The thing is desert structures still have to deal with water ingress.
It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions.
And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soaked in water, its dimensions quickly change in non-uniform ways; it twists, bends, splits, and softens. If any of this moistened wood juice finds its way down into the ground, subterranean termites discover the food source in a veritable food desert. I think you can guess what follows.
Every climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.
If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.
The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.
>>nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.
Yes, and they are continuously maintained by the living tree's processes, building everything from new roots, bark, branches and leaves. The question you need to ask is how long a dead redwood stays standing in the Pacific Northwest? What is the proportion of standing live to standing dead trees? How long does a fallen redwood trunk last, even starting out 20 feet thick?
>>The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground
Yup, due to the same processes - the high heat and low humidity make very large transpiration loads, evaporating water very rapidly from the leaves, so tall structures with huge capillary capacity are unsustainable. It isn't because they wear out fast from the wind.
You seem to be mistaking attributes of biological growth processes for attributes of mechanical wear processes.
We can see the difference weather makes in the case of Cleopatra’s Needle, which in its short stay in New York has seen some weathering it avoided for thousands of years in Egypt.
The desert is very harsh for life, but much more gentle on structures. Even when it does rain the arid environment evaporates it away quickly.
It's not even a close comparison, you find structures from the 1960s in the southeast that are far more deteriorated than ones from the 1860s in the southwest.
It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions.
And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soaked in water, its dimensions quickly change in non-uniform ways; it twists, bends, splits, and softens. If any of this moistened wood juice finds its way down into the ground, subterranean termites discover the food source in a veritable food desert. I think you can guess what follows.