This is something I’ve been wondering. Say you have an apartment building that is several decades old, would it be better sustainability wise to try and make the old building greener or tear it down and rebuild it? Tearing it down and rebuilding would require a lot more resources and potentially energy than retrofitting, but a new building would have better insulation whereas an old building would likely be straight brick or concrete, more efficient HVAC systems, and usually have units that are physically smaller so more units and therefore people would be able to fit in the same size building (though that last point is definitely more due to capitalism than environmentalism, due to rising real estate prices). I also imagine you can’t really retrofit more advanced green features like grey water recycling, advanced HVAC systems, etc without so much effort that it would approximately equal the resource consumption of rebuilding, I’d love to be wrong though. Does anyone have any experience or research on which option would be better?
Wood houses last longer than concrete? I would have assumed it was the other way around.
And yeah, I definitely am not for single family houses. Apartments all the way.
1300 year wooden temple
Keep the wood away from persistent moisture, build the structure with clever joinery which allows movement and easy maintenance (relatively speaking) and viola - you got yourself something for the ages.
Concrete is tough to maintain when severe damage occurs.
Huh. Searching it up, a lot of websites say that concrete lasts longer than wood structures (the really old wood ones might be survival bias). Though I have no background in structural or material engineering so I don’t know if it’s just big concrete propaganda or not.