I was thinking about this because I was watching an episode of Star Trek Enterprise, which takes place 150 years in the future and there is the TransAmerica building in the background and the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge is seen again in the 24th Century and beyond in Trek shows and science fiction.
Could the Golden Gate Bridge still be around in several hundred years? What type of maintenance has to be done to a bridge to keep it in good order? The Empire State Building is 80 years old and is going strong. How much is the maintenance of the building itself? How has it kept up with the times? If there is a New York City in 400 years, will the Empire State Building be there? And if not, how was it torn down safely?
The same with tall office buildings. What is the lifespan of a skyscraper? Wouldn’t it be difficult to tear one down as could a smaller building? If humanity evolves and the buildings, say in Manhattan, NYC are not destroyed, what is going to happen when the 20th Century structures outlive their usefulness?
I have the video of what would happen to structures if mankind disappeared from the Earth. More or less the buildings would eventually fall down on their own in a few centuries.
What is the oldest building that is in continuous use?
With current structures they being maintained depends on their usefulness. The Empire State Building will stay up as long as people want it to. At some point someone might decide it should be torn down and replaced with something bigger, newer, more efficient, stronger safer etc. but until then we have the engineering today to replace or repair any given part of it. Nothing would stop us from keeping it as is for hundreds of years. Though an earth quake or other act of nature might cut it’s life short.
The oldest building that has seen continuous use is probably the Pantheon at close to 2000 years. It’s a sizable structure and has seen a few remodels. There are older structures in the world but few can compete for the title as many lack written records to confirm ‘continuous use’
With proper maintenance, a building can last forever.
Of course, at some point you also have the whole “my grandfather’s axe” thing. After enough replacements, reinforcements and restorations, who’s to say how much of it is still the original building?
It will be gone someday, eventually it would become uneconomic to maintain it. However, it’s likely to outlast a lot of more modern skyscrapers, being more over-engineered.
I’m not sure the Parthenon qualifies. It largely fell into disuse after it was blown up in 1687, and I’m not sure that it’s current status as a monument counts as “in-use”.
If the Parthenon doesn’t qualify, an early stupa, mandir or church may be the oldest building in continuous use.
Whats the tallest, biggest building to be torn down so far. And how “packed” was the area around it?
Eventually, when these tall suckers have to be torn down, somebody is going to be stuck with a very expensive tear down bill or a not quite as expensive but much riskier explosive collapse teardown. Imagine what it would cost to take down one of those suckers piece by piece (yeah, I know they were put up that way too, thats kinda the point).
To me, these buildings are kind of the real estate equivalent of a quarry that runs for years but when the thing shuts down they just walk away and the restoration is somebody else’s problem (yeah, I know laws make that hard to do these days).
I just hope the people that made the money building and running these things are also the ones that pay for them to be taken down. Though I guess I’ll be six feet under before that problem arises so no biggie for me.
Yeah, but for buildings, you pretty much need to get into tearing it down and rebuilding it to be into that kind of situation.
Many old buildings in Europe (mostly from Roman times) went without anything resembling “proper” maintenance, much less any rebuilding, for centuries: people didn’t know how to build something like that, so they couldn’t rebuild it, but they still used it and did their best to keep it clean/unclogged. When Luisa Fernanda Rudi, then Major of Saragossa, revamped the city’s plumbing, part of the Roman sewers was set up as a museum: it had been in continuous use for c. 2000 years (in general, the city’s sewers and running water pipes leaked like sieves; the plumber’s bill was huge but the savings in water have already made up for it). The Golden Gate Bridge may be less resilient than the Aqueduct of Segovia or those Caesaraugustan sewers, but the OP specified “with proper maintenance”; under those conditions, the Golden Gate Bridge could very well be there in the 24th century, yes (so will the Aqueduct of Segovia, hopefully).
For tearing them down we are pretty dam good at blowing things up. A controlled explosive demolition could easily take down the largest of buildings without much if any effect on the surroundings.
The World Trade Centers for example(sorry if anyone finds that offensive) were taken down buy uncontrolled explosions. For the most part they still imploded into themselves limiting the damage to surrounding structures. If engineers had actually wanted to take the buildings down I think they could have done so without damaging anything nearby
Arthur C. Clarke, in one of his novels, posited that the exterior of the Empire State Building could someday be coated with a very thin layer of artificial diamonds to preserve it virtually forever.
Sure, but nothing lasts forever. Eventually, absent some Clarkeian technological advance, it will become unsafe, regardless of how many restorations it undergoes.
It’s not composed of arches or other self-supporting structures; it’s basically a shit-ton of concrete and steel held in place by brute force.
Condos were not invented until 50 years ago. There was no such thing as a condo in the 1950’s - why the heck would anyone want a condo in the 1950’s?
However, in recent years, many very old apartment buildings, much older than 50 years, have since been converted into condos.
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The first condominium law passed in the United States was in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1958.[1] English Common law tradition holds that real property ownership must involve land, whereas the French civil law tradition recognized condominium ownership as early as the 1804 Napoleonic Code; thus, it is notable that condominiums evolved in the United States via a Caribbean government with a hybrid common-civil legal system. In 1960, the first condominium in the Continental United States was built in Salt Lake City, Utah