Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?

It wouldn't be at all surprising to see a home built with such 'toy' materials require nothing more than some stucco repair and drywall patching, with a brick house right next door literally falling apart.

I realize not every region has earthquakes to worry about, but it is a factor in some areas.

Nope, that's exactly it - it's cheaper and faster for the builder to frame a house small and simply. They've found that people spend money for houses based on location, size, and the visible stuff (like nice paint jobs and shiny appliances). They could spend twice as long as 40% more in materials and the home would sell for 2% more - not worth their time.

http://timber.ce.wsu.edu/Resources/papers/4-3-2.pdf

However, if you're not in an earthquake-prone area... then I agree I'd prefer to have a more solid construction.

> 10ft ceilings

These were no longer necessary once air conditioning was invented. However high ceilings and window awnings are more energy efficient and therefore should probably make a comeback.

1. Labor specialization, meaning less of the home-buying market is savvy enough in the "handyman" sense to tell the difference. 2. A move away from building the thing you're going to own, and building things that other people will buy later. 3. Minimum standards for housing construction.

The third needs to be explained more - instead of aiming towards "building a good home", the construction industry aims to build the cheapest thing that they are legally allowed to sell (ie, meets building codes). While building codes do mean that there's a quality floor, competitive pressure means that nobody can consistently exceed the floor without getting out-competed by people who aim to barely meet it.

I collect antique espresso machines. Some of these are highly sought after because they use big, heavy, high quality components: big brass boilers, copper piping, stainless steel enclosures and big brass groupheads. Compare that with many flimsy, plastic machines today (which rarely last more than a couple years), and it's no wonder there is a market for these older machines.

You could extend this to a lot of other things. Pre-war and post-war America look way more than five years apart.

The basic framing of houses is not that much different.

Windows if anything are too big, not too small! My city apartment has floor to ceiling windows which are difficult for window treatments. Suburban homes can have huge two-story family rooms.

Noise is more a problem from adjoining units. Outside noise is sealed out quite well thanks to double-pane windows.

Overall new construction is of quite high quality when it comes to what's important. New homes have smoke detectors, fire sprinklers, better electrical systems, more durable cladding on the outside, better insulation, more bathrooms, and air conditioning. As someone who has seen both old and new homes and has considered living in both, I do not get the nostalgia for old homes. Most home buyers around here agree as they are gutting old homes and renovating them, not living in them as is. I considered living in old homes, but only because they are in good locations. Their oldness in and of itself offered no benefits.

That's no explanation for situation in the article, of course. One would expect that structural elements of large, dramatic investments of that sort would take proper care to last. But drywall-on-sticks is an economic reality that makes sense.

If you go into a modern home, you see sheet drywall with tons of shitty looking texture all over it to hide the deep imperfections with the hanging of the drywall, and nary a wood detail to be found.

It's absurd that we've taken these woefully cheaper home construction standards with the prices of housing.

We stopped living in walkable villages and cities and started living in motorway dependant sprawling suburbs. Our buildings got uglier. Our built environment got worse even as we got richer.

Largely this was a matter of public policy. The Roosevelt administration made new rules to plan new development to promote industry during the Depression and imposed it on banks and local planning boards. Still, there wasn't enough push to get the banks to allow anything to be built. Then after the war, those regulations had been in place for almost fifteen years and nothing had been built in the whole country for 16 years since the Depression began.

So people took the rules as gospel and built using them. The only thing allowed was car dependant sprawl and the car companies -- an enormous political power right after the war -- loved it. So the whole country was redesigned. It still is. And if your community isn't worth loving -- as sprawl isn't -- then it isn't worth building beautiful buildings.

That's why this is now the nation of NIMBYism. People can see that nothing has gotten built here but garbage since 1929 and they don't want more of it. Places like San Francisco are now like jewels and museums since nobody has been allowed to build like that in 86 years and won't be allowed to start tomorrow. The epoch when things could be new and beautiful has passed from living memory.

...in many cases i have seen in NYC, homeowners are economically motivated to "lower" their ceilings (cheaper to heat/cool living space).

I bought and still live in an early century Georgian, and the maintenance costs over the past two decades has been a very real challenge.

If a pipe leaks, if there is a crack in the wall, if/when the floor eventually gets bowed, etc. It is an entirely different, time-consuming and expensive approach to maintaining everything.

For the majority of homeowners, it is clearly and absolutely a cost issue.

I built a few dozen homes and only once had a client request 2x6 construction. I tried to sell it on all the others, citing sturdiness and better insulating properties, but everyone looked at the features it excluded and went for flimsy 2x4 builds.

It gets important if you are a developer building subdivisions of homes. $10k saved on every house is $big profit. 25 home subs is $250k+ savings...very much an issue.

My own house is 2x6, and properly insulated top to bottom. My neighbor's slap job summer cooling bill is not quite double mine. Close to same sqft and same interior ac temp setting.

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 one thing, the "miniscule" part becomes 100% of the cost.

Not only that, but this is only one of many things that could be done more expensively. What if you add better fire resistance, better insulation, more weather resistant paint, more carefully assembled parts, etc. it ends up becoming quite a lot more expensive. It's a bit like the difference between a Mercedes and a Toyota. They both seem to be basically the same, but the Mercedes has slightly more expensive parts scattered all through it like a few dollars spent on fluid dampers on the adjustable seat backs compared to no damping.

This was my thought as well. The modern building is likely just using the brick as veneer, even if it is full-thickness brick. It's likely concrete walls with brick layered over it. The fact that the brickwork is poorly done likely doesn't matter except aesthetically. If all the brick fell off the building would still be standing.

The newer building is indeed ugly, and the brickwork looks cheap and poorly done. But that doesn't mean the technology has declined. It means the technology has advanced to the point that the brick is just ornamental.

See http://www.carsondunlop.com/resources/articles/brick-houses-...

Does this mean there are robot Freemasons in our future?

My analysis doesn't even address brick problems associated with the switch from multi-wythe brick construction to brick veneer over wood framing. (Andres Hall is not a wood-framed building.) Although buildings with brick veneer over wood framing are usually better insulated than old multi-wythe brick buildings, they are frequently plagued by an entirely new category of water entry problems due to flashing errors, clogged air spaces, and missing weep holes. But that's a topic for another article.

In my opinion the reason contemporary brick construction is not up to par with 100 year old brick construction is the same reason contemporary washing machines are not up to the standard of washing machines 100 years ago: The emphasis in making things now is on speed and cheapness, the emphasis 100 years ago was on quality.

The college dorm building was certainly thrown up in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the price with a fraction of the labourers, than the bank building.

The article's author is not wrong. The average 1980's brickwork building is built less well than the average 100 year old building. However, 100 years ago buildings probably were built worse on average than today. Both of those statements can be true at the same time.

Exceptional (by modern standards) material, used in quantities that would be considered excessive even in nice construction these days.

That would imply that there's no issues with the newer design when the article clearly showed where the wrong choices have affected the durability of the building.

And that aesthetics should override competent construction technique is a bad idea, is also a fair criticism.

A lot of UK housing built circa 1900 - 1930 was not well built at all; Building regulations as such hardly existed and there was a lot of trial and error. Buildings did indeed fall down.

I have a theory why it's like this. In 1800's architects we're often painters first. Their day job was to paint portraits and signs and whatever was ordered. There was quite lot of painters around, only few of them made "art" and only the best got to draw buildings. The architect would then work the design together with mason. Civil engineers of the time we're busy building railroads.

Then at the end of the century, photography happened. In hindsight it's called "the crisis of art!". Suddenly architects could no longer apprentice by painting stuff for customers. You needed a school for architecture. The teachers would of course be old architects, who hang out with painters. So they sucked that "we can't sell portraits anymore, let's go crazy!" attitude.

In the 1940's you still had some old school guys. During this time some factory owners still thought that paying an architect was investment. You got a factory that would sell your product, keep your employers happy and make you proud. Here is factory building from that period. http://torshammer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Kabelfabrike...

Now architecture has not been based on anything for century. Or maybe seeping fashion trends of modern art. Most big money people use architect just to "pretty up" the facade of a building as afterthought. If even that. Nobody trusts architect to make anything coherent or beautiful.

At the same time architects need to jump on any opportunity to get some international fame. Because that's the only way you can ever succeed with such career. This breeds eccentricity. Which makes the whole thing worse.

To justify not using and architect, you might word that as "saving money". To be consistent with that, you cut costs in labor and materials. To the point of making actually bad buildings.

Even now we have trouble with people stealing brick buildings. Unused houses are sometimes set ablaze by brick thieves, then later they come in the night and cart off the bricks.

My current house was built in ~1985. The brick quality isn't bad, the walls are much straighter, but the wood is cheaper and the materials thinner and lighter. It might be the case this place will last 100 years, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's a middle market house, for the time, not cheap but not high end.

While survivor bias is important, where I live (London) the main reason houses from 100 years ago aren't around now is simply the war. The stuff from then that's still about - including "cheap" factories and other stuff - is now wildly fashionable and still well-built. Stuff built in the 50s was laughably awful and a lot is gone, stuff from 60s and 70s is going the same way. There are definitely other things going on.

The same applies to "every generation thinks the next generation is horrible". That may or may not be true, but sometimes there are horrible generations.

If anything, a whole bunch of perfectly decent old buildings have been torn down. Because they were no longer of any use (prolonged vacancy is the worst for any building), not because they were falling apart.

Somewhat of a tangent. Good architecture has three properties: it's useful, it's robust, and it's beautiful. That's a three-legged stool from antiquity, and I firmly believe architects and builders sat on it for centuries. Modernism was an ideological project that discarded two of these legs: only utility was important. the pursuit of beauty was either for old-regime bourgeois or for unenlightened proles, and robustness was not all that necessary for the beancounters anyway, eternity is not a concept for the godless machine age.

Is is also fairly recent that the architect needed to take on all aspects of architecture. For example, architecture training was often taught in the fine arts faculties. The structural issues then were then taken on by the master-builder. It worked, the latter had a wealth of experiential knowledge, an architect didn't need to tell him how to frame a window, or ensure water didn't drip along the wall. The architect becoming first a licensed professional in need to defend his title, then some sort of artist willing a new pristine creation in the world, claimed more and more roles. Now every detail needs to be in the plan almost, less room for correction by skilled craftsmen (who also are thinning out..).

Every component in a building today save plumbling, windows and electric is inferior to its complement in 1915. The bricks are of lower quality (to the point there is a thriving market for used bricks), the wood is garbage, and quality of labor has shifted from skilled craftsmanship to glorified assembly work.

My home was built in 1927 as a cheap starter home (upstairs was delivered unfinished for buildout when the owners had kids). It's build quality today would only be seen in a custom home with a very wealthy/particular owner and cost a minimum of $750k. (Current value of my home is around $250k)

  If there is a fire the house is gone because the floor 
  joists will be ruined by the water to put the fire out.

The only information I can find doesn't seem to agree with this, although it doesn't specifically prove otherwise: www.woodbywy.com/document/tb-213

Yeah, the dorm in the linked article is totally better than that building. So while there are good buildings from that era, let's not kid ourselves, there were also a lot of horrible buildings that are rightfully no longer around. I would be willing to bet that the average quality of new construction is better now than it was then. If nothing else, the pervasive use of aluminum/vinyl siding and tar-asphalt shingle roofs yields buildings that better withstand the elements that old-style painted wood.

That contrasts with the article's 1891 example of a building where the brickwork was both structural and decorative, requiring maximum attention to detail.

Or read just the the text here:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/7eea331af1ff2fe...

Or an alternate theory: bank owners used to be local businesspeople, who would have been (rightly) embarrassed and ashamed to erect a shoddy and short-lived structure in their hometown. Now banks are at least regional, if not national or global, and care more about saving a few pennies for shareholders than they do about the communities they inhabit.

Combine this with the fact that consumers and "fellow citizens" don't give a crap about good buildings and good urbanism, and here we are with crackerbox drivethrough shite that nobody gives a damn about because it'll be bulldozed in 30 years, after a brief stint as a laser tag venue.

It's houses that seem to go downhill. But not single family houses, only bigger buildings.

There was a structural brick house that remained an eyesore in a DC neighborhood for years after a car accident demolished part of its cylindrical masonry wall (picture a round castle tower). The owner gave the reason that the masonry skills to construct this type of feature were not something easily found, and had been a sort of lost art, and they had been looking for a long time before finally getting it repaired.