[eightysixfour]

There is at least some reason to believe we should make some types of buildings less robust. While there are many beautiful old homes, there is a bit of a bias when we think of older homes towards ones that have been kept up to date or remodeled many times in their lives. A large percentage of homes don’t go through this process and become blight.

Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.

If you can use highly recyclable materials, this would encourage more adaptable cities where the housing is more easily adjusted for the needs of the people at the time. Density can go up or down over the course of these long cycles.

The other approach is to build simplified floor plans which are highly robust but adaptable to maximize reusability - like the two column, three row warehouse layout which can be be adapted for almost any use case.

This is my issue with builders like Icon, who are making 3d printed cement walled homes. Homes that last a long time get adapted many times in their life span, and these structures don’t really enable the growth and adaptation we see from buildings that are useful for many decades.

[brigandish]

> Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.

The rejoinder to that being that most housing I've seen in Japan is of scandalously low quality.

[jacknews]

I agree, and buildings need to be easily reconfigurable too.

I love the idea of modular buildings, but this doesn't quite seem to fit. The materials don't seem ideal for the wet climate, the manufacturing process seems expensive; either you buy or rent a cnc, or have panels manufactured 'locally' then trucked. And the fact that it's precision cnc suggests this is really not modular at all, but custom designed.

Steel frame, and panels in standard sizes, eg steel sip, or home-poured foam-concrete, would be cheap, reusable/recycleable, modular etc. Maybe ugly too, but then mount a nice wood, stone-veneer, or enamel rain screen/siding, and interior paneling.

[ethanbond]

They also need to be beautiful enough and stylistically timeless enough to be worth maintaining and remodeling.