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In Europe we have plenty of old buildings. The good ones (i.e. made by very wealthy people) tend to be decent, with a skew towards huge living rooms but tiny rooms. The cheaper ones are a mess to mantain: cold in winter, hot in summer, expensive to renovate (it could be more expensive to renovate than to build a new one), bad to no isolation, in my region terribly humid, usually too dark with minuscule windows for modern standards.

With roman buildings that last 2000 thousand years we are looking at survivor bias. Near me there are some roman ruins from a (cheap and small) public bath that are barely distiguishable from a pile of bricks. The are some nearby pre-roman ruins in better shape.

by modo_mario14 hours ago|

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>cold in winter >in my region terribly humid

You need to actually reduce draft a bit (often old houses like mine tend to accumulate flaws that the elderly living there before didn't fix anymore.) and use a heating sources that matches.

Having a fireplace is fine. It could overheat the house whilst also keeping air dryer and it's essentially renewable (compared to the alternatives and houses made of more plastic insulation than anything else) if you don't mind air quality dip in winter.

That said i can see how that's no longer an option in places that have drastically increased their population

by jaapz9 hours ago|

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Fireplace is extremely inefficient, and really bad for both your (exhaust fumes get into the room anyway), and your neighbors (the smoke doesn't just dissappear) health, though.

I love the heat and smell of a good fire as much as the next guy, I'm just not sure it's worth the risk of cancer and respiratory diseases.

by AngryData4 hours ago|

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If efficiency is important, like if you are using wood for primary heat, you should at a minimum be using a sealed box stove which should be pretty efficient and have little to no smoke escaping.

Alternatly you could just use an outdoor stove that merely heat exchanges to the inside.

by wbl15 hours ago|

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There are exactly 3 old buildings in Warsaw thanks to the Germans. Brutalism exists because a generation who grew up in rubble wanted solidity.

by ascorbic15 hours ago|

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They weren't torn down because there was better technology available. They were torn down because they were falling apart, or were no longer meeting the needs in that location. I love old buildings – my house is 250 years old – but there's no denying that generally they are less suited to current needs than newer buildings.

by benj11111 hours ago|

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Older buildings are generally more flexible though.

In the UK, within living memory electricity has become widely available, TV has, gas, internet etc etc. and yet we still build houses without the assumption that some cable isn't going to be modified in the wall some how.

There's fairly modern houses that didnt have the 2 courses of brick added to the loft to allow 300mm of insulation to be installed.

We are now building houses with gas boilers, knowing that they will have to be swapped out probably before the life of the boiler runs out. And I bet the radiators and piping aren't sized to make that possible. That the circuit isn't sized for that.

Yes none of this is easier in a 250 year old house, but it isn't harder and 250 year old houses hadn't really changed appreciably for a few centuries so it isn't as if there would be an expectation that you would be installing new things in the wall every decade.

by matheusmoreira10 hours ago|

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Those are houses though, private property. Not government infrastructure.