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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

The future is owning a state-of-the-art 3D printer to produce the small plastic part for your sixty-year-old washing machine.

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?

How would any of the issues with the Dartmouth brick building in the article have been caused by #1?

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).

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).

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.

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