100 year old buildings in European city centers have high ceilings and large windows. Nobody builds that high rooms any more, I would guess in order to fit more stories in the building. They do show their age sometimes with weird floorplans, lack of ventilation, and perhaps noticeable draft. But these will be very livable for a long, long time still.
Granted, some survivorship bias is surely in effect, and these were probably the fancy buildings of their time with better construction quality.
I live in Nice, a city at the border of France and Italia.
My area is full of beautiful buildings that would never be built anymore:
- the fancy wall sculptures, round corners and marble stairs would be way too expensive to build today.
- they have a lot of volume: high ceiling, corridors, spacious stairways, that would be "optimized" today into the required minimum allowed by law.
- they are not too high, because they didn't have the mean to do that. So I see the sky, and the sun reaches my windows.
- they have "buffer areas". Entrances, places with green, fancy chiseled property doors, around the building. I don't come out and arrive right on the street. My bike rack, mailbox and trash disposal area are behind a light and elegant fence.
- there are a lot of windows, and large ones, so I have a lot of light.
- some rooms have old style wooden floor. It's pretty, and warm to the feet. It would be ruinous to add that today, you would get a premade cheap one at most if you had the budget.
- I have a spot in a tower. It's useless, nobody in their damn mind would build that anymore. I love it. And all my friends are always mentioning it when we talk about the flat. For some reason, it's very pleasing.
Mostly, they are charming to live in, those old buildings.
One could value that or not, but after living in a lot of different places, I find I often prefer older buildings even if they are less comfortable. They bring me more joy.
Unfortunatly, it's not just about the cost: we are loosing the skill we used to have to make those.
Not to mention we used to treat construction workers very badly so it made building a lot of things possible at the time that would be indecent today.
I live in the old Lyon district and I agree entirely, but it's hard to buy into the argument that "we can't build this anymore because it'd too expensive", as if the people at the time were all incredibly rich. As far as I know people back then were much poorer than we are today, especially in the cities.
Now I'm not saying I understand why it was done this way -- it's honestly quite puzzling how we seem to have abandoned these myriads of techniques that made everything we built so beautiful.
My theory is that it was more likely a culture thing -- back then, you wouldn't conceive of an entrance door without some wood sculpture or at least some elegantly carved stairs. That just wasn't something any architect or artisan/builder would do.
Also in these times of "climate crisis" it's striking how old urban planning makes the temperature much more balanced and the air flows much more nicely. There's a 3°C difference between the town center and my old district, because mine has very few concrete (old paved ways), no cars and has stone walls. My friend in the city center has 27°C in her kitchen. I'm still at 20°C.
In Lyon it's even more obvious. There are some restaurants with truely huge spaces that you rarely see anymore in France, like near the sucrerie, or the brasserie georges.
But I think it's definitly about money, not culture.
Today, we are more numerous, and there are more building to buid. Hence the projects are in competitions for the resources to build them, like stone or wood. Cement being cheap compared to stone, it wins.
For the same reason, space is now a premium, and so it's expensive to have big volume for new constructions.
What's more, a rich country mean rich people, and so richer workers. 80 years ago, you could abuse your workers so much, and pay them so little, it was much cheaper to build things that took a lot of time. Today, time makes or breaks a project rentability way quicker.
Add to that you have to make everything up to code now, which is even more expensive. And with insurances everywhere, on top of that, environmnent risk evaluations, etc.
And of course, a lot of building used to be constructed either by the state, or rich families. Now, you must borrow money to build, which mean you add the cost of the financial system.
100 to 200 years ago labour was so cheap to the upper class as to cost zero. A truly upper class family could have dozens of full-time servants. An upper-middle-class family could have 3 or 4. Even 50 years ago it was common for a middle-class household family in Lisbon to have a live-in maid for pennies. Try having even one full-time maid on an engineer's salary today. Or just supporting a family of 4 on a single salary, for the matter.
Old middle-class and above buildings were beautifully built because expert craftspeople and old-growth materials were practically free. They used them all up and we're left with more efficient (but uglier) ways of building. Which is a good thing, means we're not exploiting workers or cutting down forests and mountains quite at the same rate any more. But until we achieve another technological revolution in manufacturing and are able to spec custom parts at the same price as mass-produced ones, we won't be building things as prettily as a century ago.
Survivorship bias is less of a factor than commonly assumed. If you check, for example, this map showing the age of buildings in Berlin (https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt-berlin/), you will note that it is neighborhoods rather than individual buildings that survived (or didn't). Large parts of Berlin were built in the early 1900s, and the differences between individual buildings is rather small. Survival depended on the war and, to a lesser degree, the east/west split, with policy in the east being more inclined to tear down intact city blocks and replace them with architecture better representing the ideology of the times.
> east being more inclined to tear down intact city blocks
I thought this was the other way around in the divided Germany? Many beautiful buildings were torn down in the West to be replaced with modern ones (like in so many other European countries), while East was poorer and couldn't afford the same so ending up with keeping the historical buildings. I've learned that this is the reason for places like Regensburg having an intact historical centre.
All luxury apartments are built like that. Everyone is aware that it's "better" (I guess almost everyone would prefer to live in a high ceiling room with big windows, who doesn't have some kind of reverse-claustrophobia)
But since half of the world has an irrational hard on for suburban ghettos, mostly that's where we waste our economic surplus.
A lot of these are now considered protected, like the canal houses in Amsterdam; they cannot just rebuild those. They will often be gutted and modernized on the inside and have their foundations replaced though.
Meanwhile in the rest of the country, houses will get demolished after a certain time, 50-100 years after they're built. They could be kept around longer, but it's a factor of maintenance costs, energy bills, attractiveness and value. In a lot of cases they will replace older, small houses in desirable locations with bigger ones and charge higher rent for example.
We have some relatives living an apartment (I think) a couple centuries old- I would guess from the early 1800s or 1700s, I have lived in multiple late 19th century and early 20th century apartments and all of them felt a lot more modern than that one. One weird thing is that there is only 1 sink in it, so if you go to the toilet you have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink afterwards.
Also only 1 toilet & there's no space for a dishwasher or some other modern appliances.
It looks nice but I would definitely prefer to live in a more modern apartment long-term.
Yep, that's another good example. Plumbing has always been an issue in the older houses I've been in mostly because it's next to impossible to change it.
Right, I do think you get diminishing returns once you get to "high end and well maintained early 20th or very late 19th century" buildings, a lot of these can accommodate more or less modern lifestyles quite well (albeit not all of them and they'd have to be renovated with stuff like adding elevators to 5-6 story buildings).
I guess I'm spoiled from growing up in America, but my pet peeve about old buildings in Europe is that so many of them seem to have super tiny toilets, where there's barely enough room to close the door after you sit down. They make the worst toilets in America seem like luxury mansions in comparison.
There are definitely differences. My bathroom is larger than my bedroom. I'm not sure, but I think there was originally no apartment specific bathrooms at all (instead just a communal one in the inner yard) and this room used to serve some other purpose.
Granted, some survivorship bias is surely in effect, and these were probably the fancy buildings of their time with better construction quality.