The Price of Saving Grand Central Station

GCT has never had a coal fired train in it - its always been an electric only station, Penn is the same.

The hand of one of the Gemini twins?

It's more obvious with larger structures. Reinforced concrete has a finite and relatively short lifetime. 300 years sounds like a very long time, but a significant fraction of 300 year old buildings are still around, we have such a large fraction of newer structures in large part because the worlds population is vastly larger today.

At the smaller scale you see things like complex roof lines that are very hard to maintain.

Have you ever lived in an older city?

My first apartment in my city was built in 1910, and it was one of the newer buildings in that neighborhood. Even cheap railroad flats controlled by slumlords for 50 years are in better shape than the crap built in the early 90s.

The fatal flaw of older frame houses is balloon frames, which burned many down.

Growing up in the country, 100-150 year old farmhouses were common. I’m personally acquainted with 1 house and 3 barns built in the Dutch colonial period.

IMO, most things built now except for custom homes and some commercial structures will be a pile of junk in 100 years. The wood sucks, the vinyl sucks and the foundations are weak. Scaled up developments are built to maximize tax benefits, period.

Sure there is some survivorship bias, but the cheap mass housing of the Victorian or Edwardian eras are often still around. Not just from the famous Victorian philanthropist industrialists (Cadbury, Lever brothers, Rowntree, Titus Salt etc) with their model villages for workers, but even the cheap stuff built for the collieries and mills, or early social housing. The social housing of the 1930s have, thanks to their sell off, often become the desirable estates of today. Of course there's also been a fair amount of German bombing and slum clearing that's thinned out the older stock.

There's some key differences in how things are built that mean there will be precious few 1970s and 2010s homes surviving for 300 years.

Victorian: Single or rarely double skin brick for most internal walls. Until the 70s or 80s breeze block was an acceptable cheaper alternative. Resiliant against a dozen generations hanging pictures, making adjustments to rooms and features, hanging flat screen tvs etc. Adds significant natural sound proofing. Roofs built with large scale carpentry and joints. Remove every nail and bolt and the roof will still be gale and rain proof. My current house doesn't seem to ever have had any nails or bolts in the roof space. The 30s house I used to have seemed to have just a few token ones. Slate and small tile (shingles in the US?) should last around a century and be an easy replacement. Some of the cast iron gutters and rain goods will be shot after a century, but plastic often needs replacing after 30.

Crucially the foundations are built, often providing a handy cellar, rather than being a weak pour of a foot or two of concrete.

Sometimes comes with a downside. One house, in Manchester, was built with engineering brick. Even the internal walls. So damn tough it took time to get a drill or angle grinder into it let alone bang a nail in for a picture. :)

New: Internal frame and plasterboard walls, sometimes between houses meaning limited hanging of tvs and pictures, and adjustments even for the first generation of occupants. 300 years of home improvements and decoration will not work here. Listen in on the neighbours with ease, even when you'd rather not. Roofs built from pre-assembled trusses. Lose the ironwork from age or rust and the whole roof will be on the brink of collapse as the steel joints are structural. Not amenable to loft extensions, storage or even surviving the decay that frequently affects the eaves (You can't replace the rotted part as easily as they're now part of the structure). The modern style of large tile and truss means roofs are much shorter lived (I'm told around 40 years).

Now, if only there were some houses being built using pre-war methods and strength of materials with current levels of insulation, renewables and electricals we'd be golden for the future. :)

The problem is weathering. Weathered stone looks much the same as current stone; weathered concrete looks absolutely horrid. The Brutalist buildings that were all concrete have aged very poorly, with water and rust stains and moss present.

You'd also need someone to actually make custom molds for every project; if you have nobody willing to do it at a reasonable price for stone, what makes you think they'll do it making molds?

Plaster molds have been used to mimic this effect, but mostly it looks very bad and is used for things like tacky McMansions.

Right now, the only material that works and looks good for the purpose is stone. There is a reason why stone countertops have remained a central piece of home furnishing throughout the years.

The question is what material you'd use. Plaster looks cheap. Concrete doesn't age well in the elements. Steel doesn't have that look.

I'm not saying build entirely stone structures; no one has done this for centuries. But you do need a stone mason to do the kind of facade detail work you'd see on, say, the Empire State Building.