Old versus new: Which building is better?

My little brother is moving into his first apartment. He owns next to nothing, and asked me to help him find second-hand furniture. I mentioned his needs to a few friends, and my brother is now outfitted with some of the nicest solid wood antique furniture I’ve ever seen. These friends love old, well-made furniture, and were able to donate some pieces that are neither particleboard nor require multiple nails to hold them together. They’re solid. And I’m kind of envious. 

“They don’t make these like they used to,” said the donor of the chest dresser. And she’s right — this particular dresser is well-built, has fine woodwork detailing and has stood the test of time for 80 years already.  

Her comment reminded me of something a mechanical engineer said of a high school he was helping renovate. Built in 1910 and designated a Chicago Landmark in 1979, it’s a solid brick structure with large windows that open, a steep roof to help shed the heavy snows of Chicago winters and typical high school classrooms, a gymnasium, an assembly hall and a variety of other room types. 

As we walked around the building, talking about its energy-efficiency benefits, he noted that the upgrades to the building included smart classrooms, new LED lighting and some acoustics updates. But, he said, the energy-efficiency retrofits were easier to do than in a newer high school he’d worked on. 

We also visited that newer high school building during our afternoon together. It had better windows (though they didn’t open), greater HVAC system efficiency, a tighter building envelope and high-level building automation and controls. The students had both air conditioning and heating and teachers could control all aspects of each room independently, based on what they were teaching. The building had achieved U.S. Green Building Council LEED Gold at the time it was built. 

He went on to explain that the original designer of the old high school building, which was a mix of the Chicago and Prairie styles of architecture, had used the building’s site, construction materials and overall design style to make the 1,400-student school as efficient as possible at the turn of the century. That meant that the brick walls were almost two feet thick, both to support the large structure and to provide insulation from the heat and cold. The designer had relied on stack effect to help keep the air fresh in the building. While the original design didn’t have a high-efficiency boiler, the retrofits handled by my tour guide were being done to ensure the building’s HVAC system worked efficiently for many, many years. 

The engineer, proud of his work at both facilities, echoed what my furniture friend had said. He preferred the older building, and was impressed that after 100 years, its energy efficiency had held up well. While new buildings and products are almost always more user-friendly than their older counterparts, they just don’t design buildings like they used to.  

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