In 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90°
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"During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago. Streets, sidewalks, and buildings were physically raised on jackscrews."
I once lived in a building that connected to the pedway, so I was able to dress in shorts and a T-shirt in a Chicago winter, navigate underground through the pedway to the Blue Line, then take the Blue Line to O'Hare for a flight to Tampa.
The train part was a bit chilly, but it was better than having to drag a winter coat with me on the plane.
In case anybody was wondering - the important part was that it was moved to an adjacent lot (to clear space for a new building) and happened to be rotated as part of that process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Building_(Indianapolis)
For ~30 years, then they tore it down anyways.
Current skyscrapers are designed for a minimum 100-year lifespan.
/Source: I actually asked a skyscraper architect this question once.
But not everybody built like that, there are also many examples of elegance and material economy. Roman stuff spans the gamut from 'wasteful' to 'optimal'.
Castles were usually built to deal with attackers so likely far strongly built than they would have been otherwise.
This is what always really impresses me about old churches, they go straight up to 100+ meters and it's just square cut stones piled on top of each other lined up with plumb bobs and wires, standing true for 100's of years. Imagine the feat of engineering that the foundation comprises for a building like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin%27s_Cathedral,_Utre...
And note the survivorship bias. The stuff that was "not quite enough strength to be sufficient"-- or even "just barely sufficient" was removed by time.
Not even then. 30 years would be ridiculous. Even in the US, all the houses in my area (west coast, so nothing is all that old) back to the late 1800s are still being used as residential housing. Renovated, of course, probably several times, but the bones are the same.
My mother still lives in the house I was raised in, and it's largely original in fundamental construction -- built in 1914. Small renovations over the years, but when she passes the house will undoubtedly be completely gutted to the studs and redone. Gone will be the lathe & plaster, but on the bright side the electric wiring will be modern as well as the plumbing, HVAC ducting, insulation, etc.
But even so, that house was primarily built from 2x4. Even at two stories with a basement. My own first house, by comparison, was built in 1964 and it's like a tank. Exterior walls were 2x6 by then, though dead-air w/foil was still the predominant insulation method. But the wood ... the wood ... was exquisite. It was not an expensive house by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it was constructed with wood you just flat out can't get today. Hardwood floors not because they were upscale, but because that's what all the houses got. The studs in the walls are actually 2x4 and so dense it's hard to drive nails into them without bending. I did a little renovation and got to compare an original stud to a new one I had bought and it was incredible how different they are. The exterior siding was old growth cedar that you can't get today. In some ways, for wood construction, I'd say that era was the peak.
We may surpass it in some ways now, but only because we've fallen back on technology to do it. Instead of simple wood beams, the second floor above my current house's garage is held up by an enormous glulam beam that spans 40 feet. Wasn't really practical before glulam to do that with wood in residential construction.
I've seen lately that nobody tears down the 60s era ranch houses around here when they want to backfill an area. They move the house onto a new foundation and then renovate it and modernize the exterior looks so it fits in.
That’s fascinating. I wonder how they interpret “minimum”. Do they try to just cross that threshold or overshoot by a lot?
In 1930 the Indiana Bell Telephone Building was rotated 90 degrees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26534718 - March 2021 (2 comments)
Indiana Bell Building Move (Of 1930) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530546 - March 2021 (9 comments)
Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468788 - Nov 2019 (24 comments)
Rotating the Indiana Bell Building (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901264 - Sept 2019 (5 comments)
It feels like everything is so hamstrung and bottlenecked today by comparison.
Today, we have so much experience with building things, as if every invoice is ready to be sent to order every piece of a building, that we don’t have experience with repairing.
Moreover, insurances tell us that a desk or a telecom switch devaluates 25% per year, so we value the existing furnished building to basically scrap value after 5 years. But insurances evaluate at the resale price. But an equipment in-place and working has at least 90% of its purchase value for 3-10 years, if not 125% of its purchase value, since it would cost a lot of maintenance to scrap and re-plug a new one.
If insurances/accounting rules admitted that equipments are worth 90% of their purchase price for 3 years, we would put more value into repairing things. Our replacement culture is rooted in the way we perform accounting.
I've given serious thought to not having internet at home, because I grew up and spent nearly half my adult life without it, and it sure sure seems that I got more done in those days.
I don't think people quite understand all the fifth oder effects and dependencies that are at best ignored, at worst totally unknown.
In the 20th century, new building materials was one of the new technologies of the day so it makes sense that a lot of time and energy was spent doing things related to buildings/construction. The end of the 20th century and the 21st are dominated by technology and software being the growing method of productivity. Plus now we have software and math that (probably) shows moving a building 90 degrees is going to cause 10 new problems we didn't even consider in the 20th century.
It's all about opportunity cost. In the 20th century we built a ton of buildings that stored and manipulated giant volumes of paper documents and physical files. Now we have databases and virtual filesystems so we don't need giant clerk offices or document storage buildings. Giant data-center buildings might be the most apt comparison on some level.
I guess in a way we perform majestically-large relocations of digital storage buildings all the time now, which as you put it is roughly equivalent.
It's also related to "The pinnacle of {technology} happened right as it was superseded by {other technology}". (Well, duh. People stopped trying to improve {technology}, so no improvements happened.)
“In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).”
It's a choice.
I agree but I think they will settle down to a similar place in the coming decades.
1) "What we have to lose"
2) "What we have to gain"
You'll make more money selling 10 humidifiers to a typical consumer over a 20 year span at $40-$60 each, than what you could ever max them out on for one humidifier that will last that full 20 years. If you're the business in question, it's illogical to pursue any other path unless you're making a conscious choice to give up profit to specifically build something of vastly superior quality.
It's obviously not because we can't do it. The great majority of consumers won't pay for it and or can't afford it.
It's cheap-rotational-product-as-a-service. Most consumers don't have the purchasing power to buy a $500 humidifier (and or don't want to save up to do so), and they want to allocate their money elsewhere at a given time, so the $39.95 plastic cheap humidifier that'll last 2-3 years wins every time (that way they can buy 10-12 things that last a few years for $40 instead of one per year for a decade).
Or put another way, it's payday loan consumerism.
The logic is that customers will prefer your product and you'll take market share from competitors.
But that logic only works if you're small. If you have 2% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 5% of the market, you do it. If you have 30% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 33% of the market, at the cost of having a longer interval between repeat business, eh.
So the real problem is that we have too much consolidation and vertical integration. It's too hard to start a new company that goes from zero to 5% of the market in the first year by making a better product. So that's not what happens anymore.
And it's in the interest of the consolidated incumbents to sell you a new device every three years, not to sell you a 20% more expensive device that lasts for decades.
Although I wonder if an upstart couldn't still disrupt this in some markets. The Korean automakers took a big chunk of the market from out of nowhere by offering triple the usual powertrain warranties. What happens if you design a washing machine to last for decades and sell it with a 30 year warranty?
It's impossible for a consumer to asses the "quality" of an item at the time of purchase. We infer quality from reputation, price, and warranty, but there's no direct measure of it available. There's barely even a definition of quality. Even if we ignore the metaphysical aspects of quality, we are left with messy problem.
Price correlates to quality only in as much as the least expensive thing is most likely to be the worse thing, but imagine if we used price as our only measure of quality? The strategy people would arrive at is to charge the most for the least-- which is pretty much where we are now already.
This incentivizes products that work great for a little bit-- which is again exactly where we are now.
My point is only that we've arrived at a crappy capitalism stalemate. I'd love to make high quality products for high quality people, but, that market isn't out there due to... human nature.
On the other hand, since it’s now so cheap to produce stuff, there’s no real reason to make it last longer any more.
I also feel like the marginal cost of labor is much lower now with everything being machined. If labor costs $1000 it’s easy to justify $200 in materials. If labor is $10, not so much.
I feel as if I'm always swimming up a river to get things done, "well so-and-so wouldn't approve", "what about XXXX", "YYYY wont be ready until March, etc. etc."
People used to grow up needing to milk the cows every day. There wasn't time to waste, get going and get it done. Regulations were more minimal and everything was contractual.
Today, you need permits to change a kitchen sink, you'll get a ticket for not wearing a seat belt, etc. etc.
We used to call those "salmon days." You spend all day swimming against the current, only to get screwed in the end.
Yep. The downtowns of entire cities were elevated dozens of feet. Rivers were reversed. Tunnels were blasted through mountains because it was the most direct route, initial cost be damned.
In the 20th century, renumbering the addresses of an entire city was so inconsequential that in some places it happened multiple times. Today, that could never happen. People just don't have the will to do anything big anymore, unless there's a buck in it.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens’ blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." — Daniel Burnham (1846-1912)
... But we are still doing this, today. Though not excactly by hand-crank.
I believe most of our modern electrical/clinical/construction/etc. standards have saved many lives.
I work in Aerospace and most of our regulations are written in blood, as they say.
I prefer to paraphrase A Few Good Men: "We follow rules, or people die".
Tons of stuff gets done all the time. All around us. A lot of it is unremarkable because it’s so commonplace. Where I live, most of Seattle’s most vulnerable buildings have been retrofitted for earthquakes with nearly no fanfare. It’s an enormous task, but it happened gradually and in compliance with regulations. It doesn’t fit the narrative of getting stuff done I’m some big show of accomplishment, but it certainly fits the narrative of the original tweet.
I was thinking of it in contrast with all the subway projects that don't happen and cost ten times as much now, and things like that - think Collison's lists.
San Francisco's subway from SOMA to Union Square to Chinatown opens in 2022.
Sadly, I can't come up with much else.
[1] https://www.mammoet.com/news/mammoet-moves-historic-building...
Electrics were never disconnected, but shut off at the box. And it's not plumbed in. But it was still quite an effort.
I would have a loved to have done a time-lapse of the project, but sadly didn't think of it until after the move.
Achieved would be my choice.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/74880470/11000-ton-bell-tele...
https://twitter.com/CTARPM/status/1422672300365725699?ref_sr...
They wanted to straighten the subway ("El") track to make the trains faster. The building is historic and can't be demolished, so they moved it out of the way.
(We're talking about renforced concrete bases around 2 meters deep for a single story home. Obviously, the higher the building, the deeper the base.)
If so, how was this building moved? If not, how did it manage to stay up?
In 2018, the historic Kodak Building 9 in Toronto was moved 200 feet out of the way so a subway station could be built beneath it, then moved back into place on a new foundation above the station. See here for details of how it was done and a timelapse video: http://www.thecrosstown.ca/node/2018
Photo: https://bi.im-g.pl/im/7d/dc/10/z17680509IH,Przesuniecie-Pala...
And was posted then multiple times.