3 ms·

Many, many, many, many of pre WWI buildings were constrained by budget and had poor inhabitants. Today they are very popular (and nobody poor can afford it anym

• usrusr 3y ago
  Where I live it was a close call between rebuilding in modern layouts (car-friendly and that entire "block in a park landscape" approach that I consider the biggest failure of 20th century architecture, nobody likes these "parks" that are too close to buildings to feel public and too open to feel private) and rebuilding in the old layout, with houses on the edge of the street enclosing hidden backyards, roof lines closely matching pre-war roof lines. Old layout won and today everybody is very happy about that. But wherever there are old stock buildings and post war reconstruction buildings in the same street, the old ones are considered much higher standard, despite best efforts to avoid modernism in the reconstruction. From today's perspective, the actual age difference between one group and the other is laughably small. But in the rush to rebuild post war, the "good enough" threshold was so much lower than pre WWI the difference echoes on through the renovations to this day.
• lukan 3y ago
  Because labour was cheap and plenty, when they were built with hand with bricks. Also some survivorship bias, as many badly build ones, did not survive the bombs so well. After WW2 it was mainly cheap concrete.