Everything has an expiration date. Yes, everything.
Milk. Memberships. People. Buildings. Industries. Ideas. Even art.
One of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius is, “Soon you will have forgotten all things, and soon all things will have forgotten you.”
It’s sobering to realize that everything we build, collect, accomplish, or worry about eventually fades away.
So what is the lifespan of a building?
The oldest building in New York is less than four hundred years old, and it’s only still standing because it became a museum.
If you were living in New York in the 1960s, you might have watched the original Penn Station being demolished just fifty-five years after it was built. One of the architectural treasures of the city was torn down.
Now, a little more than fifty years later, we’re preparing to spend billions trying to improve what replaced it.
Neither iteration will match the beauty of the original.
I’ve worked on roughly twenty-five building conversions over the course of my career. Prewar buildings built before 1939. Wooden soap factories. Industrial brick warehouses. Cast-iron textile buildings. U-Haul storage facilities. Telephone company switching stations. Banks. Even abattoirs.
All of them were reinvented and turned into homes.
My first project was originally built as a shoe warehouse. It became an office building, then a charity headquarters, and eventually sixteen condominiums that I sold to buyers.
Watching buildings evolve like that changes the way you think about them.
You stop seeing them as permanent. You start seeing them as adaptable.
But not every building deserves another life.
What I’ve noticed is that the buildings built around the turn of the twentieth century make the best conversions. They have large windows, high ceilings, thick walls, and generous volume. When I walk through them, they simply feel better. The proportions are different. The ceilings are higher. The windows are larger.
You don’t need an architect to explain it. Most people feel it the moment they step inside.
Today we’re starting to see another generation of office buildings converted. The glass and brick office towers built in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
But most of these lack the same qualities as the prewar buildings. The ceilings are lower. The windows are smaller. The floor plates are enormous. They were built for workplace efficiency, not for the way people want to live.
Yet current zoning often forces developers to work with what already exists, even when a better building could be built in its place.
Sometimes preservation preserves quality. Sometimes it preserves mistakes.
The challenge is knowing the difference.
Every generation inherits buildings it didn’t create and leaves behind buildings it probably assumes will last forever.
Most won’t.
The question isn’t whether buildings have an expiration date.
It’s whether we’ll recognize the ones worth saving before they’re gone.
Let’s do this!
Shaun
