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> Isn't the particularly short lifespan of modern concrete construction mostly a combination of its use in areas with regular freeze-thaw cycles and using a reinforcement material that rusts

No. It's a consequence of designing to requirements of minimum cost and a 50-year lifespan. It'd be easy to make concrete with much longer lifespan, but it costs more.

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It's a nice thought that all these depressive brutalistic/modernist builduings will all soon crumbly by the same mechanism that spawned them!

Most brutalist buildings are already 60+ ish years old and doing great (actual brutalism, rather than “concrete buildings I don’t like,” was mostly a style of the 1950s and 60s in the west, though it lasted quite a bit longer in Eastern Europe). Even the Boston government services center, everyone’s most hated brutalist building in the US is already past 50.

for many people, myself included, actual brutalism is "concrete buildings I don’t like"

Eh, there’s no accounting for taste, but there have always been shitty buildings in every vernacular. We tend to not see the worst buildings in older styles because they’ve long since been torn down.

“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.” - Unknown

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