Are We Still Building to Build "Forever"? : How Architects And Engineers Can Rethink Building Lifespan

When architects built back in the day, it was perhaps mostly from the standpoint of legacy and a cultural impact. However, today it has become a question of carbon, cost and better workflows for building design engineers. In this blog, we take on Dezeen's discussion on architectural longevity from the lens of embodied carbon, adaptive reuse, and the growing role of AI in helping building design firms make smarter decisions under pressure.

Are we still building to build "forever”?

The 19th‑century civic architecture was often conceived to last centuries, yet a large share of contemporary commercial buildings is replaced or radically transformed in under 30 years, long before materials reach the end of their technical life. The true limiter is not structural endurance but utility: buildings today are built to be adaptive to requirements especially as uses, codes, and expectations move faster than the fabric.

This is why the Pantheon in Rome still stands tall over can 1900 years later, while many hospitals or office blocks from just a few decades ago already read as functionally obsolete in plan, services, and performance. Fashion compounds the problem: the same Victorian housing stock that was widely demolished in the 1960s is now prized and retrofitted, highlighting how unstable “architectural taste” is as a design criterion.

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Two futures: ultra‑long life vs. accepted temporality

The debate is now crystallising around two complementary strategies. On one side, some projects deliberately target beyond the usual 50 to 100‑year design horizon, as with infrastructures conceived to outlive several generations and climate cycles. On the other, we have time‑bound uses of infrastructure such as data centres, warehouses, mega‑events, sometimes stadiums, to name a few, so teams start to accept short utility lives and instead aim to minimise materials and maximise reversibility.

The Expo 2025 Osaka Grand Ring is emblematic of this kind of strategy: designed as the world’s largest demountable timber structure, its ambition was to be cherished for a century, yet it is already being dismantled, with much of the timber reportedly at risk of incineration rather than reuse, much to the shock of the design and architecture community. While the Osaka Grand Ring, might be one of such extreme examples, this gap between architectural ambition and post‑event reality shows why design teams need robust workflows to track components, document reuse scenarios, and align stakeholders early around realistic end‑of‑life pathways. The whole process and envisioning end of life, is becoming more critical than ever.

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Love, flexibility, and the engineering brief

One school of thought argues that buildings last when people love them, that is, when they feel psychologically comfortable, emotionally attached, and socially anchored. However, Dezeen highlights that the risk, as pointed to by several conservation and reuse specialists, is that “designing to be loved” easily slips into ego: no architect can predict what future generations will value, nor which architectural language will be considered obsolete in 40 years.

A more pragmatic approach for design engineering firms and project owners is to design for flexibility that is in a way generic: generous floor‑to‑ceiling heights, robust structures, regular grids, and services layouts that allow new partitions, new uses, and future performance upgrades. Georgian townhouses, industrial silos, and 19th‑century warehouses work well for adaptive reuse precisely because their volumes and structural logic are forgiving, even if their original program is long gone. One can perhaps think of these examples in practice as well: think of so many warehouses that now hold modern buildings.

Design for disassembly meets AI‑driven reuse

One major barrier to reuse is today’s highly optimised but “glued together” construction: composite façades, hybrid products, and complex junctions that are nearly impossible to dismantle cleanly. This is why “design for disassembly” and circular construction are moving from niche to mainstream in French regulation and guidance, with growing emphasis on traceability, reversibility, and component‑based thinking.

Here, AI and agentic workflows become powerful allies for design engineering firms:

• Identifying reuse potential: AI systems can scan existing DOE, BIM, photos, and specs to flag components with reuse value (doors, raised floors, steel elements, HVAC equipment) and map them to current technical and regulatory constraints.
• Automating scenario studies: by linking carbon data, costs, and planning assumptions, AI can compare “keep/upgrade” vs. “demolish/rebuild” options and generate pre‑structured notes and annexes for feasibility, APS, or DCE phases.
• Supporting REP Bâtiment and circular economy: in France, obligations on producer responsibility and waste reporting push teams to document materials and end‑of‑life streams; AI copilots can help pre‑fill forms, consolidate quantities, and keep versions in sync.

For design engineers in France, longevity and adaptive reuse are no longer abstract architectural debates; they are constraints that hit your spreadsheets, your planning, and your margins. Embodied carbon regulations, RE2020, client ESG commitments, and policies encouraging renovation over new-build are converging with cost inflation to make “rebuild by default” harder to justify.

To read more about the Green Building Movement, click here. Also, explore more about agentic AI in construction and how it can eliminate waster, including adaptive reuse of components and materials. Want to know more about how help design engineering firms in their pre-construction workflows? Speak to our team, here.