Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I live in Nice, a city at the border of France and Italia.

My area is full of beautiful buildings that would never be built anymore:

- the fancy wall sculptures, round corners and marble stairs would be way too expensive to build today.

- they have a lot of volume: high ceiling, corridors, spacious stairways, that would be "optimized" today into the required minimum allowed by law.

- they are not too high, because they didn't have the mean to do that. So I see the sky, and the sun reaches my windows.

- they have "buffer areas". Entrances, places with green, fancy chiseled property doors, around the building. I don't come out and arrive right on the street. My bike rack, mailbox and trash disposal area are behind a light and elegant fence.

- there are a lot of windows, and large ones, so I have a lot of light.

- some rooms have old style wooden floor. It's pretty, and warm to the feet. It would be ruinous to add that today, you would get a premade cheap one at most if you had the budget.

- I have a spot in a tower. It's useless, nobody in their damn mind would build that anymore. I love it. And all my friends are always mentioning it when we talk about the flat. For some reason, it's very pleasing.

Mostly, they are charming to live in, those old buildings.

One could value that or not, but after living in a lot of different places, I find I often prefer older buildings even if they are less comfortable. They bring me more joy.

Unfortunatly, it's not just about the cost: we are loosing the skill we used to have to make those.

Not to mention we used to treat construction workers very badly so it made building a lot of things possible at the time that would be indecent today.

I live in the old Lyon district and I agree entirely, but it's hard to buy into the argument that "we can't build this anymore because it'd too expensive", as if the people at the time were all incredibly rich. As far as I know people back then were much poorer than we are today, especially in the cities.

Now I'm not saying I understand why it was done this way -- it's honestly quite puzzling how we seem to have abandoned these myriads of techniques that made everything we built so beautiful.

My theory is that it was more likely a culture thing -- back then, you wouldn't conceive of an entrance door without some wood sculpture or at least some elegantly carved stairs. That just wasn't something any architect or artisan/builder would do.

Also in these times of "climate crisis" it's striking how old urban planning makes the temperature much more balanced and the air flows much more nicely. There's a 3°C difference between the town center and my old district, because mine has very few concrete (old paved ways), no cars and has stone walls. My friend in the city center has 27°C in her kitchen. I'm still at 20°C.

In Lyon it's even more obvious. There are some restaurants with truely huge spaces that you rarely see anymore in France, like near the sucrerie, or the brasserie georges.

But I think it's definitly about money, not culture.

Today, we are more numerous, and there are more building to buid. Hence the projects are in competitions for the resources to build them, like stone or wood. Cement being cheap compared to stone, it wins.

For the same reason, space is now a premium, and so it's expensive to have big volume for new constructions.

What's more, a rich country mean rich people, and so richer workers. 80 years ago, you could abuse your workers so much, and pay them so little, it was much cheaper to build things that took a lot of time. Today, time makes or breaks a project rentability way quicker.

Add to that you have to make everything up to code now, which is even more expensive. And with insurances everywhere, on top of that, environmnent risk evaluations, etc.

And of course, a lot of building used to be constructed either by the state, or rich families. Now, you must borrow money to build, which mean you add the cost of the financial system.

All those things add up.

Yes, I guess the remarks on population density and on workers' wages make sense. Thanks for clarifying.

100 to 200 years ago labour was so cheap to the upper class as to cost zero. A truly upper class family could have dozens of full-time servants. An upper-middle-class family could have 3 or 4. Even 50 years ago it was common for a middle-class household family in Lisbon to have a live-in maid for pennies. Try having even one full-time maid on an engineer's salary today. Or just supporting a family of 4 on a single salary, for the matter.

Old middle-class and above buildings were beautifully built because expert craftspeople and old-growth materials were practically free. They used them all up and we're left with more efficient (but uglier) ways of building. Which is a good thing, means we're not exploiting workers or cutting down forests and mountains quite at the same rate any more. But until we achieve another technological revolution in manufacturing and are able to spec custom parts at the same price as mass-produced ones, we won't be building things as prettily as a century ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com