Demolished buildings 16 years older in US than in Europe, report finds

Researchers have found that buildings demolished during the 21st century in European cities had a shorter lifespan than those in US cities.

A report titled Lifetimes of demolished buildings in US and European cities, published in the peer-reviewed Buildings & Cities journal, compared the ages of around 15,000 buildings demolished in nine US cities and four European cities.

Written by Juliana Berglund-Brown, Isaac Dobie, Jordiana Hewitt, Catherine de Wolf and John Ochsendorf, the report found that the average mean age of a demolished building in the US cities was 81, while for the European cities it was 65.

Overall average age of demolished buildings is 71 years

Using data on buildings demolished in the 21st century, 5,305 razed structures were analysed from US cities, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Boulder in Colorado, Cambridge in Massachusetts, Lynchburg in Virginia, and Raleigh in North Carolina.

The European cities in the study were Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich and Helsinki, with a total of 9,574 demolished buildings analysed.

The average lifetime for all the demolished buildings in the study was 71 years.

In the US, the city with the highest average age a building reached before it was bulldozed was Cambridge with 120 years, and the lowest was Raleigh with 53 years.

This compared to Europe's highest average of Zurich with 75 years, and the lowest being Helsinki with 49 years.

"Buildings are often demolished before the end of their technical lifetime"

The report was published to help raise awareness of building demolition and point to what factors might make a building deemed outdated or unusable.

"Buildings are often demolished before the end of their technical lifetime," the report stated. "Building demolition occurs for difficult-to-predict reasons such as economic viability, owner preference and unfavourable architectural characteristics, making actual lifetime hard to estimate."

"This research estimates average building lifetime in nine US and four European cities across building characteristics in order to increase literacy about the demolished building stock, identifying what types of buildings are deemed obsolete."

In the US, the majority of the demolished buildings were built between 1920 and 1950, while the European buildings were largely built between 1950 and 1970.

The report found that the age of the city did not influence the "survivorship" of demolished buildings.

"It is noteworthy that Helsinki, founded in 1550, and Raleigh, founded two centuries later, have comparable average building lifetimes," the report said.

"Therefore, it is clear that the age of a city is not proportional to the age of demolished buildings in that city."

Residential buildings live longer than other building types

The report also categorised the demolished-building data into four building types – commercial, residential, industrial and institutional, which included educational, recreational, and arts and culture buildings.

Demolished residential buildings in both the US and Europe had the longest average lifetime compared to other building types, with those in the US lasting 85 years and those in Europe lasting 70 years.

The building type with the shortest lifespan in the US was institutional buildings, with an average of 55 years. This compares to 54 years for institutional buildings in European cities, but the shortest average lifespan in the continent was among commercial buildings with 43 years, decades less than the US average of 71 years for commercial buildings.

Notable demolition stories that have been featured on Dezeen include the razing of a portion of the White House's East Wing and the demolition of the first-ever Stirling Prize winner in Salford, UK.

The top photo of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demolition is by Monica Nouwens.

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