How do you feel about tearing down or even just "retiring" places like the White House or Buckingham Palace?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Or other old buildings in your nation or state/province/etc. or whatnot that are similarly used? I have read complaints from those who have worked (or lived) in such places. They weren’t built with the modern world in mind - plumbing, air conditioning, etc. Some don’t get the (sometimes very high) funding needed to keep them maintained and up to date, so that could improve things in some circumstances. Is it worth it - do the people there want to be there and do we want them to be there?

Obviously the people who live in such places are usually rich, and so sometimes find these places a step down in comfort, modernity, or up-to-dateness.

Also, of course, there can be a lot of judgement when things are changed, leading to a favoring of the status quo, even when it’s not good.

So, do you think these places need to be active, with governmental employees there (and presidents or royals or governors actually residing there)? Would you be okay with them just being places for tourists and educational tours and such - how much do they need to fund themselves for you to be okay with it? Or is the one you are thinking of in a location where you think really needs to be torn down so a modern facility meeting the same purpose can be there? Or are they just too important to destroy?

2

The White House has been renovated multiple times over the decades. It has modern plumbing, HVAC, internet, etc. I’m not sure I see the need to replace it.

3

This. The White House has an underground bunker and a ton of intelligence gathering gear to protect the President. You would have to duplicate this wherever he or she happens to live while in office. The White House is the best place for them to be in case of a national emergency. I don’t know anything about Buckingham Palace, but if that’s where they choose to live, and are mostly footing the bill, I don’t see a problem with it.

4

The White House in 1950:

No reason they couldn’t do that again one day, if necessary.

5

Who makes that decision?

6

Experts, agencies, committees and important people.

7

Top Men. Top Men.

8

The President decides it needs to be done, then lobbies Congress to approve the money.

9

Not only should the buildings be kept, but heads of state should be required to look out the window once a day so citizens can gather and yell at them from the street.

10

Really, the only question is whether it’s worth bothering keeping the shell around or if you just bulldoze the lot and start over.

It would be trivial to build a replacement that looks exactly like the old one, but fully modernized. And there’s zero chance that a replacement wouldn’t be made to look identical–it’s just too iconic. It would be easier and cheaper than working inside like they did in the 50s. But on the other hand, I think a lot of people would complain if they didn’t at least pretend to have some continuity, even if it is only in a Ship-of-Theseus sense.

11

I say, chaps! (Greetings from Britain.)
Didn’t we helpfully do this for you in 1814? :wink:

Burning of Washington - Wikipedia

12

I’m all for it. I’d like to ditch the 1800s look and replace the White House with a gleaming glass tower, but not too tall, maybe 10 stories. It would elicit howls of protest, but since this is the 21st century, we should have a 21st-century look.

As for Buckingham Palace, same thing. Maybe a 30-story tower since the Brits have more…stuff.

13

Buck House isn’t a particularly attractive building, and for what it’s worth I don’t think even the Royal Family are particularly fond of it, but AFAIK it’s still doing its job reasonably well so there’s no great appetite for retiring it.

The iconic British building that is in desperate need of extensive renovation, possibly to the extent of total tear down or abandonment, is the House of Parliament. It is, by all accounts, rapidly becoming unfit for human habitation, and is a major fire risk:

Parliament could burn down “any day”, former minister Andrea Leadsom has warned as she urged MPs to “get on” with the renovation of the building.

Speaking to the BBC, she said the Houses of Parliament could see a fire similar to the one that damaged the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.
…
The Houses of Parliament - which was built between 1837 and 1860 - requires significant restoration, including asbestos removal, fire safety improvements, renewal of wiring and conservation work.

In addition to a fire risk, there have been warnings the building could be damaged by a flood of sewage. A sewage ejector system installed in 1888 is still in use now.

A review produced by the body put the basic costs of essential repairs at £7bn-£13bn and estimated they would take between 19 and 28 years to complete - or 12 to 20 years if the building was fully vacated.

It needs fixed urgently. We have long since reached the point where the list of things that need repair and maintenance is growing faster than things can be repaired and maintained. This means that every year that goes by without radical action (i.e. spending a lot of money and possibly kicking the MPs and Lords out for over a decade to give people room to work) is a year in which the numbers attached to both the timescale and projected cost of repairs, and also to the risk of fire and/or structural failure, get bigger.

However, we’re unlikely to get such a decision, because MPs don’t like to be seen to vote to spend billions of pounds on themselves, so they prevaricate for another year, at which point the numbers get bigger again, and MPs get less likely to vote to spend that much money.

Hence you get stuff like this…

In 2019, MPs voted to set up a sponsor body with responsibility for the restoration of the building.

…

It said the costs would increase by 40% if politicians stayed put.

Expressing concern about the project’s timescales and costs, the commissions - or administrative bodies - for the House of Commons and Lords voted to scrap the sponsor body in favour of a “new approach”.

I personally would happily go for a modern purpose built Parliament and retiring the current one, but Britain doesn’t do that so I will simply wait for it to burn down.

14

The White House is one of the few enduring symbols in an otherwise much-troubled nation. I have no problem with it, and technical obsolescence isn’t a factor as it’s been renovated multiple times, as already mentioned. Conversely, I think it’s embarrassing that in Canada, the prime minister’s official residence is in a state of disrepair and not currently in use, because politically it’s deemed not a good look for the PM to be perceived as allocating public funds to his own comforts, which I think is total nonsense. It’s not for him personally, it’s for the prime minister – everyone who holds that position now and in the years, decades, and centuries to come.

In Britain, I’d feel the same way about 10 Downing Street, but not Buckingham Palace. Buckingham is outrageously huge and expensive to maintain and is just one of many palaces where Chuck can choose to live. If the physical structure is deemed to have cultural relevance it can be preserved while turning it into an institution that benefits the public, such as a university or museum. If not, the land it sits on is immensely valuable and belongs to the people. Chuck can hang out somewhere else. Is Windsor Castle not big enough for him?

15

7 to 13 billion pounds to renovate Parliament?

Seems it could be razed and a totally-new-modern building rebuilt on the same grounds (or elsewhere) for a fraction of that cost.

16

It’s a problem when history (and inertia) risk killing people.

While it was awkward and expensive, I think retaining the shell of the White House was the right thing to do, both from a symbolic and historical-use perspective.

What the British want to do with their Westminster Palace is up to them. Wasn’t major portions of it already destroyed and rebuilt due to fires in the past? Parts of it are way older than the White House, other parts newer, it’s already leaning hard into ship of Theseus territory. Not that there is anything wrong with a ship of Theseus, especially when it’s more likely to stay intact and afloat than something crumbling into dust and at risk of burning. Plenty of historical things are ships of Theseus and the continuity can be important to those that care about such things.

17

Trouble is there’s huge sentimentality for the building. It’s very unique, and nothing like it would ever be built in this day and age. I, for one, would be sorry to see it go for some glass office block.

18

In.Deed.

But that shot just simply isn’t on the board. MPs, thanks to their collective cowardice, are caught between two options that are unthinkable to them: knocking down/abandoning the current historic building or spending billions on renovation. Both of which would indeed come at some political cost. But this is one of the dilemmas where you just have to pick a horn and get gored a bit.

It’s not like anyone wants to be in the group of parliamentarians who let the place burn down - but no-one knows when that will happen so there’s a reasonable chance, particularly for less ambitious or successful MPs, that they will have moved on before it happens and it will be Somebody Else’s Fault.

Right now, for example, it is pretty clear that current Tory government is going to get wiped out at the next election, which will be at the absolute latest in January 2025. Most Tory MPs are quite reasonably worried about losing their seats. Are they about to vote for billions of pounds of unpopular spending just before an election? Spending that when they lose their seats anyhow will only benefit someone else? Of course not. So…let’s make sure we all know where the fire exits are, I guess.

19

Yes - there was a massive fire in 1834 which destroyed most of the original. The iconic building we have now is the New Palace of Westminster, which incorporates the parts of the Old Palace that survived.

(Per wikipedia, the building of the New Palace took 40 years and ran considerably over budget, as building projects tend to do.)

But being built so long ago means its really no longer fit for purpose. Aside from the maintenance/fire risk/flooding risk issues, it’s cramped and difficult to modernise and was built for different working rhythms than we have now.

Any new building would have to make a decent stab at being iconic in its own way (a nation’s Parliament has to have some majesty and theatre about it) but that’s a difficult brief and most likely it will be disliked for a generation or so before becoming accepted as how Parliament ought to look. (I believe the current building was not well received when it was new either!)

20

Nor, in the end, was the Scottish Parliament building:

And there were many alternative ideas for what Westminster could have looked like (though any of them could no doubt have ended up with the same problems:

As for BP, the private apartments are only a small part of it. Mostly it’s for public/state occasions or service/staff facilities and offices. They’re already in the middle of a major renovation programme.