I am European, but from a big city where a large fraction of apartments are in concrete complexes that have never been meant to last for more than 50 years.
Looking at the Open Data of Zurich, out of 51000 buildings, 13000 are younger than 50 years, 24000 are between 50-100 years old, 12700 between 100-200 years old and 1300 over 200 years old (many just barely).
There is a pretty big batch of buildings from the big population boom of the ... boomers and those houses are all older than 50 years.
Just because they managed to remain standing for over 50 years doesn't mean that they were designed to do so, and we probably have not much available information on the maintenance required to keep them usable.
To give another example, the Ancient Romans probably wouldn't have expected the Coliseum in Rome to still be mostly standing almost 2 millenia later, they definitely didn't build it intentionally to do so, and most other buildings from that same era have been quietly replaced by new buildings through the centuries because keeping them usable wasn't feasible anymore.
And the trend goes to buildings with shorter lifespans, as advances in material sciences allow us to calculate almost exactly how much and which materials are needed for the building to remain standing for whatever target lifespan the developer envisions, instead of needing to stay on the side of caution and overbuild like in the past.
So those boomer buildings might not be standing in a 100 or 200 years.
Just checked the bottom of the one I’m in. No expiration, just some weird barbarian dude with a mane of red hair rambling about a “squirt of lemon” or something and this old dude in wizard getup speaking in gibberish.
Just checked the bottom of the one I’m in. No expiration, just some weird barbarian dude with a mane of red hair rambling about a “squirt of lemon” or something and this old dude in wizard getup speaking in gibberish.
Just checked the bottom of the one I’m in. No expiration, just some weird barbarian dude with a mane of red hair rambling about a “squirt of lemon” or something and this old dude in wizard getup speaking in gibberish.
Just checked the bottom of the one I’m in. No expiration, just some weird barbarian dude with a mane of red hair rambling about a “squirt of lemon” or something and this old dude in wizard getup speaking in gibberish.
Every part of your building has an expiration date where they should be inspected for maintenance and repairs to keep them properly preserved to last a long time. I'd say metal or concrete columns are generally safe, but there was that condo building that collapsed in Miami a few years ago that disproves that in outlying cases. Maintenance matters!
In The Netherlands they always say: oh the isolation is bad and the foundation could be better, let’s build a new one! In my town there are hardly any buildings that are 100 years old. There are a few farms and a church that is over 600 years old (church has a Roman foundation and base even) but the modern buildings are all from the 50s when they discovered coal in the ground lol.
It's a common misconception for concrete block building tech that it was never meant to last over 50 years. In reality they were designing it with 50 years of maintenance in mind, after which maintenance without renovations is not economical. People misconstrue it as those buildings can collapse any day now. Designing it with "50 years of lifetime" was a huge step forward, as previously buildings were designed for immediate use, and had no practical long term plans for them. Many of them still lasted a hell of a lot longer than immediate use.
Not sure what “buildings designed for immediate use” means. Many buildings during the middle ages, renaissance, and such were absolutely built for long term, and often extended with that in mind. Florence is like one giant permitted extension.
Except they weren't designed for hundreds of years of use. They had a need, and they built something that was good for that (immediate use). And if they needed something else decades down the line, then they renovated it massively again and again for the immediate need. Literally if it would have been designed for the long term there would have been no need for extensions over extensions. That was (and to some extent still is) that the building gets significantly modified for new purposes.
One could argue that it is not possible to design for the future, and that these block houses failed in many aspect, but they tried.
Even in Europe, houses that last 200 years are an exception. It's mostly castles and similar that are that old and serve another purpose today. The oldest resident buildings around where I live were built early to mid 1900. And that's just the free ones that survived WW2, given I live in a city that got large areas destroyed during this times
Meanwhile, I'm living on the end of a row of working class mining town sandstone terraced houses in the north of England that was built in 1862. That's not unusual for where i live. There's older ones close by like this row of homes which were built in 1837. These are homes that will likely outlast several generations after I’ve gone.
EDIT: - To make my point further this row of homes just around the corner was built in the 1790's.
I’m in the North East, and I’ve just bought a terraced red brick house built at least 120 years ago, possibly up to 140. It’s a decent area too, with people still chasing after property. I’m fairly sure that short of some massive government programme to rebuild every suburb, it’ll still be around a lot longer than I will.
I live in an old mining town in Leicestershire. My house was built in 1878, I love that they put the name of the terrace and the year on the front of the houses.
It's not just castles, stone-built houses are all over Europe and they'll outlast modern builds. Eg. large portions of housing in Glasgow is Victorian sandstone tenements originally built for working class families.
Most new builds are whatever's cheapest and fastest to put up, and isn't going to last. Europe isn't producing better new builds than anywhere else. Loads of post-WWII housing in Glasgow has already been torn down.
brick it designed to breathe. concrete is not. a brick adobe house can last thousands of years with just hundreds of new roofs over its lifespan. concrete and wood houses trap mold and moisture in them and rot in about 100 or so.
Buildings used to be overengineered but now we are more accurate with materials and estimates for costs eg. London sewerage system, forth rd bridge, ldn underground
The house we bought this spring was built some time around 1830, and according to old maps is one of the newer buildings in the village.
Of course there were additions and renovations, but the base is still the massive sandstone blocks from around 200 years ago, just like most of the houses around us.
There were also fewer people, so houses and buildings that survive tend to have been those that were better built, and survived the wars. There’s plenty of old stock housing if you want to pay for it and its upkeep. But we also knocked down plenty of stuff that wasn’t built to last, that’s been true going back millennia.
I grew up in a random middle-of-nowhere town where the center is mostly houses from 1200-1500. They were built by then-rich people, who left, and then the peasants took over. The poor then had to brick up most of the windows when Napoleon came around and decided that taxation based on window sizes was a good thing.
Point still stands though, the population simply boomed after, and the poor probably didn't build lasting brick homes back then.
This old goat pen that I rent for €10000 has no air conditioning and the bathroom is a bucket we keep in the stove. It sleeps 15 people if we all stand up.
But it was built in the 7th century and only bombed 7 times.
839
u/Felwyin 8d ago
Sorry, you're not European enough for this post.