Tuesday, June 02, 2026

house to last 1000 year?

Interesting construction or architecture question, how long houses last?

The only way any structure can last long time reasonably is to be maintained, evolved.

My take is that most of houses (and other entities) do not evolve quickly enough.

The expectations and technology solutions are changing, and speed of changes accelerating.

So to design something to last is to design for adaptability and ability to adjust effectively.

There are certainly some good lessons in this exploration / articles...
Assuming the premise is to preserve utility of buildings, not the structure alone.

How Long Will a Home Last? - by Brian Potter

Plus: octagon houses, chart rooms, Soviet apartment blocks and truss-joist hybrids+


How to design a house to last 1000 years (Part I)

How to design a house to last 1000 years (part II)

How to design a house to last for 1000 years (part III)


Construction Physics Author Brian Potter - Why America Struggles to Build - YouTube

Brian Potter is a structural engineer and author of Construction Physics, a weekly Substack about the economics, technology, and productivity of building and infrastructure

Hope for Architecture The Story — Clay Chapman Design


The Octagon House: A Home for All: Orson Squire Fowler, Madeleine B. Stern: 9780486228877: Amazon.com: Books

Reprints the mid-nineteenth-century work that extolled the merits of and provided advice on constructing an octagonally-shaped house





CRDTs, Automerge: Local-First Software; book: Designing Data-Intensive Applications

In the context of computer science and distributed systems, CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) are specialized data structures that allow multiple users or systems to update the same data independently and concurrently without a central coordinator. They are designed to automatically merge divergent copies back into a single consistent state, making them a foundation for local-first and real-time collaborative software

1. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (Computing)
CRDTs ensure Strong Eventual Consistency (SEC). This means that while different users might see slightly different versions of data at the same moment, once all updates have been received, every copy is guaranteed to be identical without any manual conflict resolution. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Key Characteristics
  • Decentralized: No central server is required to decide the "correct" version; every node is a peer.
  • Offline Support: Users can make changes while disconnected; these are merged seamlessly upon reconnecting.
  • Mathematical Properties: To work, their merge operations must be commutative (order doesn't matter), associative (grouping doesn't matter), and idempotent (duplicate updates don't change the result). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

podcast

SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software – Software Engineering Radio

References
Amazon.com: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems (Audible Audio Edition): Martin Kleppmann, Chris Riccomini, Graham Mack, Ascent Audio: Books