Old vs New Homes

I never said it wasn't. But good luck finding houses being built like that today.

You're discussing aesthetics, not the actual quality of the housing:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/stop-fetis...

I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of urban housing. Maybe it's just too expensive now, but modern houses just look like cheap painted boxes inside and out. There's no attention to small details, no flourishes or embellishment. It's depressing, especially compared to mass built housing from pre WWII.All over the world it seems to be ther older neighbourhoods and houses that are most sought after. I used to think this was snobbiness, just the benefit of time (larg

Building construction technology _has_ improved, but, particularly for residential stuff, people do not care for some of the improvements. You could build Soviet-style modular apartments, but, well, no-one really wants that.

I live in a 120 year old house and it looks the exact same as a bunch of other 120 year old houses around here because they were all obviously either done by the same builder or straight up bought out of a sears catalogue.The working people that built my house didn't give a shit that it wasn't unique then and working people don't care now. Folks want an affordable place to live.Aesthetic "concerns" around new apartment housing is a desperate attempt by the rich to

This article seems to be putting on some strong rose-colored glasses. It appeals to the idea that people in the past all lived in beautiful, long-lasting buildings. The reality is that the long-lasting buildings are the only ones that still exist. The bulk of humanity has always lived in cheap construction. Affordable housing is not a bad thing, especially with modern fire codes.The last paragraph starts with "For centuries the quality of their buildings and a certain permanence set citi

Nope land is comparable, subtract that out and you’ll see a huge difference as you literally can’t legally build a house that shitty in most areas. These things were typically ~750 SF and had terrible insulation via single pane windows etc.Survivorship bias means most of the lowest quality housing stock either didn’t survive or was significantly upgraded, but that’s irrelevant when talking about what was being built.

yeah, precisely. there's a reason new houses aren't built like that any more. you have the same problem in parts of the US where houses that are really not all that great to live in are nevertheless preserved as-is because they are "historic"

Arrogant? I grew up in a Czechoslovak apartment building and although it still stands and now looks a lot better inside and outside, it required a lot of investments in the meantime and it might have been cheaper to pull it down and build a replacement from scratch - but it wouldn't have been bureaucratically easier, plus people are attached to their dwellings.Meanwhile buildings built around 1900 are in better order, because the quality of work was a bit higher back then.You can rais

It's beautiful and unlike the periods before it they are quite spacious on the inside. If you go further back in time, it sometimes gets a bit cramped (i. e. stairs half a meter wide, half the depth of your foot and at an 120 degree angle – basically a ladder).It's interesting to see that everyone wants to life in them here, but nobody would attempt to build like it again. Even the most luxurious new apartments may have floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides, but the ceilings are at