Remodeling doesn't mean "oh no! new windows!" or "gotta change the floorboards!". The vast majority of old buildings that are still in use are essentially Buildings Of Theseus - they've been repeatedly gutted and rebuilt over the centuries. Those that aren't have had literal millions of man-hours spent patching and mending.
My POV is the UK, where one in six buildings are <1900s and a Georgian house offers a price
premium because of the quality. They haven't been "rebuilt." That's what destroying and rebuilding a building is, which is what you favour in the name of not wasting. But if you don't destroy it, it doesn't need to be rebuilt. Which is not wasteful.
If you raised the guy who built your "redbrick Georgian" "700 year old wooden country house" from the dead and showed him around, he wouldn't recognize the place.
And he doesn't need to. Because changing the decoration, windows and wiring on a house is a lot easier than knocking its walls down and rebuilding it -_-
You're also falling heavily into Survivorship Bias. You only see the handful of buildings that are still here, not the hundreds of thousands that aren't.
No I'm not. I am saying good buildings are good. Bad buildings are bad. Ones that do not last the test of time suck. How is that an argument in favour of
intentionally building more buildings that suck. If you intentionally design a building to not last, you are wilfully being a prick to future generations. Look at all the beautiful, livable and robust old houses that sit at the
top of the UK or French property market. Tell me we can't make more with all of our modern technology and understanding, tell me we can't anticipate what future generations will want to live in or need, and you'll be lying. Victorian sewer engineers showed more forethought into what Londoners would need 200 years later than Thames Water does for Londoners today. This isn't a dick waving contest between old thing good new thing bad. This is a call to ambition to MAKE NEW THING GOOD. Making a building you know will have to be demolished within 3 generations is like making games as a service vs make a game. You can tout as many QOL advantages and tout how dynamic your practises are, at the end of the service life you are intentionally burning your own legacy up in the name of short-term profits. Demolish a shit old building and make a new building that will serve its purpose for hundreds of years. "Oh but it will cost the developer more a bloo bloo" then design a public house to last with taxes. Barbican estate is 60 years old, council-built and a single one of its flats sell for £1,000,000 - £3,000,000. It will continue to serve well for a hundred years because they did not design the buildings wrong as a joke
And that sand shortage? Can be solved easily by just regrinding concrete. Only reason that's not being done now is that it is slightly cheaper to dredge the sand up. Even the guy who wrote the paper all the reporting is based on says that we're not literally going to run out, just face higher construction prices.
Making a building correct once is always cheaper than making it wrong, destroying it, rebuilding it wrong on purpose, destroying it, rebuilding it wrong on purpose ad infinitum. The sand shortage is a problem
that does not need to exist. The crisis can easily be solved by
not wasting concrete. If we can get nuclear fusion then we can waste as much energy as we want grinding up concrete for buildings they designed wrong as jokes, in the mean time the cost of regrinding concrete into sand fine enough to be turned into concrete to waste on more useless shit is astronomical and just offloading the environmental cost onto carbon emissions and energy demands
Or
You could make a house right once