It applies to just about everything. Add pleasing design to good construction and something survives. It pleases the eye enough for someone to take care of it, while being well enough built to withstand normal rigors of use/weather/whatever it needs to withstand. We say that homes today aren't built like the used to be. I've lived in one house built in 1839 and another in
1855. In some ways I'm glad my newer house isn't built that way, because I don't bump my head as often, but in other ways it was easy to understand why those houses lasted. And both were attractive through numerous eras, not just a few decades. Right now, a small house near Bedford is being torn down. The under-house is a log cabin, with dovetailed cuts on chestnut logs. Heaven only knows when it was built---this area was originally settled in the mid-1750s, but it is probably newer than that. My cousin and her husband own an old house that has a similar base structure, though it is now a fairly large clapboard farmhouse.
Old structures aren't always all old, either, as the above shows. Some parts are a couple hundred years old, while others are 20-30-40 (obviously, old in houses and old in vehicles fit on different calendars).
Charlie Self "Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." H. L. Mencken
This veers off just a bit, but I am in the design/planning stage for a set of chairs and "chairs" in general have caught my eye for the past few months, wherever I may be.
Noticed, for the first time but I am sure they have been there all along, some beautifully well made wooden chairs for customers at, of all places, Barnes and Nobles last night. They appear to be made of mahogany of some sort, are heavy and solidly built, with comfortable curves, and are not so obviously machine made despite the fact that there are dozens of clones throughout the store.
These chairs are the embodiment of your "... pleasing design to good construction".
Point is, if these things don't last a couple of hundred years it will not be from the heavy use they get, but from corporate mentality when their interior designers go for a different look based on demographic or psychological studies on what decor will facilitate parting customers from their money.
Besides, did you ever think, being raised in the 50's, that you would see automobiles made with so damn much plastic? Certainly gives a new meaning to the word "bumper", with which we were raised.
Yes. The "crumple" theory has produced some really easily damaged bumpers. Gone are the days when you could safely push another vehicle. Front or rear, push starting most cars or light trucks today can cause a thousand bucks worth of damage in an eyeblink.
Charlie Self "Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." H. L. Mencken
Houses are a mixed bag for sure. On the one hand, it's sad to see so much OSB and particle board and stuff going in. The framing is definitely much more wimpy, and they just don't seem to be built to stand up to time.
OTOH, a friend of mine growing up lived in a house like you're talking about, and there's something to be said for modern construction and materials. Their bathroom was a converted bedroom. There were no halls. Every room had four doors. Every room on the back had a door for the slaves to use, and every door leaked air like a sieve. The windows were paper thin, and they leaked air like a sieve. The walls had no insulation, and they leaked air like a sieve.
There were no sheet goods anywhere, T&G subfloor, plaster lathe walls and ceilings. It made many matters complicated at repair or modification time. The walls being so hard to work with made it a really unappealing prospect to do anything about the ancient, turn of the century wiring, or the bad retrofit plumbing from the '40s.
It had a huge ass coal gobbling furnace, but a very inefficient heat distribution system. They could burn up a massive amount of coal, have a fire in every fireplace, and still have to have five quilts on the bed to keep from freezing at night.
They finally had to move. They couldn't afford to retrofit it with insulation, new wiring, new plumbing, new HVAC, but they couldn't afford to keep heating it either.
The place we used to live had an under-house made out of locust logs. That was a weird little house, similar to what I just described, but smaller, and with the bathroom tacked onto the back. The living room floor was held up with an old bumper jack. Quality living conditions. It also had about
17.3 quadrillion spiders in the crawlspace. I hate spiders. The rent was only $200 a month though. We mostly moved because of the crazy neighbor who used to pull up a lawn chair and sit staring in our back window eating popcorn.
I just now realized that I felt comfortable enough selling off my guns to pay for Christmas a few years ago largely because we no longer live in that dump. I had forgotten why I owned guns in the first place.
My oldest daughter and her husband live in a 175 year old house in Sheffield, England. A recent visit still fresh in mind, I'll take my "stick-built" house over that one for overall comfort, convenience, and economy any day.
Comfort is relative, however ... just imagine how much more comfortable it probably was for the first occupants than what they had lived in previously.
Probably some foreign mahogany-looking wood that's all over the place in Indonesia or wherever.
That made me think of a really ironic thing. Usually the reason American companies go under is because nobody wants to pay for American quality, and the Asian stuff is cheaper, and "good enough."
I'm watching a domestic furniture manufacturer slowly going, going, handing on by the tiniest thread. We had to start selling more imports and fewer of this company's products because everybody else was selling imports, and we had to compete.
I finally took a good look at one of these "crappy imported pieces of junk" and I have to say I'm pretty amazed. Some kind of mahogany-looking wood (that's where this thought came from :) that's got beautiful figure, solid, sturdy, good M&T joinery throughout.
I have one of the domestic products, and it was put together with staples and screws. When we were carrying a lot of these, we'd take one truck out and ship back two pallets of rejects every week. The stuff would fall apart if you looked at it funny because of the crappy construction.
I guess the crappy construction itself was their answer to trying to keep costs down and stay competitive, but if I were shopping, it would be hard to pay twice as much for something not built nearly half as well. They build all their stuff out of ash, which is still ash no matter how you dress it up. Not an ugly wood, but if you don't want that look, you get it anyway. I think it's more valuable for being hard as a rock than for beautiful figure.
I dunno. I did most of the growing I remember in the '80s. I did find it surprising in the '90s when they started making cars with plastic bumpers, but the '90s cars with plastic bumpers generally look much better than anything they ever came out with in the '80s. That was a bad decade for cars. They even made Corvettes look gay.
Anyway, I was delivering next to a car dealership the other day, and they had a Wilys Jeep straight out of WWII. It was the first time I had ever seen one in real life. I was amazed at how incredibly SMALL it was. Tiny little thing. Four guys and two duffle bags, and it's full up. Little half windshield. Really poopy looking motor. Best of all, the seats were a green cushion tied to a piece of steel, except for the driver's seat, which was a green cushion tied to a gas tank.
I guess some of you old codgers remember these things up close and personal, but I was really surprised at how primitive those things were. Not a piece of plastic anywhere except maybe the gear shift knobs, but how safe can it possibly be to sit directly on the gas tank in a military vehicle that's going to take fire? Oh good, he missed me. Oh shit, he hit my seat.
There again, I finally got to drive one of those much coveted, much touted, much loved '57 Chevy Bel-Airs. A 500,000 pound vehicle with no power steering, a master cylinder that held about two and a half ounces of brake juice, a metal dashboard with pointy things everywhere. It had room for three Honda Civics and six dozen Mexicans in the engine compartment, but there was no motor in there. Just a little weedeater engine.
I think I'd rather have a '67 Hemicuda, thank you very much.
The crumple theory doesn't have anything to do with bumpers, it involves controlled collapsing of the major structure to control g-loading on the passengers, and exists primarily due to Federal laws that require that all cars be able to keep their passengers alive in a 30 mph barrier crash. If the structure under the bumper attachments is what gets damaged then you might have a case for this being responsible but that is not usually what happens.
Ralph Nader and his fellow nutcakes induced Congress to enact laws many years ago that require that bumpers be undamaged in a 5 mph impact. I seem to recall that that was reduced to 2.5 a few years ago. It could be that your perception that newer bumpers are weaker is due to the reduction in design speed.
The problem with such bumpers is that at at any speed above the design speed a great deal of costly damage occurs as the mechanisms necessary to absorb the energy of the design-speed impact get destroyed. That's why you can do thousands of dollars worth of damage easily--it's not that the bumpers are weak, it's that the mechanisms necessary to comply with the law are expensive to replace when they are broken in an impact at a speed higher than that they were designed to survive.
The other difficulty is that bumper-heights are not standardized in a way that is beneficial for pushing--getting bumper to meet bumper when one vehicle is a truck and the other is a car isn't always easy.
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