I'm not sure how modern buildings can be sturdier, when they don't tend to last very long. How many buildings from the 60s and 70s do we see getting demolished or having to be rebuilt?
Given the strength of feeling about this I was surprised how deeply one has to dig to get facts. They're out there, but not easy to find.
Some years ago I was involved in a project to raise the roof on a 17th C building some two feet. One characteristic about older properties was that - in the main - they were actually smaller in some significant ways. We used a local builder and I managed to get a substantial sum from the Lottery folk to fund the project. It was in a sensitive area of the Snowdonia NP, so we had to be extremely careful. I was on site almost every day, so I saw the entire process, from start to finish. We reused the slates from the original building because the cost of new slates is exorbitant, but they still make for the best roofing material after reinforced concrete, which - incidentally - the Romans used quite a bit.
And here's a point: yes - there was a fair bit of jerry-building in the '50s and '60s, which resulted in a lot of demolition, but that wasn't always because they 'didn't seem to last very long'. The '50s and '60s were a time of rapid building - partly because our continental neighbours had spent a large part of the '40s rearranging much of our older housing stock for us - and it was almost inevitable that the pace of construction alone would lead to premature demolition in many cases. The '70s, I seem to remember, were also a period in which the government were only slowly getting to grips with building standards, following some accidents, and bans were introduced on hardwoods from abroad, as we were starting to do the same to our far Eastern cousins' forests as our Teutonic pals had done for our nascent construction industry, but on a purely statistical basis I suspect that many older buildings also fell down or didn't last too long, It's just that we only see the ones that stayed up.
I also agree that some modern constructions take a little time to get used to but there's also a psychological reason why we seem to adore the old and mistrust the new. Partly this is down to our memories, which store experiences in a way that preserve positive aspects and eliminate or transpose the negative. That's partly why advertisers play the nostalgia card so often. It's also interesting to look at current comments about now-listed buildings. Often, old buildings were described by current commentators as 'ugly and lacking in any architectural merit' when they were first built, and these same edifices now attract adulation.
To return to my original point, however, we fund it was easier to demolish the 17th C building entirely before rebuilding it in its original appearance with the raised roof. Inside, it was extremely modern, but outside, it still looked like the original cattle shed. Snowdonia NP authority were delighted, but what we had done - in effect - was build a new property, but with
apparently the same exterior. We'd used uPVC double glazing and masses of insulation but it
looked virtually identical to the original.
I wouldn't want to return to living in an old house. I would have no objection to the outside looking similar, provided I could enjoy the benefits of decent, energy-efficient double glazing but - like the ancient monuments I enjoy visiting in my capacity as a life member of the National Trust - I wouldn't want to live in 'em.
