Is the brick actually holding up the building? In many modern buildings, it's just a veneer, about 1cm thick. The steelwork holds it up. The new Box.net HQ in Redwood City looks like a brick building, but it's not; it's steel and concrete with about 1cm of brick on the outside. There's some nice work being done with brick today.[1] Some of this is gentrification, built to fit in with existing brick buildings, or to i…
Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
231–240 of 282 posts
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#232Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
To chime in, even in places where people are willing to pay a premium for construction materials and architecture (like in sismic areas) there is numerous cases of the builder cheaping out and osometimes illegally trying to get away with fewer material. The last months there was again a case of a building constructor using less structural elements than it was legally required to, also violating the number specified i…
It seems like one of those cascading series of perverse incentives up and down the value chain. The subcontractors want to cut corners with the contractor. The contractor wants to cut corners with the developer. The developer wants to cut corners on the project in general, passing the headache onto the buyer at some point after the eventual sale. Almost no one in this mess has incentives aligned with doing things cor…
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#234The quality of modern construction (not necessarily brick) is a big pet peeve of mine and something I keep looking for answers. The way I see it, some time right after WWII, people in US suddenly decided to live in a poorly built and ugly looking dwellings regardless of their income level. It is especially easy to see when looking at NYC buildings, some rentals are even explicitly advertized as "pre-war". Examples of…
>This is clearly not a cost issue Whenever something is done cheaply and it looks like it's not a cost issue because it's only miniscule part of the total cost of the product, it's usually actually is a cost issue. The buyer of the final product might not mind spending a little extra to have that one thing done a little better, but for the supplier of the sub-sub-contractor whose entire profit comes from doing that o…
> The most reliable engines came from Honda, with a failure rate of just 1 in 344, with Toyota in second (1 in 171) and, maintaining some honour for the German brands, Mercedes in third (1 in 119).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9815860/German-cars...
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Portland, Oregon, there are whole neighborhoods of 80-90% buildings from the 1880s through the 1930s. There still may be some survivorship bias on a whole-neighborhood level since those were mostly the middle-class areas with higher building quality. But if you compare those buildings to those built recently for the middle-class market, the craftsmanship is obviously different. And urban buildings for wealthy peop…
The craftsmanship is obviously different, but is it better? I hear the argument that modern houses are all going to be just awful in a few decades. Yet I heard the same argument in the 70's and 80's, and those houses seem to be aging just fine (aesthetic choices aside). A stick built house built in 1970 is 45 years old at this point! Today's track houses have MUCH improved insulation, much stronger moisture barriers,…
When I was living in London a couple of years ago my house there was a former council house built in the 70s - so it was built to be as cheap as possible. Other than being tiny and having thin drywall everything else was fine.
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the expensive end is even better than (and more expensive than) the best of the best was 20 years ago I'm not sure about this part, unless you are very careful in what you're shopping for, and knowledgeable about it. One Achilles heel of a lot of current appliances is that there are now circuit boards everywhere, which are a common point of premature failure. If the computerized part of your appliance fails (due to…
You couldn't buy a washing machine 20 years ago that was anywhere near as energy efficient, kind to your clothes, could figure out the right amount of detergent or softener to use, or had features like remote operation so your clothes don't sit damp all day. Durability is not the only mark of quality.
...my dad's top-end washing machine bought 25 years ago is still going strong, working without a hitch. Had simple maintenance once. All the while I'm about to get my third model in 14 years.
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you know that energy efficients often means using motors with less Watt so that e.g. your washing machine will take longer to complete the washing cycle and with less hot water. The same with vacuum cleaners, eletronic kettles, etc. Eletro motors aren't a new invention, even brushless motors are there for some decades. Not every energy saving idea is a good idea. Often it's better to buy a few photovoltaic pan…
In published tests, cleaning ability is not correlated at all to power over a certain level. Most 2000W cleaners are older models, since research and development has focused on energy efficiency for the past decade, so they are even likely to be worse. I could easily construct a 10 kW model for you, and it's going to run very hot. (There was this EU introduced power cap for domestic vacuum cleaners the other year, ac…
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're on the right track but your comparison fails to take into account the productivity of the bricklayer. A good bricklayer today ought to be more productive than an 1891 bricklayer, because he has motorized mixers, vehicles to move bricks to the right place, laser lines to level his rows, etc. Even in a craft that seems legendarily nontechnical, you have to give some credit to technological advancement. B…
You couldn't possibly hire the bricklayer directly today. The bricklayer would be hired as a subcontractor by the general contractor who would apply a surcharge.
So finally, who is to blame, when the window is not even? The builder? No! He did nothing. The windowing subcontractor?? Technical yes, but practical he just used hired workers. Some times ago, it was possible to say: Here we have a good company, with good reputation, the workers are proud to work for it ... Today, it is just a blaming game -- and when one of the subcontractors is sued because of bad work, they file bankruptcy, because there is also no financial basis -- the companies are just empty shells.
What also adds up to this is, that on every level of this game, only the price of the service is evaluated today -- not the quality. I also saw cases, where the builder company was a big one with great reputation, but the execution was awful! The reason: Bad contractors.
Another reason in my country is, that the requirements for workers in the building sector have been deliberately drastically lowered by the government, to make way for even cheaper work.
Today, (at least in my country) one that wants a house for his family to be build, has no means to decide, if the company will succeed and make a good house or will build a horror house. In most cases, there will be several topics where the execution was bad or really bad and you can call yourself lucky, when the additional costs after the house was finalized are moderate.
There are some really bad cases, where families thought the house would be ready in time and canceled their rent-flat just to be on the streets afterwards, because their house was not ready even months after the deadline. Some where never finished.
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is clearly not a cost issue Whenever something is done cheaply and it looks like it's not a cost issue because it's only miniscule part of the total cost of the product, it's usually actually is a cost issue. The buyer of the final product might not mind spending a little extra to have that one thing done a little better, but for the supplier of the sub-sub-contractor whose entire profit comes from doing that o…
But the Toyota vs Mercedes-Benz is a poor comparison > The most reliable engines came from Honda, with a failure rate of just 1 in 344, with Toyota in second (1 in 171) and, maintaining some honour for the German brands, Mercedes in third (1 in 119). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9815860/German-cars...
Re: Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, replacing the circuit board on a washing machine is pretty common and easy.
I've only tried once, but I wasn't able to find anyone who could do that when mine died. It's possible the repair people I tried were just not knowledgeable, but they claimed you can't get those kinds of parts for older discontinued models (it was somewhere around 8-9 years old at the time it got knocked out by a lightning storm, while a washing machine mechanically should last ~15-20 years). I do know someone whose…