The inca aqueduct network is seriously impressive even in the current age. Some of it almost a thousand years old and still transporting spring water miles with no pumps, without a civilization to maintain it.
He also directed the creation of the road system in the empire... it would have been interesting to see how he instead of his descendants would have dealt with the Spanish had they arrived when he was alive, I think that the outcome might have been different, at least for the initial wave of Spanish
It's not that we don't know how to build things which last long. Rather, we choose not to because building that way has tradeoffs we usually don't want to make. This is also the reason we make things out of concrete and rarely out of meticulously stacked rocks.
Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+ year lifespans. When it isn’t there’s often very good reasons. It’s kind of amazing we get road bridges to last as long as they do when you consider the physical and chemical assault they’re constantly under all while trying to minimize weight and cost.
We never forgot how to build stone bridges, we stopped doing it most of the time because nobody wants to pay for it.
Traffic on traditional stone bridge designs would quickly destroy them.
Yeah a house that lasts 200 years sounds good in principle, until you think about the kind of material and energy efficiency advances we’ve had in just the last 25.
Many of them are made from wood.