Comment by paulorlando
15 hours ago
If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.
Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.
Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.
Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.
Homes still aren’t really mechanized. I’ve seen attempts but they haven’t worked well yet. Labor and materials are so expensive!
And most new homes are built by one of a few big groups. Oligopoly issues again.
>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.