Comment by jillesvangurp

It's not that hard to bring old buildings (altbau in German) up to modern standards via renovation. Here in Berlin, there are lots of buildings from early last century that are very desirable property not just because of their exterior but because of their interiors. You get modern insulation, wiring, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. And high ceilings, wooden floors. When I moved here 18 years ago, there were still a lot of these buildings in their original state with no insulation, coal burners for heating, etc. You could smell the coal in the winter. All that has been renovated at this point. The communists actually attempted to cover up the nice facades by just plastering over it as that was considered decadent. A lot of that property has been restored to its original state at this point.

A challenge with some old construction is that it was (at the time) cheap construction. Which means that after a century there can be lots of structural issues, mold, leaky roofs, problems with foundations, etc. But you should compare that to modern cheap construction, which isn't all that great either and doesn't age well.

A lot of West Berlin post war construction is particularly grim and ugly because it was obviously built on the cheap with little or no attention to how things looked. Surviving, pre-war construction is a lot nicer. Especially if somebody invests in fixing that up. You can see the contrast throughout the city because heavy bombing left a lot of gaps that were later filled in with some typically very bland and sometimes very ugly and now very dated construction. It seems some architects had some weird notions of modern. Especially some seventies and eighties architecture is a combination of cheap and very ugly. Cheap concrete does not age well. And painting it some weird shade of yellow or purple doesn't make it better. More recent construction is a lot less offensive, thankfully. The DDR mostly didn't bother with filling in the gaps and as a result, a lot of recent construction has been addressing that using more premium materials and architects that actually know what they are doing.