How to design a house to last 1000 years

The parent poster is probably referring to "How Buildings Learn", a book by Stewart Brand with lots of architectural pictures and commentary about how various buildings have been (re)used over the decades or centuries.

Brand posits (a) human needs change faster than buildings age, and thus buildings must adapt to that change over the lifespan of the building

(b) there are two reasons a building lives to be more than 100 years old: either the building is historic / well loved enough that we live with a building's warts even though it doesn't meet our needs perfectly (a Parliament building, a church, a house that cannot be modified) OR it is so flexible or easy (cheap) to modify that it can suit many purposes. (A small commercial building that can hold a dentist office or a restaurant or a law office or a nail salon, a house with an extension, a warehouse that can be converted to a modest factory floor, etc)

Buildings that cannot be adapted are torn down and replaced.

The book is excellent, and beautiful, and I recommend a physical copy to everyone.

But wouldn't that be an apples to oranges comparison because shutters are fully opaque while curtains are only partially opaque?

I would also expect outer shutters to insulate the window a little bit and thus limit the heat loss no?

Building Science Fight Club (I follow on IG. There's also a website.) has made me skeptical about these kinds of articles. There's a ton of nuance to doing construction correctly for the particular environment one is building in.

Please build it somewhere else. We have enough eyesores in London, don't need another one. Also, based on evidence, houses that last ~1000 years are typically built from stone (see Italy, South of France, Spain, Greece, Portugal) with easily replaceable wooden roof, ceilings.

It's funny - I grew up in a country with the same mentality as in the UK. But I've now come around a bit more toward the American approach: I still see the merit in preserving history but besides that, what is a good argument for constructing a house to last for a very long time? See, whenever you buy an older house and start renovating it, more often than not you start running into unexpected things that need to be updated. Partly because the original construction may have been especially shoddy (think post-war years), but even for houses that are younger than that, changes in the building code often require updates to the building.

But then, why did the code change in the first place? Some cynics will say "so that they can keep making money" but most of the times it is to synchronize with changes that have happened all around is, including the development of new materials, gained knowledge about the impact of natural factors (not only in earth quake regions), and - in our generation - increased expectations regarding energy consumption (insulation).

All the old houses that do not undergo renovation are way out of sync with modern considerations that manifest themselves in any current building code. So why not tear down a house after 100 years and build a new one from scratch? That process is, of course, quite a bit simpler for the more light-weight wooden houses in North America.

A lot of the construction snobism in Europe against American construction standards is unfounded. As far as residential homes are concerned, I don't believe that there are many advantages of brick constructions over wooden framing besides better soundproofing for most intents and purposes.

Of course, one important thing to consider in this discussion is the availability of land: in North America, outside of the big cities, there is still plenty of land available for building new building while Old Europe is already pretty tightly built up. A lot of the land is in private hands and often unlikely to be turned into lots. Plus, for North America with its car-centric developments, it's easier to find usable unoccupied land that will not force you into crazy long commutes. This is more difficult in some parts of Europe, where the ratio of people to square foot of land is much higher.