If you've ever worked in residential construction, there's one constant truth: everything you make will be redesigned away before it fails. Our desire for novel

If you've ever worked in residential construction, there's one constant truth: everything you make will be redesigned away before it fails. Our desire for novelty is strong, and cheap construction lets us reconfigure houses affordably in ways that old, stronger construction didn't. Someone will want a new countertop because it looks pretty long before the old one will break, and the same goes for closet space and windows. That's no explanation for situation in the article, of course. One would expect that structural elements of large, dramatic investments of that sort would take proper care to last. But drywall-on-sticks is an economic reality that makes sense.