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.
What sort of buildings are you referring to and do you have any data to this effect? Wasn't able to find any but, truthfully, unsure what to even google so not surprising I didn't turn up anything.
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.
I'm not sure which is more efficient. I think it depends on how you define efficiency. "Mothballing" for a decade is expensive; and of course, you're proposing that with the benefit of hindsight armed with the knowledge the need for the space will arise again. Is indefinitely "mothballing" a building efficient or sustainable? What sort of timeline do you put on a thing like that and how much cost are you willing to put into it?
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.
What's being wasted, exactly? I think this is closely related to my question above about how 'efficiency' is defined in this context. In the example you've provided, it seems like there was likely a net gain in that the building built continues to serve its purpose decades later while Super Hall would have had to accrue upkeep costs and then refurbishment costs. I won't pretend to know if 10 years of upkeep costs plus refurbishment costs would be less expensive than building from scratch, but I also am unsure how the buildings themselves actually compare.
Also -- I suspect that perhaps a more rational explanation for your theory is that much of American architecture's been focused on utilitarianism. It's been one of the guiding building principles in the country since the mid 1800s. It stands to reason that a building designed for utility be torn down when it's no longer utilized.