> My friend just needed to redo the foundation on his house. He could have spent 10-100x what he needed to and installed a reinforced concrete foundation with deep steel pylons. But that would have been a waste of his money when wooden peirs works just as well for all his intents & purposes.

Is your friend Grady from Practical Engineering? His latest episode talks about foundations and replacing the old wooden piers holding up his house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8

Also reminds me of the classic phrase "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

> The house will be torn down if it's in a city

The world is varied, it's not just a copycat of the terrible design affecting US cities.

One example? I live in Venice, Italy. The city is 1,600 years old. Most houses and palazzos are at least 400 years old; a big chunk of them is at least 600-700 years old. No one is going to tear down these places. And no, rising sea levels will not destroy Venice (see the MOSE dam [0], which is working, despite the big corruption scandals).

Besides Venice, which I'd agree it's a rather unique place, many other places in the world consist of small/medium towns, not huge megalopolis where a small house will be tore down to make space for a skyscraper.

Finally: I'd love to build a house that will last 1,000 years. Even if my great-great-great-grandkids will not be around to see it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mose

> Finally: I'd love to build a house that will last 1,000 years. Even if my great-great-great-grandkids will not be around to see it.

I mean yeah, in the abstract I think anyone would agree. I would also love to be able to build a 1000 year house. But it costs a tremendous amount of money, and there are things higher on my priority list than the status of a structure 900 years after my death. Until you fork up the cash for it, my point stands.

>The second problem is making sure people want to maintain the structure for 1000 years, or at least not tear it down. I don't think this is as hard as the other comentors are saying, though. Just don't build the house in a city.

I live in about a 200 year old house but it has been extensively reworked over its lifetime including by me. And given that it's on a nice piece of exurban property it's hardly a stretch to imagine someone in that time deciding a teardown just made more sense than all the upgrades that have taken place over that period. Just as one example it presumably didn't have indoor plumbing when the first part of the house was built.

I grew up in a 600 year old house. That isn't particularly unusual in the part of the UK I was born in. The village church is 1200 years old. There's a chapel not too far away that dates from around 600 AD.

We're not going to change it much. We fix it when it breaks.

Most of North America (or at least, the bits I've visited) seems to be fixated with new buildings of sometimes questionable construction standards, and they tend to get replaced fairly regularly. One of my Canadian friends told me that "People prefer to live in new houses". Here, the opposite is much more common.

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.

A house, or any other infrastructure. IMHO a big factor in America's capacity for reinvention and renewal is not being saddled with infrastructure designed to last for centuries. Disclose: I live and work in England, love old buildings and own a 19th Century home made from Malvern Stone.

What do you get with new houses? Well, you get wiring, with outlets conveniently located. You get modern plumbing. You ought to get good insulation.

You may not get good design, you may get shoddy construction, true.

This is all true (although not all old houses are poorly insulated -- the ~60 cm of thatch and wattle and daub construction also is surprisingly good at insulation. It even comes complete with Tudor-era built in biomass heating!).

I think a lot of the bad press that goes on about new builds in the UK at least at the moment are due to "chicken coop Barrett Homes", i.e. a large developer building the largest number of houses possible with the cheapest construction method. There are horror stories in the tabloid press of people buying houses from ~2000 that are starting to have major structural problems, or have other major flaws. The rooms are meaner in size and there is a lot of resentment about developers making ~£300k profit on each property (and building ~200 of them at a go).

Obviously, there's a massive selection / survival bias here. Bad homes are more likely to be demolished. Good homes are more likely to survive.

There's a bit of a question about how much of the house is actually left from 200 years ago.

My house was technically built in 1897 but was moved in the 1920s on to a new foundation and we basically knocked the entire thing down and rebuilt it a few years ago after we bought it. Now we're adding to it again. It shares some of the DNA of that house from 1897 but basically none of the parts anymore and is much nicer looking whilst keeping the old timey style.

Mentioned earlier in the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Probably not much.

My contractor for a couple of big renovations I did figured that the 4x4-ish posts on the first floor were probably original along with at least some of the subflooring (about half of which I redid because it was collapsing). We think there was a substantial addition (probably including a second floor) around 1900. That's when the demolished barn on the now adjacent property dated to.

The house I grew up in was similar. It dated to either the 1700s or possibly even late 1600s. But the original house was just two rooms (two stories) built into the side of a hill.

a good society is one where old men plant trees who’s shade they’ll never sit in

You and your grandchildren are only so relevant.

I for one adore walking around built up areas where the original builders thought further than that. There is beauty in solid houses. They carry history. An old part of town tells so many stories. They embed culture and provide some degree of continuity.

The initial cost is higher. But your grandchildren can sell it. Many generations can profit from an existing building. Floor plans can be adjusted to some degree and modern comforts added at any time.

A flimsy plywood house built to be replaced in 15 years is an expensive tent. It is nothing.

Yeah, unless I' rich and thinking about building my family somewhere, I wouldn't even touch this idea. And even I do, I'll probably purchase an old, but good-standing building and heavily renovate it. Modern technology also provides means to strengthen the foundation and weight-bearing part of the building.

The money part of this treatise is the steel frame, right? As they stated, things like warehouses and other buildings get reused because the steel frame is still useful regardless of the other stuff.

The foundation actually seems to be a danger point. I don't know much about pylons/stilts for foundations, but it would seem a better plan because you can adjust those for the life of the structure, can't you? And the design called for a lifted first floor/crawlspace anyway.

And that would enable a basement.

American cities rebuild everything. There's at a minimum 500 year houses and buildings in most European bustling cities.

Which means, I guess, that the structure and its surrounding structures should be integrated and beautiful.

> The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it.

Isn't that merely a matter of establishing a foundation/trust fund arrangement with the explicit purpose of maintaining the building? Of course you need enough capital so that it can sustain itself indefinitely through low-risk investments, but that is just the nature of the game.

I grew up in a semi rural area. In the more rural area it was not uncommon to have on old farmhouse rotting and a new house next to it.

At some point those folks wanted a new house and presumably the cost of what they wanted to remodel was close enough to new that they built news.

The available space that you note can also facilitate just building a new house.

I live in an old farmhouse on some nice land. I've done fairly extensive renovations after obviously no money being put into the house for a good fifty years. And it works for me.

It's also "quirky" in a lot of ways including a basement that still tends to get wet and having one small bathroom and no way to easily add another one. I can imagine a lot of potential buyers saying "Love the location but the house has got to go." (The person I bought the house from actually bought the property for the land. He built a new much larger house on one of the two plots he subdivided from the original property.)

I don't think anything 'modern' is needed.

There are Roman building still standing and many of those which no longer are are so because they were abandoned and/or 'recycled'. Buildings like for instance Notre Dame de Paris are 800+ years old.

A thick stone structure seems to do the job fine.

Its easy to overlook the constant maintenance and repair these historical buildings get. Thick stone buildings are definitely sturdy, but I still maintain that modern technology makes it significantly easier to make a 1000 year building.