Construction is life
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Having grown up in the countryside, where most construction involves killing all the trees on a site by scraping off the top layer of soil, the sounds of construction only makes me think of death.
Instead, we should build up what we already have and encourage density.
This is not a call for less infrastructure spending, but a reconfiguration of our urban design patterns.
After the Second World War, Japan concentrated heavily on passenger trains, Germany on the autobahn and a little on passenger trains, and the USA (almost?) exclusively on automobiles. Some of the differences can be explained by geography, but it was certainly not all determined by it. There always seems to be some room for choice. Usually, at any given time, the public perceives only part of the actual advantages and disadvantages, as well as the inherent trade-offs. Moreover, people's preferences are also constantly changing. That's why it's always necessary to adjust and dare to do something new.
However, in such matters, countries also seem to be extremely conservative and hardly able to leave a path once it has been taken, because institutional and economic structures and entire schools of thought would have to be completely realigned. In particular, the losers of a rethink will do everything they can to delay change as long as possible, while the exact winners are not yet known.
I wish this was true. But it's like this only in the historic centers which (obviously) have not been designed with cars in mind. Outside of those historic centers large European cities are more often than not full of nightmarish highways and parking lots.
Personally, when I'm inconvenienced by a crew spending six months on a job that looks like it could be done in two weeks, I think "what politician's cousin is padding their pockets with this absurdly long and inefficient contract?"
Could you expand on this? What do you mean?
> Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in
For me, it's not "construction" by itself, but I suspect it's pushback against urban sprawl and poor urban design. I watched an excellent video about Houston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 It takes awhile to get to the point, so you might want to skip to 3:42.
And this is just a natural evolution of realizing that building more and more and having "pride" in buildings is not really a good thing (similar to the economic doctrine of forever-growth). Working in an office building, no matter how well ventilated and sound proofed, is incomparable with working in a room with a few to a quiet garden - to give just one example.
The countries that you see that are "surpassing" the west simply haven't reached this stage of insight yet and are still locked in mundane materialistic thinking. Let them have their buildings and bustling streets and noisy neighborhoods and 10 lane highways. They will realize the health benefits of returning to more quiet way of living at some point (unfortunately, I see a number of people here in this thread have neither reached this point.)
I don't think we need more roads and highways, though. In some places, repaired and improved - for sure.
This type of narrow thinking that we somehow "own" nature is nuts. We don't own anything and cutting down trees and scraping soil we actually eroding the foundation that sustains us. You can very well exist, and people did for thousands of years, without cutting trees and scraping soil.
I'm shocked to see people with such a distorted view of the world are here on HN, otherwise a place of informed people.
Hopefully in a few decades people like this will be denounced as they climate heretics that they are and punished for it.
If the buildings around you have a lifespan of 50-100 years and you aren’t replacing 1% or 2% of them every year, then you are falling behind. If population is growing due to births, increases in life expectancy, or an influx of immigrants/refugees then housing construction must account for that as well.
I'm currently renovating a 150 year old house that was previously majorly renovated 50 years ago and we're aiming for a useful lifespan just for the parquet/plumbing/electrics of at least 50 years, 100 years for the joists, insulation and plaster. The building will hopefully stand for hundreds of years.
Lifespan of a building isn't some kind of magical threshold thing where it is perfect for 100 years and then must be replaced in year 101.
A noticeable share of those buildings built for 50 years will need to be replaced around years 25-30. Almost all of those buildings will need work before 20 years is up. Some of them will outlast their design life by a large factor.
Not to mention that not every builder is selecting the same construction techniques and design life.
Of course, pretty much only suburban areas have infrastructure/buildings built over that short an interval. Constructing 90% of a major city’s high rises in a decade would be a construction boom unlike anything the western world has seen in a lifetime.
Dead doesn't necessarily mean useless. It just means passive, static, unevolving.
Even with a decent amount of planning for the elements, it lasted 3 years. It really makes one appreciate how special it is that this lump of flesh might survive 70 or 80 years.
And if you check nature, the pattern of infinite growth should be left to tumours. Our goal is survival, not killing our host and causing our extinction.
The historical monuments were constantly under construction? The author was talking about scaffolding and jackhammers and moved earth, not detailing and polish.
It's really not remarkable yeah, also the rest of the city. I read the author's words as "globally, the city always seems to have some amount of construction or renovation". Which is true for all the lively cities I've lived in personally.
Part of that difference is that we don't want things to last that long. Expectations are that within 50 or 100 years this building will no longer be wanted in anything like its current form, so why build for longer? Just makes the teardown effort that much more expensive.
There's argument to be made for investing more in infrastructure like roads; but again there's a counter argument to be made in favor of the way things have evolved and are done now. Fresh roads are smooth and level and "fixing potholes" is never going to be cheaper or produce better results than occasional full refurbishments do.
Kind of a Laffer curve: Durable, low frequency but expensive maintenance vs flimsy, cheaply and often maintained and often rebuilt.
There were some facades of buildings that I had never even seen until I was aged 10, and all of a sudden a square that I always thought dull would be revealed with the scaffolding removed and the building looking beautiful.
Unless your buddy was from the Vatican, it's not true for much of Europe. These beauties aren't gonna last 500 years:
None of this meant in an offensive way - just the way it goes sometimes.
Ironically this is partially explained by the increasing stringency of zoning and building codes which leads to the increasing professionalization of building design. It used to be much more common for a person to basically just build a brick box on their own or with a little bit of contractor help. Professional designers need to do “design” to build their portfolio and attract business.
I would agree that this doesn't happen very often for something at least moderately well built; for the not-very-well built, I am not so sure.
People don’t cram into 600 sq ft shoe boxes in SF because that’s their dream home. They do it to avoid a long commute.
In North America so much of how we build is dictated by traditions.
Modifying a well-built structure is often easier than completely tearing down and replacing a poorly built structure too.
I wonder how many current politicians and bureaucrats work solely in the world of letters and laws. I think it would be telling.
The excerpt from Bernard Levin's review of The Wrench in The Times resonates:
> This is not a book for journalists. Civil servants, too, will feel uneasy while reading it, and as for lawyers, they will never sleep again. For it is about a man in his capacity as homo faber, a maker of things with his hands, and what has any of us ever made but words. I say it is 'about' the man who makes; truly, it is more a hymn of praise than a description, and not only because the toiler who is the hero of the book is a hero indeed - a figure, in his humanity, simplicity, worthy of inclusion in the catalogue of mythical giants alongside Hercules, Atlas, Gargantua and Orion. He is Faussone, a rigger'
https://www.amazon.com/Wrench-Abacus-Books-Primo-Levi/dp/034...
Slowly, I realized that those two experiences are connected: Because those suburban houses have existed for 50 years and will probably remain unchanged for 50 more, all the big construction projects end up concentrated in a few areas downtown. It would fairer if the developments were spread throughout the city.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map...
Construction is great, maintenance is important, but why have all of these architectural facades when all you get to see is painted wood and temporary lighting?
Wendover made a short video about that: https://youtu.be/lphKvTqovHs?t=1m56s
TLDW: It's the Law of Unintended Consequences -- The sidewalk shed (aka "scaffolding") is a hack to get around a law requiring building facades be inspected every 5 years. Instead of actually inspecting the building masonry and making any necessary repairs, just install a sidewalk shed and leave it there year after year.
You might enjoy the episode “How to Put Up Scaffolding” from the TV show How to with John Wilson https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13021528/
Ie [1] where the supports for the scaffolding are built into the building itself leaving the sidewalk completely free of interference. Still not the best to look at if you look up, but doesn't impede foot traffic at all. And it's nice in the rain.
Some others like [2] have spent a bit more money to make the scaffolding look nicer and cleaner.
It's a fair intermediate solution imo that I hope becomes more widespread if we take as a given that eternal scaffolding isn't going away any time soon.
[1]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7630615,-73.9738617,3a,75y,2...
[2]https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7589834,-73.9748391,3a,75y,1...
The correct modern solution is probably mostly drones. This idea has been floated but is not presently legal, and the scaffold companies will lobby the government and cry bloody murder, so expect the scaffolding to continue for the next 300 years.
(I live in a city that's mostly built on what was the ocean two hundred years ago (sometimes fifty years ago) but won by civil engineering. It's a big empty country otherwise. We're basically below the sea level and maintaining underground infrastructure (electricity, fiber optic, heating gas, what have you) is a constant source of noise -- even the cable company has to have its draining machine vans. But by golly do we want to live here whatever the costs.
There is a lot to be improved in construction - it is horrible for the environment, a lot of the buildings don't last, labor productivity has grown more slowly compared to other industries or even fallen.
His key attributes:
1. A common pattern language
2. User design
3. Repair and piecemeal growth
4. A human-scale building system
On the streets, the big change going forward will be AVs and micromobility(e-bike, e-scooter etc.) - right now most cities are not Amsterdam, because they're locked in on the idea of providing space mostly for heavy vehicles that are unused 95% of the time; once you add AV rentals to the mix, it becomes substantially easier to cut down the size of the fleet, both in a vehicle dimensions sense and number of vehicles. This in turn makes it easier to use the lightest vehicles safely, so the streets will wear down much less quickly, even with no change in the builds themselves.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
But constant tearing up of streets isn't necessary for life - you can have construction going in stages without a permanent state of constant construction.
Construction is a sign of growth usually, which is not entirely the same as life.
No city has literally all the streets torn up at once. Which means by definition all road construction is in stages. I’m somewhat puzzled how what you’re proposing is different from the status quo
This also means we need alternate routes or extra lanes or some kind of redundancy which asked this kind of work? So higher taxes?
For example, most of the molecules in your body are regenerated/replaced on a fairly rapid timeline - seconds when it comes to things like ATP, minutes to hours when it comes to blood sugar, days to weeks when it comes to skin cells and hair and intestinal lining cells, and longer timelines for most other structures, with a few exceptions like much of the bone structure (and even that is dynamic to some extent).
However, your body size doesn't grow despite all this construction continually taking place, does it? You lose as much as you gain, you're in a healthy steady-state condition.
Now, if your body is infested with parasites, ticks and lice and tapeworms and roundworms and malarial protozoans, and they're growing happily, while negatively impacting your overall health, I suppose that's something your neoclassical economist would call 'strong growth of the investor class'...
Welcome to investment capitalism and the financialization of the economy! Not the same as main street capitalism and a healthy industrial economy, is it?
Your value judgment on investment is, ah, popular in some circles, but its placement on the Y Combinator news forum is ironic.
And unlimited growth is followed by resource exhaustion and death.
This is only true in the physical sense if the universe is singular *and finite. Which it appears not to be.
It is never true in the sense of technological, economic, and societal progress. There is an infinite amount of growth possible in those areas. Because that kind of growth leads to more efficient use of resources, or the discovery of new resources and knowledge which extends how far we can go. And this repeats in an endless cycle.
Take virtual reality (metaverse) for example. That would allow for massive expansion of the virtual space in which we can operate and massive reduction of the physical space we need to occupy.
As another example, we could eventually learn how to gather up all the raw material (hydrogen) in so called “empty space” and use it to manufacture a new planet. There is nothing in the laws of physics preventing us from doing this. The only thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it.
So there really is no rational basis for the kind of pessimism you are advocating. So long as people are allowed to critique existing ideas and develop new ones, we have an infinity of progress ahead of us.
Laws of physics aren't negotiable. Barring very unlikely breakthroughs humans will remain a single planet species until the sun goes supernova. And with that constraint we face a nearly closed system of resources, except for solar energy and maybe a few asteroids.
> The only thing we lack is the knowledge of how to do it.
Again even if more innovation is possible there are only so many people with enough resources to discover them. Those people have all the basic needs as well as years of education just to sustain today's innovation.
Nobody said that. We only need space, matter, energy and knowledge.
This last part is mostly what we're missing now, the limiting factor, as the universe has plenty of space, matter and energy!
> Barring very unlikely breakthroughs humans will remain a single planet species until the sun goes supernova
Hard disagree, as some already have their sight on Mars. We are an ambitious species!
> Again even if more innovation is possible there are only so many people with enough resources to discover them
There're over 7 billion of us, and knowledge diffusion techniques (especially online) mean innovation is accelerating - so the limiting factor won't be limiting for long.
Given than facts don't support your pessimist view, I wonder why you think this way?
Mars is not habitable for humans and has never been touched by human hands. Ambition won't overcome that fact. Should we exhaust the earth to establish an unsustainable colony on Mars?
> Given than facts don't support your pessimist view,
My you are confident. The fact is there are no human colonies off planet earth. Even the space stations that exist aren't self sustaining. The future is not yet a fact, so we're both speculating.
I don’t see how there could be a limit (other than the laws of physics which actually prevent none of what has been described in this conversation).
they're never done. or, rather, if they no longer get changes or improvements, they've probably reached EOL.
But I also won't be surprised if this is true for some. Do you have a good example?
The country started its slow but sure descent into the gutter in mid 2010s, and by 2016 basically everything stopped. Only pre covid did I start seeing new apartment buildings rising again at snails pace, but then came covid.
No matter what it is, there is a need for maintenance of that thing. Bridges need painting, streets need repaving, ballparks need sweeping.
People are like this too. We all need sleep, the bathroom, food, etc. Yet with people we don't think of them during their maintenance periods. I think this is because we all do this during a certain period of the day, leaving the other parts of the day to enjoy our non-self-maintenance work with each other.
Why can't we do this for cities too?
I know it would be difficult. But declaring some sort of jubilee from maintenance would be pretty cool. Just for 1 month every 10 years or so, no more road construction, or bridge painting, or sheds on the sidewalk. Get the city to enforce it, make the fine big, coordinate it so that everything is clean and tidy, just for 30 days every decade or something. Make it a celebration, a party, a big time for tourists to come in and photograph everything. Like a height marker for a child on the door-frame. A pause, 'Look in the mirror, take it in, breathe, it won't last long, savor this moment'.
And it shows in the people. There's a dynamism, young people moving in, upwards mobility, low cost of living, jobs that you lack in many of these static, affluent places.
It suggests that a lot of the construction/repair needs of major cities could be reduced significantly, but it's a flaw inherent to their design that needs correcting first.
Only then, as we are drowning in compute, does it spill over into other areas and allow that compute to be used as leverage towards enhancing or automating areas compute has yet to break into. Only then are crazy ideas like having large clusters of transistors act as neurons in a neural net actually possible, and efficient enough.
This is at least what I mean when I occasionally say something flippant like "(technology/computers/software) will eat the world". Maybe our relentless pursuit of more compute isn't the best way to solve complex problems, but it increasingly seems like it may be a way.
3D printing firmware and all of it's associated design software (CAD/CAM) would run fine on computing technology 10 years old.
Construction speed is bottlenecked by the lack of investment in new techniques, not for the lack of compute power.
“Anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Why do you want to make a bridge that barely stands?
Instead you want your engineer to:
1. build it cheaply and quickly,
2. maintenance is cheap and non disruptive.
3. probability of unplanned failure is small, eg once in 100,000 years
It doesn’t feel very efficient, especially residential construction. My neighbor is building a garage with some finished space above. It’s sat without a garage door for literally months now - everything else is done.
I often wonder how soon into the project was the garage door ordered and how was that order tracked? Was the lead time calculated and a fallback option presented? These are things that we just take as a matter of course in software. They are also routine in industries that are software-intensive (finance, insurance, retail, to a lesser extent logistics)
The construction business - especially residential construction and remodeling - seem insanely inefficient to me. Jobs that should take a few days of wall clock time often take weeks due to poor planning and scheduling.
It’s interesting that certain high value specialties within construction end up being extremely efficient. You can get a new HVAC system (assuming that you don’t need to install ductwork) in a couple of days. Ditto for a new roof or a new driveway. The process is finely tuned.
It would be wonderful to have the ability to apply computational power to jobs that are not as repeatable today. Scan the house and identify constraints. Automatically design the systems, measurements and layout and assemble a BOM to minimize the effects of supplier lead times. Submit detailed RFPs to subcontractors and track their performance to plan. Etc.
If all you have to improve the construction industry is better scheduling and supply-chain management, that's something. But the poster above seemed to be hinting at things more like new construction techniques.
sometimes solving multiple hard problems simultaneously is easier and yields better results than trying to solve individual problems on their own, due to synergies that can be taken advantage of.
however, the “divide and conquer” adage has stuck too hard into the minds of ordinary people and going against it - that’s the really hard part.
Gunshots? Not so much.
Seriously, though, I do think soundproofing is significantly underused and even undertaken in most residential construction. And at times have thought anyone for increasing density needs to start there.
Construction is correction.
But go to an old European city and you're not going to see much construction. And they're not tearing down old stuff to build new. And yet many of those cities are very vibrant and full of life.