ago, but making a more general statement would be a fallacious extrapolation.
In particular the brick did not decrease in quality but the way they were built did. For instance for a while people paid less attention to protecting buildings from water damage to achieve more interesting designs.
A particular crazy architectural style that suffers a lot from this is British brutalist architecture.
It's a beautiful ruin, but it seems never to have been a properly functioning building. Artistic success, total waste of resources for church that built it.
We are so far apart it is like trying to understand and alien.
I have seen a scant handful of Brutalist building that I consider fine works of craft but the gob smacking majority are pitiful piles of concrete and exposed trusses.
I have a theory why it's like this. In 1800's architects we're often painters first. Their day job was to paint portraits and signs and whatever was ordered. There was quite lot of painters around, only few of them made "art" and only the best got to draw buildings. The architect would then work the design together with mason. Civil engineers of the time we're busy building railroads.
Then at the end of the century, photography happened. In hindsight it's called "the crisis of art!". Suddenly architects could no longer apprentice by painting stuff for customers. You needed a school for architecture. The teachers would of course be old architects, who hang out with painters. So they sucked that "we can't sell portraits anymore, let's go crazy!" attitude.
In the 1940's you still had some old school guys. During this time some factory owners still thought that paying an architect was investment. You got a factory that would sell your product, keep your employers happy and make you proud. Here is factory building from that period. http://torshammer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Kabelfabrike...
Now architecture has not been based on anything for century. Or maybe seeping fashion trends of modern art. Most big money people use architect just to "pretty up" the facade of a building as afterthought. If even that. Nobody trusts architect to make anything coherent or beautiful.
At the same time architects need to jump on any opportunity to get some international fame. Because that's the only way you can ever succeed with such career. This breeds eccentricity. Which makes the whole thing worse.
To justify not using and architect, you might word that as "saving money". To be consistent with that, you cut costs in labor and materials. To the point of making actually bad buildings.
If you look at old buildings, you tend to notice that they also have a lot of intricate plaster-work that you never see anymore. Why? Because it used to be much cheaper to hire skilled labor than it is today. You can see a similar trend every year in the Christmas Price Index, which tracks the cost of the items in the 12 Days of Christmas song. The prices of goods tend to stay stable, while the price of labor tends to increase significantly.
For our brick buildings, I tried to find the best numbers I could, and here's what I came up with: In 1894, bricks cost about $5.70/thousand [1], which is $165.51 in today's dollars Today, you can get bricks wholesale for $220/thousand - and that's what I found online, I imagine an actual wholesaler is less. [2] That's an increase of about 37%
For the bricklayer, the average wage in 1891 was $4/day, which is about $110 in today's dollars [3]
Today, the median bricklayer pay is $24/hour [4], which is $192 per 8 hour day.
That's an increase of 75% in the real wages of the bricklayer, and it means that the rate labor costs have increased is double the rate of material costs.
In 1891, it may have made financial sense to pay for a bricklayer to make intricate, high quality buildings. In the past few decades, it's likely that's no longer the case.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Oo4oAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA953&lpg=...
[2]http://brickbroker.com/brick.html [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=cNdEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA722&lpg=... [4] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Bricklayer/Hourly_Ra...
So finally, who is to blame, when the window is not even? The builder? No! He did nothing. The windowing subcontractor?? Technical yes, but practical he just used hired workers. Some times ago, it was possible to say: Here we have a good company, with good reputation, the workers are proud to work for it ... Today, it is just a blaming game -- and when one of the subcontractors is sued because of bad work, they file bankruptcy, because there is also no financial basis -- the companies are just empty shells.
What also adds up to this is, that on every level of this game, only the price of the service is evaluated today -- not the quality. I also saw cases, where the builder company was a big one with great reputation, but the execution was awful! The reason: Bad contractors.
Another reason in my country is, that the requirements for workers in the building sector have been deliberately drastically lowered by the government, to make way for even cheaper work.
Today, (at least in my country) one that wants a house for his family to be build, has no means to decide, if the company will succeed and make a good house or will build a horror house. In most cases, there will be several topics where the execution was bad or really bad and you can call yourself lucky, when the additional costs after the house was finalized are moderate.
There are some really bad cases, where families thought the house would be ready in time and canceled their rent-flat just to be on the streets afterwards, because their house was not ready even months after the deadline. Some where never finished.
Even now we have trouble with people stealing brick buildings. Unused houses are sometimes set ablaze by brick thieves, then later they come in the night and cart off the bricks.
This sounds totally bananas, where is this? Are the bricks made of gold or something?
My theory is that they just had enormous amounts of cheap labour 100 years ago, and you'd never be able to build such a building today because it would be far too expensive.
Exceptional (by modern standards) material, used in quantities that would be considered excessive even in nice construction these days.
The bank was built in 1891. The FDIC wasn't around until 1933. The appearance of wealth and institutional stability was a very important marketing tool to late 19th-century bankers wanting patrons to trust them with their money.
The dorm houses kids fresh out of high school who can't / don't want to live off campus. I'd guess the building is attractive enough to most people to avoid negative attention, and -- as the article indicates -- it obviously isn't swaying money away from Dartmouth, so why bother?
It's clear that nowadays buildings are made cheaply. For example the construction of the regular American suburban "stick" house is just the cheapest and the quickest way put up walls and a roof. What you get is something that's badly insulated (both from weather and sound) and just isn't very strong, and the technique is getting traction in other parts of the world too, replacing concrete, beams and brick.
That would imply that there's no issues with the newer design when the article clearly showed where the wrong choices have affected the durability of the building.
...but comparing a bank (a building that in 1891 had to LOOK expensive) and student flats (a building that has to BE cheap) results in the rather underwhelming discovery that because they had wildly different budgets with completely different aesthetic aims, they ended up with different built qualities. Shocking, isn't it?
If they want to make an apples-for-apples comparison, the author should come to the UK and compare our 1890 semi-detached with any post-70s new-build. There are certainly ecological issues with the older building (that are expensive to retrofit past) but the quality of building and workmanship is drastically better in the older houses.
And [at least in the UK] this isn't a case of crappy houses made of sticks falling down. With the rarest of exceptions, there is no "survivorship bias".
And that aesthetics should override competent construction technique is a bad idea, is also a fair criticism.
The real reason it looks so poor is —as I did say before— their respective aesthetic aims. Dartmouth wanted something that looked New Englandy that holds dozens of students, while the bank wanted something that makes them look like they have all the money.
A lot of UK housing built circa 1900 - 1930 was not well built at all; Building regulations as such hardly existed and there was a lot of trial and error. Buildings did indeed fall down.
I didn't mean to imply that no 1900 houses have fallen down, just to say that the incredibly vast majority of them are still around today.
Look at any city and you will see rows upon rows of ~1900s terraces. Still mostly upright. These typically only fall down when you let the roof go.
This is in contrast to North America that at the same time was building their houses out of timber. Not only does the material need better maintenance, but the difference between tearing it down and building a new one and refitting is much less than with a double-layer brick build. People want to tear them down and build something better.
https://plus.google.com/111337360985340071974/posts/KkDyX34u...
That contrasts with the article's 1891 example of a building where the brickwork was both structural and decorative, requiring maximum attention to detail.
http://ninenet.org/archives/pressroom/st-louis-brick-buildin...
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/brick
I believe this is a fair assignment of blame. It's analogous to the complaints people have about some modern web design - total focus on appearance at the expense of usability or technical quality.
The architects produce buildings that look good on paper, because that's what wins the contract. The next client isn't going to go to their previous building and do a customer satisfaction survey on the users. Nobody ever does.
Edit: Incan stone construction is one of the great examples of ancient 'over'building: precisely fitted hand-carved stone, good for five centuries. And Rome has plenty of 2000 year old brick buildings, especially the Pantheon dome.
In my opinion the reason contemporary brick construction is not up to par with 100 year old brick construction is the same reason contemporary washing machines are not up to the standard of washing machines 100 years ago: The emphasis in making things now is on speed and cheapness, the emphasis 100 years ago was on quality.
The college dorm building was certainly thrown up in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the price with a fraction of the labourers, than the bank building.
I'm sure you have an argument here, but I don't see how washing machines further it.
https://youtu.be/baFaEvBywGc?t=22m40s
I would argue that the emphasis was on "repairability".
The most recent addition to the East Wheelock cluster (couldn't find the cost of the building in question) cost $8 million over two years. The newer McLaughlin cluster, with six dorms, took three years to build and cost over $40 million in 2006.
The masonry work is excellent, and is probably the best way to create a wall that looks like brick inside and out yet meets modern insulation demands. But it is a gratuitously expensive construction technique to try and make a building look old and classic. If you don't value that particular aesthetic, you would select other materials. If you want to pander to that aesthetic but don't have a premium loft budget, you might end up with crap like that dorm.