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?
Depends, what is an old house or building? Several decades as in 1960-90s apartment complex?
The building I live in was finished in 1960 and has an E-rating (a-f) in energy consumption, its a hog. Thirteen story high lump of concrete. There is very little to be done to offset this horrid energy usage other than what has already been done.
I have not seen any earthship esque multi-household (+4 families or more) buildings. At this point with the population density we face it makes little sense to build traditional single family households.
Wood is renewable but old growth forests are under severe threat as demand for wood grows and without established forests all kinds of problems emerge. It’s a hell of a problem to solve - fuck up forest and die of ecological disasters in longlasting houses or pour concrete houses and die a greenhouse death in less longlasting houses? Also, a wooden house simply screwed and nailed together without proper joinery is pretty wasteful or perhaps disrespectful to the materials potential.
Go nude and live in the forests?
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.
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.
I think it depends on the age of the building and what condition it’s in. A very specific building instance I know of is schools. Many schools built in the past 30 years are already falling apart, but schools built earlier than that are often far more stable and still standing with general upkeep. If the building is newer, I’d say just redo it since the lifespan is pretty short, but for older buildings it’s probably better to attempt updating it. Putting insulation in older buildings is work, but if the exterior structure is fine then it will last.
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