Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent? I mean I agree it would be a miserable place to shelter-in-place for COVID, but with COVID in the rear-view mirror for the vaccinated, I'm not sure it's a major concern.
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
It's easy to find better explanations with a quick search, but the general idea is that as habitats change, animals will move toward the poles and come into contact with other species that they historically haven't, creating lots of new opportunities for diseases to jump between species and mutate and do all the things they love to do.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
Please elaborate on how that's responsive to my comment. Again, not really sure a possible 2 year pandemic is especially significant in the 50 year design life of a building. Even if it sits empty for 4% of its life with 100% probability (generous), you still get 96% (48 years) of use out of it.
First, you take an arbitrary probability number that depends on man-made models that are likely much more wrong than right. We've had a lot of hundred- or thousand-year events in the last two decades.
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
You can’t just apply extreme value theory to spectacular events because it supports your argument. Yes, there was a hundred years between the 1918 influenza outbreak and Covid. No, that doesn’t mean you can say that pandemics probabilistically occur once in a hundred years. The world is changing at an extraordinary pace, populations are exploding, humans and animals interact more than ever, and international travel is trivial.
Covid is not going away. Get your vaccine and move on with your life. In another year nobody will even remember the damn thing (at least for most places… some don’t seem to want to let this go).
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
> Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent?
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.