The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
Sure that's part of it. A lot of the delays in modern construction are due to labor cost optimization and supplier delays. A lot of the time parts of construction sites are idle because some specialized group of skilled workers is at another site or they're waiting for a delivery.
I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.
In about 2004, height of the Florida housing bubble. I stayed with my cousins in a housing development and I watched over the course of a week as this construction company built an entire street of homes. I was wildly impressed because I never see that in the north. They basically had the the foundations poured and then each lot like an assembly line each stage of the crew working. The framers working, then the guys putting up walls, then the roofers, then the plumbers. It was impressive. But I think that only works when you are building 1000 homes.
Yeah that’s pretty much how it goes everywhere. You sacrifice a lot of speed to keep everyone working at 100% of availability because you have to have multiple sites and leave some sites idle. So you may see the same process but slower in other places. For example a framing crew might not be available right as the foundation is finished so there’s lag between the foundation crew and the underfloor. But modern tract house construction is an assembly line where the crews move and the material is fixed in place.
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks.
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here.
If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
Yeah, definitely regulations affected the effectiveness, but also good things happened as well, we have a lot more power tools to use and we're not likely to lose our head just because we didn't deliver a job on time.
We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.
I mean, it flat-out wouldn't be approved today, and for good reason. Bear in mind that it _burned down_. And, like, see the See Also section on its Wikipedia page; there were a bunch of similar structures, which mostly also burned down.
Clearly they didn't know how to build things very well. Crystal Palace type structures look impressive, but they are _bad buildings_, both in terms of practicality (what would you use one for?) and safety, and no competent modern engineer would design one, even if it were legal, which it is not. There were a bunch of things like the Crystal Palace built in the 19th century, and the reason you don't see many these days is that they mostly burned down, often within a few years of construction (the Crystal Palace was actually an unusually long-lasting example of the genre, likely because it was mostly lightly used or completely disused).
Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.
I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.