The depressing counterpoint, I suppose, is that 99% of the time, you're not building the Pantheon, you're building something that was intended to be minimally-acceptable, utilitarian, and disposable from the get-go: a parking garage, a tilt-up big-box building, a freeway on-ramp, a strip mall. All of which may well be obsolete in a few decades just because the urban environment changes rapidly.

If you could figure out a systematic way to cut the cost and the lifetime of such lowbrow, mass-produced concrete structures in half, developers wouldn't hesitate, they'd jump on it immediately.

We revere longevity only in retrospect.