[clickety_clack]

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.

[itopaloglu83]

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.

[rsynnott]

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.

It just wasn't a good design.