BLSS:

I wasn't talking about the difficulty of building in the USA vs Europe, but the difficulty in tearing down. They repurpose buildings much better and with greater regularity in most of Europe than we do in the US, at least this is true in Italy, Spain, Iceland, France, the U.K, Austria and Germany, where I have some personal experience.

I think a case in point on our own campus is old Super Hall. It was torn down in the Sowle Era because of declining enrollment and a Board of Regents space analysis. This was at the low ebb of enrollment after the big post-Vietnam draft enrollment decline, which was greatly exacerbated at OHIO, for reasons too complicated to discuss in this context.

Then several years later, as enrollment increased back up again, we were short of space, so they built the Bentley Annex on the same space once occupied by Super Hall. Now, would it not have been more efficient to have mothballed Super Hall for a decade, and then refurbished it when the enrollment increased again? But, that's just not the American way. We'd rather tear down a perfectly good building and then rebuild on that same spot.

We Americans are very wasteful when it comes to this type of thing. I think it stems back to pioneer days when we saw the countryside as containing an inexhaustible supply of natural resources -- trees for lumber and heating, minerals (like iron, copper and coal) for building and locomotion, etc. We have never learned the value of conservation the way they have in Europe.

Well, your alternate theory would not explain the McMansion phenomenon. I know of several neighborhoods in cities across the country where perfectly good homes have been torn down and replaced by so-called McMansions. One of these is a house in Lexington, Massachusetts, where a cape cod that my parents had rented in 1955 when Dad had a Ford Fellowship at Harvard has now been replaced by a McMansion, at the expense of most of the nice yard that used to surround the quaint New England style home. In another case a house that a friend of my wife's grew up in in Bexley, Ohio, was recently replaced by a McMansion. This kind of thing goes on all over the USA, and I submit is probably much rarer in Europe. If you have data to prove, otherwise, I'm all ears.

If the prerequisite for tearing down a structure, is that its no longer needed
for the purpose (utility) for which it was built, why are they keeping the Roman Colosseum, Egyptian Pyramids and the Acropolis ?

I mean the Parthenon doesn't even have a roof anymore. :-)

I'm sure, in the case of Acropolis ,there are much better uses for a property with such great views.

So what you're saying is that, if we wait long enough, just like the with Colosseum, Scott Quad could be considered historic, have significance and be worth saving ?

Works for me.

The Colosseum should be torn down due to it's ties to the cruel practice of slavery and murder in the Roman Empire. It's offensive to the descendants of these victims.

Thousands of slaves died in the Roman Coliseum during Gladiator battles like many football players will die from CTE. These types of barbaric practices should be outlawed due to their ties to paganism

When I read this, all I could of was the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone".

Enjoyed reading this.

It is going down today.

It’s very sad that they couldn’t find a way to repurpose the building. As we all get older things change and we’re not going to like it.

+1

What the heck is "campus flow"? Sounds like "administrative speak" with little or no meaning. And, for the record, it's not on the East Green. It predates the East Green, which was built after WWII. Scott Quad was built in 1937. Like Howard Hall, which was also torn down, it wasn't really on a dormitory green. That we couldn't keep a venerable old quadrangle is a real shame. It's just part of American "throw away" culture.

I suspect that if OCF had his druthers, he'd still be staring through the drafty windows of old Ewing Hall, throwing elbows on the hardwood at Bentley, eating supper in Super Hall, bunking in Howard and trying to land a date outside Boyd Gymnasium. That is, when he's not joining Rufus and Manasseh for a pint at the Bunch of Grapes.