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Making a House That Will Last for Centuries?
tcyun asks: "The intro text from kaisyain's review brought up a thought that has been floating around in my head as I am a new home-owner. If one wanted to design a home that would last for hundreds of years, what would one have to do? I, and many of my friends, have recently/ purchased homes. As with all homes, some things are in good shape, others are not. Many items are the fault of initial design, many are due to poor upkeep and repairs. Looking around, it is possible to have a home last for hundreds of years (my family's ancestral home is about 400 years old and there are castles in Europe that are older). If one wanted to build/modify a home, what would one need to do to make sure that the home would still be standing, and usable, hundreds of years from now?" M : Wired suggests going underground.
"A few elements come to mind: structural integrity, usability, reparability, ease of upkeep, physical location (geology and neighborhood), technology, and aesthetics.
- Structural integrity: Rock lasts a long time, but has a variety of draw backs. Concrete (poured or cinder block) foundations are common where I live but wood is still the material used for most of the structure. Should steel cross-beams be considered for parts of the structure? I have heard good things about laminated/engineered wood.
- Technology: Folks on Slashdot have talked about wiring homes with cat-5/7/x and installing empty conduit 'just in case.' Is this really useful with the proliferation of wireless? Would it be more useful if a crawlspace was made available between the ceiling and the attic so that any type of ducting/wiring could be run into a room? Should all rooms have access to a central column through which wiring, plumbing and ducting were run?
- Usability: I have a small house with a small, combined living-family-dining room. I am fairly sure that 50 years ago the designers were not laying out the space to take into account book shelves, a large television, stereo cabinet, gaming consoles, and more in addition to a couch, chair and dining table. Simply making the room larger is one option, but cavernous space is not necessarily good for usability. What would be a good floor plan and how might different sized rooms be distributed to be useful over time for multiple purposes? Would it need a bathroom? (joke)
- Reparability: the previous homeowners made a number of DIY 'improvements' which are nice, until one needs to make a repair. Many items are installed in ways where the only option is to remove entire installations. What types of modular improvements can be made that allow for easy repair/replacement over time as needs change?
- Location: How would one choose where to build a home that would last for hundreds of years? Do you pick an existing neighborhood, space that is at the edge of a town/city or somewhere further out? Does one pick a neighborhood that has been economically/geologically/stable/safe over the longer term even if it is not in great shape at the moment. At first glance, cities in the United States like San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh have all gone through 10-20 years spells of nastiness, but have been fairly stable cities at the macro level for a hundred years.
- Aesthetics: Does one simply design/architect and deal with the fact that it will variously become attractive/unattractive over time?
And to complicate matters, how different are the options if one imposes a budget for initial construction (depending on your own idea of what a realistic budget is)."
look @ great wall of china and pyramids of egypt. people worked really hard to build them.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Most of the houses around me now have been here at least a hundred years. They just built them and they stayed up. Victorians were good at that.
It's called "The Great Pyramids."
Got me thinking about L.A. Story "Some of these buildings are over 20 years old."
The house I live in, is only 100 years old this year.
my sig
After that, we can talk about step two . . .
I'm sure their shelf-life is around 200 years. :-)
If you are in California and you are really interested in the topic this person brings up, you need to stop by this place outside Victorville along the 15 freeway.
California Institue of Earth Art and Architecture.
Not exactly what you might be looking for. But I want one of these houses. Cool looking, Cheap, Enviromentally friendly, and they will last a long... long... long... time.
Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I would suggest avoiding load-bearing interior walls. That way the house can be reconfigured as needed in the years to come. Also, use nice thick (at least 2x6) walls to allow space to run whatever you want in them later.
As for materials, any modern materials will last a long long time if properly maintained. Houses built of wood 100's of years ago are still standing and our wood products now are much stronger/better.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Just make it from non-boidegradable plastics. Cleaning would be a breeze too. Just wash it out with a hose.
Michael Loves Me!
There are many centuries-old buildings in Europe, but then, Europe doesn't have very many earthquakes and such. As a result, many of the oldest buildings seem to be made of stone.
In Japan, on the other hand, there are tons of buildings that are hundreds of years old, _and_ have survived some of the biggest earthquakes, not to mention, a fairly dynamic climate (hot humid summers, cold wet winters). Wooden architecture might not withstand fire, but unless that's a concern, I'm sure there are some lessons to be learned there.
---
Open Source Shirts
earthquakes, temperature swings, snow, etc... There are as many ways to build for the long term as there are climates
Yes, it has drawbacks, but if you want a house that will still be usable in three hundred years it's the only way to go. Not only are there many castles and the such still around that were made out of stone, but there's many stone houses as well. For instance, the old rock house on Moore Farm is almost 250 years old now, and still livable.
You're only going to live, what... a hundred years? Maybe a little more? Screw it. Make a great house that falls apart right when you die. You don't want your deadbeat relatives prospering from your hard work, do ya?!
This comes from *CNN*. inet.porn.house.jpg WTF.
Lots and lots of stone. IF there is one thing history teaches us, its that buildings of anything but stone suck for longevity.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
build it out of stone blocks. Look at all the monuments that are thousands of years old still standing made out of stone. granted for the most part they look like shit, but also remember they have not had any maintenence after probably the first thousand or so years. once you have the house built out of stone, you can furnish the inside anyway you wish. and the out side could be made to brick, or you could make some nice aztec designs in the stone. just a thought
Google for it.
It's a mix of mud and straw commonly used as a building material throughout various times and places. There are houses in Ireland that have withstood centuries of weather and worse with little more than a renewed coat of lime every now and again.
I've used this material myself. It takes temps as hot as 2300F, becomes a more or less solid block once it set, can be built a vertical foot at a session. Amazing amazing stuff.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Seems that the key in the past is building out of solid multiple-feet-thick stone bricks. =\
Worked for Europe and Egypt.
http://www.longnow.org/
The conventional materials for building houses, Such as plywood, and cheap, pressed wood posts are not meant to last for too long even with resonable maintainance.
I guess if you want it to really last, look into better quality materials such as steal beams, concret, marbel, high quality wood, graphite, etc.. It will cost a lot more, but thousands of eyars from now it might be still standing. =)
Just curious; why would you want a home that can last so long?
Your lifestyle may be the main determining factor how long your house lasts. Keep it clean and dry and pests will not find its structure a desirable alternative to a more suitable food supply. The metal composition of the plumbing (nickel, chrome, other stainless, etc...) will determine if rust will eat through over the years (and it will!) and cause a flood. Is there sufficient drainage of rain gutters? Is your basement sealed from cracks?
The goal is to keep the wild elements of nature out of your house with the roof over you. This includes party animals which may be more destructive than cockroaches.
However, a problem you will face is climate control and ventilation. Those 1800s houses were drafty, had huge non-living-space attics, and had poor energy efficiency. After thinking about it for a while, and visiting friends' tract mansions that smell of mold and rot 18 months after completion, I am convinced that the excess (and energy-consuming) ventilation through those old houses is a bit part of why they last so long.
Unfortunatley it is no longer acceptable to have your bedroom go to 110 deg.F in the summer and 38 deg.F + draft in the winter! So were I designing a new house to last, I would add a very large heat exchanger and the necessary vents, fans, smoke detectors, dampers, etc. to force-draft a good amount of air through the house. This would probably mean a duct system separate from the air conditioner (I would probably use radiant floor heating). And also a lot of motors, fans, controls, etc - so buy spare parts for 20 years down the road.
Your idea of an insulated equipment space between the top floor and attic is a good one - possibly you would want to put the heat exchanger there. And I would go ahead and wire for Cat6 and CATV, since technologies like that don't go away as fast as people think. But use conduit so you can change your mind on the media later.
Other things I would consider: real plaster and lath walls, copper supply / cast iron waste pipe, and for sure lots of access hatches so that things can be fixed without disassembling the walls.
sPH
Since the great wall is packed with the bodies of those that built it (and the pyramids probably have some poor saps crunched in as well), should we assume human skeletons contribute greatly to a structures durability?
-rt
My wife and I are building a monolithic dome. Basicaly it is about 3-4 nches of rebar reinforced concrete in a rebar reinforced concrete foundation. Should survive for decades easy and probably a couple hundred years at least. Some people don't like the dome look, so maybe you should just go with concrete, has great durability and great thermal mass.
My 2 cents: I've seen a number of these houses that last for centuries. There are a few pitfalls, i.e. finding materials that last. Most of the houses which people have inhabited for long have been upgraded much since their building. Probably the best thing you could do is employ good planning for accesses, plumbing and electrical. Odds are you won't have significant changes in plumbing technology or wiring, but being able to get at it for repair is a good. Insulation, windoes, etc, avoid plastics, as they break down. Good landscaping is important, too. No roots in your cellar/exterior plumbing and easy access to utilities (whatever shape they may be) Last, give yourself a decent vegetable garden, workspace and leisure space. :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...Teflon. Sure it would be a little slippery (when wet), but hey, it would outlast the elements.
-Valiss
Solid, old fashioned, brickwork. None of these wierd el cheapo modern shite that they use as a substitute. That stuff is just pathetic and noise travels through it easily as well which just sucks for obvious reasons.
here are some links:
Daycreek Home Page
Cordwood Masonry
Green Home Building...chniques: Cordwood
CORDWOOD - NEWBEE S...pages.com/cordwood
PPR Cordwood - Home
Yeah, I had that crazy idea when I built my house, too. I'd fix it up and that would be that. It just ain't going to happen.
My place is a plain old post-war home that is about 55 years old and is structurally fine but I have had to do many upgrades to it. With maintenance it should last a very long time but at some point it will probably be more economical to flatten it and build something new.
The fact is that tastes and technology change. When I moved in the place had knob and tube wiring and no insulation at all. I rewired (hint: use 20 amp, not 15, and run plenty of circuits - I have every one of my 7 outlets in the kitchen on its own breaker - no problem with overloads here). I had insulation put in. The plumbing was updated to copper years before I moved in.
At some point I will need a new furnace (40+ years old) and a new water heater (16+ years old) and will look into the new energy-efficient technology for those.
The point is that the house was pretty much state-of-the art when built but as things wear out or technology changes then the place gets upgraded to newer standards. What's next? Who knows? I could have pulled lots of cat 5 and then wanted cat 6 or fiber. A friend did a full network wiring during a remodel and never used it - by the time she was done she and her husband had switched to wireless. Even my nice wiring upgrade may become obsolete with DC feeds and smart controls. Someday I may be using fuel cells and heating the place with the waste heat. I don't know. Stonehenge has lasted a long time but it doesn't have any modern upgrades.
Enjoy your house. Pick your battles^h^h^h^h^h^h^h upgrades. Don't drive yourself crazy pursuing perfection.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
There's a german architect named Albert Speer who has done some work for the german government on this idea, though I understand it to be quite controversial.
Concerning your points #2 and 4 (technology and repairability), and, to a certain extent, #3 (usability)...
You know, it's really not that hard to tear down a sheet rock wall, make whatever changes you want and build another one. We're talking about one Saturday's work here. The materials are dirt cheap too: have you ever bought 2x4's? Or sheet rock? The most expensive thing you'll buy is likely to be the case of 24 beers for your pals who'll help you out.
So if you're planning to build a house that's going to last hundreds of years, a few Saturday's worth of the owner's time really doesn't weigh in heavily in the sum of the relevent considerations.
My friend and I theorized about creating a house in a cliff face. The house would be dug (excavated?) into the rock, and shaped to your needs.
Important things to remember in this plan were things such as:
- A sub-floor or crawlspace below the lowest floor to allow for water drains, wiring, etc.
- Plenty of internal space for ventilation (depending upon the type of rock there could be Radon issues).
- Insulation, depending upon the climate, your rock walls could be cold around the front of the house.
I very much like the "conduit" suggestion of yours. I think it is a good solution to have a centralized access method like that. It allows for easier service, and you never have to worry about where you are going to run that wire.
I would still run network wiring, as wireless should only be used in situations where wires aren't practical/convenient - portable devices mostly. As computers improve, that bandwidth becomes important in-house. (movies, music, etc)
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
take a look at the civilazations that have left ruins.
1. stone
2. square shapes
in south america the buildings that last are the square mayan/aztec design. they survive where others fall down.
everything else will fall apart due to age. use a material that nothing eats for longetivity.
I recently moved out of my last house, which was built circa 1900. The house was built to last - outer walls were all double layer of brick, central support beams were made of gigantic 12" diameter planed tree trunks. Theoretically the house could have been given a "shelf life" of hundreds of years.
Except for one thing - it had changed ownership about 12 times before I bought it. Someone decided around 1970 to put a kiln into the basement, except the pesky main support beam was a little too low for their liking - so they carved a 9" deep section out of it. By the time the house came to me, the middle of the house sat 3-4" lower than the outer edge.
One of the challenges to building a long lasting house is designing rooms that offer maximum flexibility of use, but since this isn't always possible, it might be a good idea to make modification of major supports structures difficult to achieve, to prevent stupid people from hurting themselves or the house.
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
That should last you thousands of years.
Would you want to live in a castle? No running water, no heat, no insulation, hard to modify... Even most of the 100-year-old homes I've seen are awful by modern standards. The rooms just weren't designed for the way people live today. Do you really think you can predict what sort of house people would want to live in 300 years from now?
Maybe a better question is how to make your house easy to adapt to new needs and easy to dismantle and recycle once the adaptability isn't good enough.
Were spent in a home that dated from the 17th century in rural England.
;-)
The house was all stone construction with huge oak beams and a lovely flagstone floor in the kitchen. That is how to build a house that lasts for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, it's very expensive to build homes that way these days. And flagstone kitchen floors are damn cold in winter
-psy
(Yes, I know Homer Simpson saw this house at "ELCOT", but it was actually at Disneyland.)
Best Buy can have you arrested
is a dam VS the earth.
Over time, the earth will win. Slab on grade to avoid that problem, and makes the house a bit cheaper.
They last forever!
All you'll need is a small room with a hole in the floor, and the three seashells :)
David
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, by Stewart Brand.
It's about how buildings are changed over time to meet the functionality required by their users. Some of the "now vs. a hundred years ago" photos are fascinating, and the book is filled with insights that could be applied to any field of design.
But seriously, what's the point? I mean you and I will live at most 120 years (with lots of medication of course), and there is always chance that either of us will die of unnatural death (if there is such a thing). :D
Who cares about a piece of building, made of stones, graphite, whatever, last hundreds of years? I mean what did Pharohs and Emperor Huangdi gained from their pyramids and big walls? ---Though the Great Wall was amazing to look at when I went there.
As Buddha said, no things are permanent, including you and me. And who knows what's gonna happen in a few years. North Korea might nuke your house. Yeah, I am a cynic, and I think it's pointless to try to achieve "immortality" in any form. Because there is one thing that's common to all of us. Sooner or later, we are all gonna die, and as King Solomon said, "No one's gonna remember you, or fucking care."
You may be interested in How Buildings Learn - it's about how buildings are altered and adapt to changes (new occupants, new uses, new environment, new technology) over time.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
" If one wanted to build/modify a home, what would one need to do to make sure that the home would still be standing, and usable, hundreds of years from now?"
:)
Well... don't build in California... the occasional violent movement of the ground tends to have a negative effect on most structures.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
One needs to start with good materials and look after them. The original oak timbers were cut and used green and allowed to season over the years. Kept dry they became very strong, hard but not brittle. Where the timbers entered the ground there was rot but this was cut away and new timber installed. This style of maintenance will allow the building to go on for ever if you want.
A case of my grandfathers trusty old axe; three new heads and four new shafts!
I live in Central Mexico, and there are a lot of old Spanish colonial here homes that were built anywhere from 200 - 400 years ago. They all have meter thick walls, and have proven very adaptable for modern needs, such as electrical installation and plumbing. Of course this is because you can just gouge out the wall for cabling and then plaster over it.
When you built a house back then, it was truly built to last.
Also, in temperate areas, the structure (25 high ceilings with all rooms opening to a central courtyard) provide natural air conditioning year round.
If you look at traditional architecture from around the world, you will find that every climate has had architecture adapted for it.
It has just been in the past 50 - 75 years or so, with the creation of housing developments that architecture has fallen apart and failed. That is because the architecture appropriate for the climate of Massachussetts is not appropriate for Arizona, and vice versa. However, housing developments are built to maximize the profits of the developer, not to last hundreds of years.
Of course, Spanish colonial architecture may not be appropriate for where ever you live, but I would guess you could find climate appropriate architecture for your region that would outlast your great great grandchildren.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
It's an even more intriguing question to ask, "how can we make other key technologies last for hundreds if not thousands of years?" Computers and information archives of all kinds; vehicles, terrestrial or otherwise; renewable power generators; and so forth.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
No joke. Old-fashioned water taps with metal seats and rubber washers will wear out but they are then repairable. The parts are terribly standard. Even if they weren't, they could be made out of common materials at some point in the future. Washerless faucets, otoh, use proprietary and expensive gadgets to control the flow of water. Some are not repairable. Some are, but require expensive, funky kits. And all of them will be eventually go out of fashion and their replacement parts along with them.
Faucets with washers and seats. With $10 in spare parts, they'll last for 10 lifetimes. If I ever build my own home, I'm gonna use faucets with plain round rubber washers and simple, standard metal seats.
The ex-apartment-maintenance man in me wouldn't have it any other way.
Even wood construction can last: Queens' College in Cambridge was badly built in the 15th century, and because they consistently backed the wrong side in various wars, they could never afford to fix it. It's still standing.
Bloody pointless ritual to appease $DEITY_OF_CHOICE.
The buildings that remain from 400 years ago only do so by dumb luck. Virtually all of their contemporaries have failed, even ones of similar design and construction.
To last 400 years a structure needs to be built of non-degrading materials, with a design that remains useful despite unknown domestic evolution, in a location that remains desirable, but not so desirable that the house is removed for redevelopment of the property, and in a style which will always be at least acceptable. Only one of those criteria is under the designer's control.
Simply seeing 400 year old houses no more implies the ability to create them than seeing someone win at roulette implies you can pick the next winning number.
Here's an interesting product, Timbercrete made onsite from sawdust and cement.
It's cheaper and a better insulator than stone (and just about anything else for that matter).
I'd guess that, if sealed properly, it could last for hundreds of years.
Step 1: use stone and concrete. The Romans used stone and concrete extensively, and many of their public works projects are STILL standing two thousand years later. Today we have reinforced concrete, which is even stronger than anything the Romans had. Also, this will make it prohibitively expensive to tear your house down if anyone gets any bright ideas about turning your property into a parking lot in a hundred years.
Step 2: Use concrete for interior walls, floors, well, basically everything. What's the first thing to go in old houses? The roof. And, when it does, water gets into the house and the whole structure rots. A concrete roof will keep water out, which is the most important thing if you want the house to last.
Step 3: Don't use glass for the windows. You can get a 4x8 sheet of inch-thick lexan or plexiglass, which is bulletproof by the way, for 175 bucks down on Canal Street in NYC. It's an extremely resilient material.
Step 4: Don't build the electric and etc into the walls. Design the house so that everything is retrofit, i.e. bolted onto the surface. That way you can always strip it out and replace it later. Note that you can't do this with plumbing, but no plan is perfect. Go for PVC pipes there; at least they won't rust.
Step 5: Paint EVERYTHING with a polymer-based paint to waterproof it.
Step 6: make sure the house sits at the base (or top) of a cliff or some other construction-inconvenient location. Then plant LOTS of oak trees all over the place. Within fifty years they'll turn into a nice forest. This has a couple of benefits:
A) if anyone tries to build on your property, the tree huggers will come out and Hayduke their machinery. They'll also spike the trees, which makes it reeeeeeeally tough to chainsaw them down safely.
B) Even if the local town board figures out how to get around the environmentalists, it'll cost 'em a fortune to knock down all those trees and make room for a wrecking crane to go for the house. They'll give up and go somewhere else.
Step 7: Cultivate the area around the house into a wetland, then make sure every environmentalist in the area is aware that it's there. Then, get the EPA in to declare it a wetland. This is way easier than you might think. It makes it just about impossible for anyone to build anything there ever again.
STEP 8, the MOST IMPORTANT STEP: Put the whole property into some kind of legal trust, so that you don't even really own it anymore and no one can sue you for it. Then, set up the trust so that it just passes along to your children, and so on. Your descendents will have use of the house forever, basically, but won't be able to sell it. In the process, make sure there's enough money in the trust to pay the taxes for at least the foreseeable future.
What do you think? I can't afford to do this kind of thing, but then, I rent an apartment and I'm into the whole "once I'm gone the world will forget I was ever here" thing. I find my complete irrelevance to the universe to be entirely invigorating.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'm a karma whore! Please mod me up Interesting! Do it or I'll keeel you. HAND!
Am lonely hermaphrodite seeking two people to fill both my holes simultaneously.
Most technology-related problem would be solved if the house was designed as a structural framework with panels that bolt on for interior and exterior walls. This would make the home easy to "open" for upgrades and maintenence.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I think that you have addressed nearly all of the really major problems in your question. My solution would be to build a concrete + steel building (provided you don't live near saltwater, where the steel degrades the contrete quickly) with very high ceilings (including in the basement) and no perminate walls (think giant box). Then make rooms with long-term barriers which could be removed or re-arranged for future needs. For electrical/communications/plumbing, the wires go above a removeable ceiling, the pipes go below the floor (above the ceiling of the floor below).
The major problem with this design is coming up with a pretty way to shape the outside of the building. Perhaps buring the whole thing and living in a hill would be a good option.
Pick a pretty location (but stay away from ocean view cliffs) that you can afford. If it is nice enough, other people with money will move to be there too (and stay).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
people want everything, immediately, and for free. an additional $1000-$2000 at construction time will yield a huge return in quality and flexibilty later on. the problem is, people wont pay one thin dime more for that quality and flexibility when you go to sell the home. it's all about comp's. what did your neighbors house sell for...not about what the specific house being sold offers. and you as the seller want every sheckle (sp?) so unless you consider your home a charity it's a bad investment to build for the future.
Look here
Now this is just a shame... Dixie Chicks punished for bashing bush. What's wrong with a little girl-on-girl action?
If you live in California, and you're thinking about building a house that will last for centuries, move first!
:)
All I ever heard about during the 80's were how earthquakes were going to cause the state to slide off into the Pacific. The 90's were El Nino driven mud slides. We're back on global warming and rising water levels now, and of course, there is the ever-present sprawl, blah blah blah blah...
My house is a large 2'-thick steel box situated 200 feet underground in the Arizona desert. It has a garage, which is another large 2'-thick steel box which is above ground and connects to the main house by a 2'-thick steel tube.
Didn't y'all learn anything from the Three Little Pigs. For God's sake, people!
I'm not trying to be a party pooper, because I'd love a house that'd last a while, but: surely fires, cyclones, earthquakes and son on will get to it before it gets anywhere near the end of its life span?
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt, New Zealand - jonathan@metalab.unc.edu
I've come accross This Building Company that claims its houses can withstand wind speeds in excess of 285 km/hr. http://www.mooreliving.com
When concrete was first invented, someone built a bunch of houses with it as a proof of concept. They were about twice the price of a house of similar size, but required hardly any maintenance, and were inexpensive to heat and cool. Though they are a bit unattractive, almost all of them of them are still standing now, in excellent condition.
Modern concrete homes benefit from preformed window and door holes making them just as livable as conventional houses. They are still much cheaper to heat and cool, and things like brick veneer or vinyl siding make them hard to distinguish from other houses. They also use regular wood for walls and floors, so if you feel the need to remodel, or add wiring, it's just as easy as with a regular house. The only abnormal thing is having to bring new wiring in through a predetermined location.
Termites are a much lower concern, since the steel reinforced concrete has to crack enough for termites to get through. By the time a crack gets big enough for termites to get through, it's probably time to remodel the inside anyway (every 35-50 years). This is a good time to seal the cracks up. Even if they get in before you want to remodel, you can rest well knowing that they aren't eating the expensive outer shell of your house.
The real problem with concrete houses is that they still carry a significant price premium of at least 30%. They are somewhat popular as a hybrid though. Fully finished walk-out 'basements' are very popular nowadays. An entire floor with bedrooms and other living space lets out directly onto ground level in back of the house with lots of windows, and has concrete walls. Ground level for the front of the house is at the second floor.
This classic from the 60's is still the absolute MUST place to start.
I really don't know how to say this strongly enough. Without at least reading this book *first* you are blind.
Technology may have changed, and you may not go along with everything Mr. Roberts has to say, but it's primary value is teaching you how to *think* about house building on a "proper foundation" (both figuratively and literally) without cultural bias and the false "knowledge" that has been imparted to you since birth by commercial interests.
It will open your eyes. You can't really ask for much more, and building a house blind can be a tragic mistake.
But this book. Read this book. Then read it again. Then put it aside for a few day and read it *again.*
It will become one of your most treasured possessions, along with the house it helps you create for *you* rather than some vague ideas other people have about what your house should be.
And above all remember, the "value" of your house isn't what you can sell it for. The value of your house is that it *houses* you and if you truly want to build for the ages and your heirs it's selling price is irrellevant.
Thoreau understood this, and it wouldn't hurt to read Walden even if your intention is to live in a 5000 square foot mansion in the middle of a city.
Your Engineered House is about *what* to live in. Walden is about *how* to live.
Put the two together and you're set for life.
KFG
Come to England, we have many.
Build the whole thing out of one huge industrial diamond.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apparently these dwellings last a long time. So the first item of business is to go find yourself a Hobbit.
Buildings are more like wave patterns than like solid matter (oh, wait, solid matter IS wave patterns--well--anyway).
Practically everything manmade that we think of is "permanent" is only as permanent as the institutions and people that support and maintain it.
It's absolutely astonishing just how quickly the most solid-looking things crumble and vanish as soon as we stop paying attention to them. Vacate a town, and a hundred years later someone examining aerial photos with a magnifying glass can see nothing but a slight telltale pattern unevenness in the texture of the vegetation...
What you do when you build it is just the beginning.
To make a building last, build something that people will want to live in and maintain.
Take a look at Stewart Brand's book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
1. A good crawlspace between floors, and under the lowest floor. Allows for running wiring/ducting/plumbing. 2. Avoid load bearing walls in the interior - instead focus on load bearing posts or columns. Much more flexibility over the long term. 3. Space "walls" behind all plumbing areas - room for working, repairs, enhancements. (combined with #1 - your repairability / enhancability should be virtually unlimitted). 4. Keep "moving parts" away from weaker areas. Example - keep plenty of strong material around doors / windows to reduce damage from wear. 5. Use quality materials up front. 6. Be careful what you put outside. Many types of shrubs/trees/plants are hard on homes, and shouldn't be too close. Others can provide needed protective shade or wind protection. Some plants will ward of daminging insects, and attract beneficial ones. 7. Keep it attractive / stylish. Nothing is more damaging to a home than bad/boring architecture. Not much withstands the wrecking ball. 8. "Overbuild". Better wiring than is needed. Better insulation than is needed. Better roofing. More outlets than you think you need. More lights than you think you need. More bathrooms. More is always better up front, and very expensive later. 9. Watch the obvious factors - fire prevention, earthquake structure, flood management. Again - make things repairable. 10. Well, thats about it - so 10 will be simply - use skilled crafstmen everywhere. They know better than any of us.
All these people advising stone obviously haven't lived anywhere with *really* old houses. I grew up visiting pubs from a time when people were shorter (pre-industrialisation, i.e. greater than 150 years ago). I would have stand between the oak beams, and duck as I walked around. There are many old houses with visible oak beams and thatch roofs. Dunno if the walls are still wattle and daub, but the Tudor style has lasted a long time.
I suspect stone/brick is easier and cheaper to maintain (although more expensive up front), but anything is going to need looking after and having money spent on it. Buildings don't look after themselves.
Oh, as for style: I hate these open concept homes with merged living and dining rooms, and even open access to the kitchen. That's just builders trying to be cheap. It goes hand-in-hand with not putting in overhead fixtures and control of sockets via light switches. I like a door on my kitchen to keep the rest of the house smelling pleasant, and going to eat in a separate dining room makes eating more enjoyable (and keeps food smells, etc away).
Walls? -You don't need it. When I was at your age..blah blah.. lived outside
Electricity? -You don't need it. Use your self and the heath from your body.. blah blah..
Steel? Wood? -You don't need it. When I was a kid.. blah blah.. If you insist; use some stone. After all they still call it the Stonage.
Technology? Damn important man! Nothing but:
[INSERT PREFERED CABLING = Optical, Cat6, CAt7, Cowboyneal Automatic Cable Guy] You just can't live withoud decent wiring!
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Like many, my first thought was stone, fitted together tightly without mortar ala Egyptian pyramids.
;)
;)
Then I started to think about other houses that I've been in that were over a century old. These houses were built much more solidly than modern houses... which is really wierd when you consider all of the new "codes" and laws as to how a house should be built. These houses were built when people took pride in what they were building, not just trying to build the cheapest house they could for the sake of saving a buck.
1. Overengineer everything. Make the rooms too big, the supports too sturdy, the walls too heavy, etc.
2. Use solid, treated wood (if you use wood at all), no press-board, particle-board, or plywood.
3. Make the exterior walls out of something weatherproof, like bricks or fieldstones. I'm not even sure I'd recommend concrete blocks on this one, as it weathers much more quickly than fired bricks.
4. If you decide to use plastics, like the recycled 2x4s, make sure they're not exposed to the sun, as nearly all plastics deteriorate with prolonged exposure.
5. Don't rely on steel at all (like the new steel struts), as it will rust. Even galvanized steel will rust anywhere it has been scratched, drilled, or cut. This rust will, over time, propogate horribly, just as it does in car bodies. Cast iron is safer, as it does not rust as deeply as quickly as processed steel, although I would definately coat it with something heavy and permanent (powder-coat comes to mind).
The hardest part would be to find a suitable location for this house... something built like this couldn't be in an earthquake zone.
Another hard part would be to come up with a "timeless" design. You could alway shoot for the classic castle design.
The roof will be the soft spot with any house except a geodesic or monolithic dome structure, so pay special attention to it... use GLAZED concrete tiles. Speaking from experience here, after 35-40 years, non-glazed concrete roof tiles will wear through in non-obvious ways and leak. The damage will not be apparent until it is catastrophic.
Just curious, did you win lotto?
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Let's look at houses that are a 100+ years old.
Insulation wise, how good is it?
Piping, wiring, heating and ventalation? How good is the quality?
What is the cost of updating and retrofiting?
In a hundred years from now, the same questions can be asked of our current homes.
Maybe a better question should be "how can we build homes, that can be easily dismantled and recycled, to make way for better technology"?
I was once enamored by the idea of building a house that would last a thousand years. While I came up with several ways to do it, I also came to the conclusion that to do so is a terrible idea.
The needs of today are not the needs of tomorrow. If you have ever visited some of those thousand year old towns in europe you know that the streets are too small, the heating sucks, power lines and pipes have no place to hide, drafty and damp. Not a happy place to be but for SCA fans.
The castles of old are horrible places to spend any amount of time as well, not because they are old, but because they were designed with different priorities.
Thus, we can project that in the future, today's home of paradise might be quaint or gaudy to future eyes. But they won't be able to tear it down and building something good because it will be a historical landmark. A useless museum probably. And the children of tomorrow will be trapped inside buildings built by long dead peoples.
Perhaps in the future there will be no houses at all! Borrowing from Philo Farnsworth's ideas about the potential of fusion, maybe house of tomorrow will fit in your pocket when not in use, and be constructed entrirely of force fields. The old time houses will seem like caves!
My parents house is a 19th century farmhouse in Ireland. The walls are unshaped stone (just the faces are finished)and mortar. They are three feet, (yes 1 meter) thick. There is a 3 feet thick dividing wall in the center of the house running between the back wall and the front wall.
The roof beams are old ships masts and a lot of the other timbers were ships timbers.
The foundation is on bedrock.
It's survived a gas cooker explosion (which took out 2 windows and the kitchen cabinets, but the floors and the walls never moved), several huge storms over the last century and a lot of floods.
Building houses that way today does cost a fortune. For a start you can't get good timber anymore - most timber is kiln dried and doesn't seem to age as well as the timber that was stored for 20 or 30 years to dry naturally.
It's also hard to find a builder who knows the principle of dry stone building. Most older Irish homes were built in the same style as drystone walls, except that mortar was also used.
some crack smoking mod gave it the cowardly overrated mod.
A cave should be pretty durable as long as nobody comes after you with a MOAB.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
What about, a house that is completely compostable, recyclable and cheap that can be returned to the earth so that minimal additional cost is incurred in it's destruction, therefore making upgrade costs less. Rather than thinking about how permant we can make our mark as human viruses on this planet, perhaps we should be thinking about how to make the least impact, and yet still be livable. Like anyone knows in the computer industry.. old is no good. A house is a mere living system, like a computer old ones are just a pain in the ass.
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Of course, physical factors are important. Suburban development is crap, though I'm curious about the quality of some of the urban development I've seen -- with most of the exterior structure being built out of concrete and brick. I'm sure the interior is still crappy drywall without good trim or any of the detail that you find in an older house, but it feels like the structure is meant to stick around. (BTW, brick lasts a really long time and is pretty low-maintenance)
But when I see houses going down, it's often not because they are falling apart. Or if they are falling apart, it's often because people didn't care about them (at least for some period) and they went in disrepair. Really, it's because the location is desirable and the land is worth building a better house on (or houses).
So a really long-lasting house should fully exploit the potential of its location. I'd stand to say that it shouldn't have too large a lot, and maybe exist somewhere with well-apportioned land (like the inner city). The value of the house should not be in the size of the land, or even the size of the house (so long as the house matches its property), but in the quality of the house.
Build tall instead of wide, it's easier to expand the width later, but people don't go adding floors to their buildings.
If you not only for the house to exist, but for it to stay in your family, you'll have to think a lot about what you imagine your family being -- a country home, a city home, an old suburb are all possibilities. New suburbs are built by people that aren't willing to invest in their community, which is no recipe for long-term permanence, of the house or as a base for your family -- avoid them entirely. Each city will have a wide variety of neighborhoods, but I feel like they come in three varieties -- established (upper-class) neighborhoods, neighborhoods undergoing gentrification, and the middle-class neighborhoods. (There may be lots of lower-class land, but I'm just guessing you aren't going to build a home there). You need a lot of resources for the established neighborhood, because there's probably already a perfectly good house on the location. I don't think any of us really know what the long term future of the gentrified neighborhoods is going to be, especially the second generation of gentrification that we're seeing.
Anyway, those are just thoughts... it's the kind of thing you could debate about for a long time.
Pick any home. Next, give birth to a president or write a constitution. You might also have some luck birthing a Hollywood star or catholic saint. You could optionally have Edgar Allen Poe or Shakespeare over and hope they might write something. Getting George Washington to sleepover also can work. Make history and someone may want to preserve the legacy.
Google for information on Monolithic Dome construction. When your modern tract houses are starting to fall apart, the concrete in a dome house will just be hitting its prime. They are also remarkably resilient against fire & adverse weather conditions (hurricanes/tornadoes).
Monolithic domes are the castles of the 21st century.
Okay, I love stone as much or more than the next guy, but it's hardly necessary to build a house out of stone to get into the multi-hundred lifespan range. There are lots of houses in New England that are stick-frame homes with wooden clapboard siding that are >200 years old.
There are numerous threats to a house's longevity:
1) Weather
2) Pests (insects, mice, etc.)
3) insufficient maintenance
4) Problems such as earthslides, earthquakes, settling, tree roots damaging foundations, etc.
This is off the top of my pointy head, so I'm sure there are categories I'm not thinking of right now.
Okay, so we know that you can get a stick-frame, non-stone house to last for multiple hundreds of years. How to PLAN for that is another matter.
First, take the weather and your local area into account. Prone to earthquakes? In a flood plain? Loose soil? Soil that drains poorly? On a hillside? Design accordingly! Many of these are foundation design issues and can be designed around. I'd stay away from the flood plain, though.
Next, once you've got your design TYPE planned, make sure your builder is doing to use appropriate engineering to achieve the design requirements. These include new types of roofing materials, roofing support design (big issue in Hurricane-areas - make sure your roof SUPPORTS can take it). Make sure your roofing system can 'breathe' if that's what it needs. The roofing material needs to be matched to the correct roof support system - cheap builders don't care, but this is what can cause massive roofing problems a few decades down the road, depending on weather in your area. Make sure your soil drains properly. Make sure your foundation is sealed properly. Make sure your windows are correctly installed (and skylights are even more problematic), and installed correctly for YOUR type of wall/roof system. Make sure your house is designed properly for your site - what type of sun/wind/rain do you get in that area? Make sure your window & skylight placement is proper. On the coast? Make sure higher salt content & moisture content in the air is taken into account for ALL materials used. Moisture-resistent drywall. Wood that comes in contact with concrete/stone/earth needs to be treated properly. Don't use wood shingles if you've ever heard of 'fire'. Live in a forest area that is prone to fires? Design accordingly (have a swimming pool - backup water source for dousing house down).
Maintenance. Learn what all the systems in your house would require, and make sure you've got the wherewithall to make that happen. Maintenance costs money, so build that into your accounting. Making your house's internal environment have a fairly consistent temperature/humidity level will go a long way to making wood and drywall last much longer. If your roof needs work, get it done RIGHT AWAY. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, and foundation systems. These are your critical priority systems to maintain, as they can impact everything else in very bad (expen$ive) ways. If your architect & builder are smart, they can minimize the amount of plumbing needed (designing house to that, say, kitchen, bathrooms, etc. share as many walls as possible. A good builder can make things like 'wet walls' (remember the Matrix?) where service people can get access to normally hidden things like plumbing, etc. Having to bust through a drywall to get to hidden plumbing really blows.
Make sure everything is vented properly (bathrooms, oven hoods, etc.) - that helps make things more livable. Make sure you spend the money for the good windows that tilt in so you can easily clean things and INSPECT them. Getting cheap stuff that isn't easily accessible is probably not a good idea in the long run.
Flooring - radiantly heat that floor! Very nice technology.
Zone heating/cooling - a great idea, but having vastly differing temperatures in adjoining rooms makes me nervous. I've seen no anecdotal evidence of this being a problem, though houses with zone heating/cooling
You can always dig a hole to extend an underground house, but you can't really un-dig one. If you wanted an extra room, that's easy, but if you want to remove it or alter it, it's going to be difficult.
Many people in the opal mining town of Cooper Pedy, South Australia live underground to escape the heat.
Heating would be an issue if you were deep underground. Maybe the heat from molten lava should be used for heating? However, any kind of explosion/terrorism would rupture the pipes and kill everyone in the immediate area.
I would want steel reinforcements in my underground house, although how useful it would be when there are thousands of tonnes of rock above?
What happens after an earthquake? Compulsory interior re-decorating? You mix up some cement to patch up the gaping hole leading to your neighbours toilet?
get a bunch of slaves,then have them cut some rather large blocks , than have them stack the blocks in some design, probably pyrmidal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The first castle I built on a swamp... that fell over. The second castle I built on a swamp... that one burned down. The third castle I built on the swamp burned down and fell over into the swamp.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Castles, pyramids, great wall, etc. don't :-).
:-)
impress me that much, because these were built
as massive projects involving far more resources
than any average schmuck could muster (besides
IMHO non of these come anywhere near the older
megaliths in wester europe, but I digress
I.e., considering the amount of work and
resources invested in these projects, they
ought to be be long lasting, and actually
some of them (especially the medieval castles)
are quite a bit disappointing in this regard.
One far less ambitious and superficially
unimpressive building that really struck me
was the Maison Tavel in Geneva (Switzerland);
(google search for: maison tavel geneva); just
a house, but has been continuously occupied by
the same 'bourgeois' family for close to a
thousand years.
you may want to look into this house for tips
Giraldus
Buy yourself an old nuclear missle silo like this one:
silo
I'm sure that bad boy will be around for a while.
A lot depends on where you plan to live and the weather conditions present (hurricanes in the South, earthquakes out west, mudslides in the Northwest, and massive snowstorms in the Northeast), but in general you can use these materials:
;-)
Autoclaved Aerated Concrete for the basic structure of your house. It insulates (both thermally and acoustically), and can be worked with ordinary wood-working tools.
For roofing, real slate is beautiful, but they're fragile. Try concrete roof tiles instead. They were used on a Hometime episode a few years ago where they built a log cabin using the material.
Electrical: You can combine the lighting circuits onto shared circuit breakers, but having each rooms outlets on their own breaker is very nice. Conduit is almost required when using the AAC blocks, so you get a freebie there.
Doors/Windows: You just can't beat the ones made in the scandinavian countries. Triple pane, low-e coatings, excellent hardware -- just plain solid operation.
Obviously, I've given this some thought myself
Chip H.
The Timeless Way of Building
A Pattern Language
If you really want to build a house that will last for hundreds of years, the most important thing to do is to leave your descendants with enough money to keep it up. Most of the popular building materials are physically good enough to last for a very long time, but it's very tough for a building to stand a long time if it's not maintained. A lot of buildings are also torn down long before they need to be in order to make space for a new building of some type. Money will help there, too, because it will give your descendants the leverage they need to fend off possible threats to the house. Beyond that, just look at what materials were used in existing very old houses in the area and use those, since they've proven their durability under local conditions.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Instead of building homes out of 2 by 4's and cardboard, er, drywall, you might want to try something more durable.
Such as bricks and steel reinforced concrete.
You may have the impression that concrete is a modern material. It isn't.
The Romans used concrete extensively, there are a number of several hundred year old concrete buildings.
How long it lasts is down to the building design. Fundamentally, it has to be flexible and low cost to run. People pull down buildings because they become expensive to operate and difficult to use.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Some of the criteria mentioned by the author set me thinking: and here is what I think might be useful in building a house that lasts:
a. Structural integrity
Structures made from rocks tend to last longer. In fact, most of the ancient buildings or structures were made of rock. Ditto for Medeival castles (and not_just_the_ones_in_Europe). So, looking at the past, rock should be your first choice. But is it the only one? I don't think so.
Reinforced concrete *could* be an option. However, concrete is a very treacherous substance Also, if one lives in area that experiences heavy rainfall, concrete might not be a good choice. Moisture/ rainwater can seep through the voids in concrete and can corrode the reinforcement. The cost of waterproofing might be huge.
Bricks. Lots of them. The thicker the brickwall, the longer it might last. But then how many people would want a wall say 4 feet thick?
Timber: In principle, well-cured timber should last for a long time. For e.g the pillars that support the dykes/ docks in many older European cities.
b. Technology
That is an interesting criterion. TV screens are getting bigger, computer monitors are getting thinner. So, the amount of space required for each of these "Display Units" is changing. Similarly, cell phones are a commonplace, so theoretically, telephone conduits/sockets are not necessary. It is difficult to predict what the appliances/ applications in the future would be like.
c. Usability
What do you, the owner/habitant of the structure plan to use the building for? If you plan to stay there for a LONG time ( and I mean till ripe old age) start thinking of having ramps instead of staircases. Or escalators. Similarly, the bedrooms should be on the ground floor (or first floor as some people call it). How many children are you planning to have? Do you plan to convert the building to a museum/public library after your death? THat will decide how much of usable space you will need to provide in the house. Remember, a group of people need more space to move through a room than a single person.
d. Reparability
Concrete repairs are expensive. Rock masonry repairs are difficult and expensive (I am speaking in genral) Timber *might* be cheaper to maintain.
Again by meintenance I am assuming normal maintenance (painting/waterproofing, etc.)
e. Location
As far away from Human habitat as possible. The Pyramids/ castles/ Great Wall of China....were they in the cities/ suburbs????
f. Aesthetics:
I am not the aesthetics type. Personally, I believe that functionality is superior to looks. What is considered beautiful or appealing today might not be considered the same in the future. ("In the 60's in England one could have bad teeth and still be considered sexy"...Austin Powers Int'l Man of Mystery if I am not mistaken)
**Remember: at the end of the day, it is RESOURCES that will decide the fate of the structure. Some kings spent decades building monuments. Some dynasties spent centuries building walls.....They could do so because they had resources. In terms of land, labor, money, material, time and many more.
There are much more important things to concern yourself about than making a house stand for a century.
Some of the comments in this story are interesting from a building standards POV.
From what I gather, a lot of US houses are made of wood and you have crawl spaces inbetween interior walls.
Over here in the UK modern houses are generally double skin brick exterior walls with a damp proof course injected in to 1 or 2 ft above ground level. The depth of footings the walls sit on generally goes down to clay or rock. the 'ground floor' sits well above the dirt.
Interior walls are usually single brick (no crawl space madness) and plastered - wires and pipes are buired underneath the plaster. Some walls are dry lined - thats a wood frame with plaster board, and then skimmed with finish plaster.
Yes this a pain if you want to wire your house for CAT5 - chopping the plaster off your wall to run the wires in a channel and then plastering up really messes your decorating.
The roofing is slate tiles over felt over wood spars. Windows are double glazed PVC units (for security, noise reduction and energy efficiency). Most houses have a gas fired boiler for hot water which feeds central heating radiators and the hot water tap. Our electrictity is at 240v 50Hz and we have an earthing system for safety.
I remember reading about some Western architects who came here to study construction methods, especially the puzzle-like way that wooden beams are fitted together to create a temple roof. Their determination was that it was simply too complicated to be able to be reproduced in the west, as it took years of apprenticeship to learn how to cut and fit the joints.
Aside from the nifty temples, most Japanese architecture is crap. I live in an "old" building, built in the 1980's. No insulation, ugly from the outside.
Oh, and if you like that pre-war style with the tiled roofs, remember that many many people in the Kobe quake were killed by falling tiles.
Sometimes I think that Gojira stomped on Tokyo because he had good taste.
-- My Weblog.
One of the most interesting and useful resources for thoughts on living spaces is the work of Christopher Alexander. The website is helpful, but starting with the book "A Pattern Language" is better. http://www.patternlanguage.com/
Of course, the oldest buildings you see today will be low-tech resilent materials; the houses are old, after all. There's something to be said for making use of our society's massive non-biodegradable waste stream into something that you want to last a long time.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Before I start I should say that my girlfriend (well, partner, but using the word girlfriend should get a few Slashdotters drooling) is a town planner, a graduate of the internationally reknowned Bartlett School of Planning, and I've learnt a thing or two about urban design, planning and architecture from her along the way.
Modern buildings, with very few exceptions, aren't designed to last for hundreds of years. Architects, developers and builders design and build for the short term, not for the long term. The materials they choose to work with aren't designed to last for centuries simply because cities, and hence buildings, evolve over time - what's needed and what's fashionable today will be useless and outdated in only a couple of decades from now.
The proof of this is around us - buildings erected in the 60s and 70s are being pulled down all the time, to make way for more "modern", "practical" and "aesthetic" developments. This is especially true of commercial buildings but it also applies to residential structures too.
Modern building design is nothing like Victorian building design. The Victorians constructed brick buildings, because brick was the best material available to them. As a result, they couldn't safely build more than four or five storeys - beyond that a building would not be able to support its own weight. They also (for the most part) didn't have any means of transporting goods and people up and down easily - lifts/elevators didn't really take off in a big way until the turn of the 20th century.
It was only when the means to work steel effectively, to shape it as required, was developed that modern building design took off. Steel being lighter and stronger than brick allowed architects to design taller, more spacious buildings and coupled with the use of lifts/elevators, it allowed them to break the ceiling barrier that previously existed. Once they started to work with steel, they quickly were able to go very high, very quickly, hence the rapid development of skyscrapers almost overnight in New York and other cities.
But I'm digressing from my main point: The reason why buildings don't last is because, generally they're designed with the knowledge that they'll be obsolete within their designers' lifetimes.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Much maligned in recent times, a traditional Hovel can last for centuries if properly maintained. In Europe there are some examples well over 500 years old. Most hovels are built into a hedge, thicket or clump of small trees and consist of a single room with no provision for sanitation, and usually without running water or cable TV. Costly ventilation systems are rarely needed as usually the builder would leave large openings for the smoke to escape. Construction materials usually comprise of sticks, mud and a dash of bovine excrement. Very cheap and can usually be habitable in a few hours. Insects can sometimes be a problem, but once a family of rats move in this usually sorts its self out.
on building to last for a long time is How Buldings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. by Stewart Brand (See also here, here and here
,000 year clock so he's very much into thinking about the longer term.
The book covers everything about buildings after they are built from leaks, technological changes to changing styles. Have a look at the Amazon link for the samples pages to get an idea of the content and especially the pictures. The book covers modern homes, office buildings, castles, farm houses. small shacks and everything in between. It is definately the place to start if you want to build something that will be around and used in 50 or 500 years.
It's not a howto or builders guide except in the general sense. However it covers the general picture of the things you need to think about and provides links to other sources with more specific information. Overall it is one of my favourate books.
The author is president of the Long Now Foundation which is building the 10
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.
My house here in Cambridge, England, is fairly modern (built circa 1865). A great many of the university buildings are much older. Interestingly, the colleges here take a very long term view to building new property; while most modern buildings only have a design life of 50 years or so they target 200 years as their standard. I guess if you've been around as an institution for 500 years already you have a different outlook on what a "long term" investment is than most corporations. Anyway, as a result many of the larger architects firms here in Cambridge have the expertise that you need. As it happens the "short answer" has already been given in a previous post; use a lot of stone.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
If you need to reconfigure, it's easy to take the rooms apart and put them back together again.
Easy...don't install Windows!
Blarf.
Concrete is not an invention of the modern world. The oldest known concrete dates back to 5,600 BC in the former Yugoslavia. The first major users of concrete where the Egyptians in around 2,500 BC. The Romans followed in around 300 BC. Google for the history of concrete for more information.
Some of the earliest straw bale homes were built around the turn of the century (see this paper for a few details) and still seem to have good structural integrity... Aside from that I would hesitate to make any extravagant claims about the length of time straw bale structures might last.
In addition to the other points mentioned, however, I would add a few of my own to consider.
So what about it? It's fun to speculate as if money were no object, but has anyone else researched alternative construction methods that have advantages over the traditional frame construction? Has anybody actually done this?
http://metapundit.net
What happens after 10 years, when the roof needs replacing - then a wall needs structural repair after a 100. Then the other walls. Then the foundation needs underpinning and resetting.
At what point do you decide the house is completely different?
For example, consider this quote from a UK sitcom "Only Fools and Horses":
Trigger: I've been sweeping the streets with the same broom for 25 years
DelBoy: Really?
Trigger: Yeah - its had 16 replacement heads and 4 replacement handles.
The oldest church in South Carolina is made of rammed earth as well as the oldest church in the San Francisco area (towers that Hanibal built in Spain are also still standing). The new techniques of using rebar to tie the pad and rehinforcing top beam together is great. Here's a good book on it.
We're planning on having a rammed earth ground floor with a timber framed second story. The ground floor is going to be designed for additions to be added on as needed (large doorways in exterior walls).
For interior use, we're going to use a manifold system that will pipe water to where ever it's to be used. You can think of it as two hubs, one hot, one cold and flexible pcv/vinal lines that run, in the ceiling, from the hub to the faucet. This gives you flexibility in placing sinks and such or even repurposing rooms. For sewage, that'll run under the floor. This'll be accessable from the basement. We're looking into grey water recovery as we'll be doing this in New Mexico (not that any place can't stand some water conservation).
For networking, am going to be running hamster tunnels (smurf tunnels?) along the base of the walls as well as along the top of the walls, between ceiling and upper floor. Don't know about adding wireless access points/antennas to the system.
The layout of the house will also make use of berming along the north walls and a porch along the south walls that will block most of the summer sun but allow winter sun to heat the place. Some of this design will come from earthships being built in New Mexico. We'd like to be totally off the net, but our love of tech makes this a distant dream (unless low power laptops take over for just about everything).
I drank what? -- Socrates
Modern wood is actually not nearly as strong as old wood. It is fast-growth wood; look at a section of wood from 50-year old whatever and compare it to a modern 2x4. The growth rings are what give you strength (over simplification); a 2x4 only has a few rings!
A better generalization is to use materials that are suitable for the local environment. Brick works well where you don't have earthquakes... wood works well where you do! Concrete works well where fires are a risk...
I see an increasing number of expensive luxury homes built with steel beams and concrete rather like office buildings. Very nice.
I personally like ICF technology.
.sig
(Try googling for Insulating Concrete Forms)
The cost is initially higher than traditional wood,
but it's quite competitive if you take the long view.
-- this is not a
(It's a little more complex than the above description - but not too bad)
A friend of mine who designs buildings says that these are popular in Canada and Europe. The only downside is that they're so freakin' tough that you can't really rip hunks out if you decide to make additions later.
For some pictures see, for example,
www.logixicf.com/
(I'm not affiliated with them, and have no idea if this product is good - but the pictures are better than on the other sites I found)
Cost no object?
How about a house completely made out of a corrosion resistant metal, like titanium or stainless steel.. walls, roof, etc. would be made from this.
foundation would be solid granite blocks.
anything I'm missing?
Plexiglas discolors over time; glass doesn't. The best bet is layered glass; you can put plastic in the middle and glass on the outsides. So what if you break a window... that's life!
Missile Bases
Wood is a perfectly good material for beams. Your 400 years old ancestral home is held up with wood. The nearly 800 years old St-Jean Hospital in Bruges (Belgium) has a roof held by huge wooden beams that date back from sometime between 1188 and the 14th century. You don't need special high-tech woods or steel.
The quality of the construction and a design that can be cost effectively repaired or overhauled is much more important, IMHO. The common trait of 400+ years old structure is they've been fixed many times without long term impact on the whole.
Alex
There is but one way to be assured of shelter into the future. Store up good deeds and righteousness with God, and you shall have a place in the house of the Lord forever.
If you go with concrete or stone floors then go for radiant heat and cooling. (The cooling is a little tricky; you have to make sure you are above the dew point.) It also lends itself to solar heating and free-cooling.
Why, Diskworld, of course. You could google this, *or* Terry Pratchett, but why not search right here on /. for "Pratchett" and "Diskworld" with "Niven"? That'll setcha up jest fine.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Build your house from diamond, platinium and quartz.
Burry it 200 feet deep and you can be sure it will last forever. It sure will be crap, but who cares about you anyway ?
It's on the Canadian Shield. Some of the most geologically stable land in the world. Few tornadoes also (well, at least in Duluth, its a giant hill so...) Very, very, very low chance of earthquakes (caused by the crust warping back up from the glaciers--about one millimeter a year, most of the quakes are in S MN though.) Not many big cities that could be a target in a war/terrorist situation. Lots of iron ore mines in the Arrowhead region though,take that as you see it. Or alternatively any Canadian province on the Canadian shield.
Steel reinforced concrete is not "far better" for long term use by any rational standpoint. It stretches, pulls, fractures from within. And that's if it is kept perfectly dry every single day that it exists.
But don't mind me. I was just discussing this exact subject with a civil engineer last night and framing that conversation around thoughts from ones I've had with authorities as varied as the senior job site engineer for rebuilding the Statue of Liberty and folks from the Millenium Clock Project at the MIT Media Lab.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
... i have some opinions on this.
number one above all else: build a home that you can love. in sickness and in health, as a child and as a senior, good times bad times. a house that is loved will have people take care of it. a home is shelter, for bodies and for souls.
then think about making it easy to take care of. that's not necessarily by exotic construction and materials. it's by sound materials, available materials, and materials a homeowner can repair or maintain or change him[her]self when times are poor.
think of the pieces of your house as items in a changing wardrobe, not a one-time suit of armour.
okay. that's philosophy and your young ears want tech wizdom. let's do that now. use the hundred year rule. if a material or technique has lasted a hundred years, it's a pretty good one. we've had a *lot* of new materials since the mid eighties. a good many were bunk. some are turning out okay and i'm warming to them. but when undecided i use the hundred year rule.
regardless: keep a sound roof. water must stay out or everything beneath will fail. similar words for the foundation. do very good drainage of the property.
now go subscibe to fine homebuilding magazine by the taunton press. spend a few years absorbing the varied opinions [not quite as bad as slashdot, but bring some salt].
oh, and about the 'they don't build them like that anymore' refrain... bullshit. we've always made lots of crap. it's just that better work lasts and hence we tend to think that's how it was done 'back then'.
I come from Europe, and in my hometown there are many houses that have lasted for centuries. Most commonly they have a concrete foundation. Then the first floor exterior walls are made of stone. The subsequent floors can be made either of brick or stone, it is really an aesthetic decision. The internal walls most often are not supporting, so they are made of brick.
Also, a trick I learned from my grandparents, which works great in keeping your house cool in summer and warm in winter. The idea is to basically have two layers of outer walls, with air in between. This technique has been used for centuries in the Middle East, where it is hot as hell.
Bulgaria is 13 centuries old, and some castles have lasted for centuries. There is a church near my old school which dates back to the 9th century or something like that. Believe me it is not that hard to make a house that your grand-grand children can live in. It probably will be expensive here in the states though, where people charge a lot for non-conventional stuff.
John Travolta, 52, star of "Saturday Night Fever" and "Grease" died today when a DC10 he was piloting crashed into a mountain in the Azores. Heavy weather is being blamed for the crash.
The plastic will decompose LONG before that Twinkie inside ever will! Let's here it for chemical preservatives!
Druegan
Certain types of stone are a good choice. Concrete (plain, or reinforced with large amounts of cover and minimal steel structural contribution) is a good choice. Large hardwood, old growth timebers aren't a bad idea if you're only looking at a couple of centuries.
Here's the key, though: BUILDING CODES SPECIFY LOADS FOR 50 YEAR EVENTS. That's right folks, 50 years. All the loads specified by modern building codes are (generally speaking) designed to a 2% probability of occurance in any given year. Okay, technically that's not 50 years - but you get the idea.
Your design, structurally, should be for a 500 year event. We can extrapolate for those loads, but it is a bot more severe.
Also, build in a seismically stable, non-coastline, non-flooding, low-snow, low rain, low relative humidity locale. Build in the middle of nowhere - nobody cares about the style, and the likelihood of somebody wanting to build a road/powerline/gasline/oil pipline through your house is lower.
Naturally, you should account for two floors plus an unused attic and basement so that you can do repairs & replacement. Make sure you feed everything from your unfinished spaces - nothing in your unaccessible ceiling/floor.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Make it out of Lego(TM) blocks. Is there really any other way to build?
Raceways are conduits you put on the outside (facing the room) of your interior walls. After you've installed them, rewiring your house then requires ... a screwdriver. It's supposed to be easier on the insulation, too (no holes in walls).
Raceways, incidentally, were often used when first installing electricity in old houses back in the early to mid 1900s. Some houses still have them, but they are usually too tiny to run anything but electrical wire through.
One problem, though. Many non-geeks might find raceways ugly. :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Everyone seems to be putting thought into what type of house will endure time and weather. But another big concern, for me, would be how the house adapts to your future lifestyle. I'm not just talking about room for a big tv and speakers, shelves, whatever. Say you put in cables or fiber so the house is wired to make a LAN pretty easily. What if, down the line, you need to upgrade or something fails? If your house is stone, you're going to have a tough time, I would imagine. Now this is purely conjecture, but what about in the distant future? What if wall-tvs become a reality? It might not be feasible to tear down the wall of a stone/brick house to put in your tv. What about a house that will not only endure time, but will also scale with it?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Here's a web-site about stone construction:
0 03/02/0 8/galleryBoxesAndCans.html
http://www.thepeacock.com/
And here is another vision, as steel can last a long time.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0119080/stories/2
Longevity is good. It did wonders for Cobol.
Honestly, Having a house stand for a long time is a nice goal, but if you take into account how people use houses now compared to how they were used 25 years ago, and go back in 25 year increments, you will likely not see any period of time larger than 50 or 75 years where a single dwelling completely met the needs of its inhabitants.
You won't even be around by the time the house you're living in today falls apart - why build your house of the future to today's standards? At best you're wasting your time and money. At worst, your descendants are going to have to waste time and money tearing the useless eyesore down.
Sure, castles last a long time. People still love 'em. Have you tried living in one? They are very ill suited to us in so many ways. Adding modern conveniences is an expensive pain. Bringing them up to code, keeping them clean. Maintenance and upkeep. These costs alone could pay for a new house each year, nevermind the fact that you couldn't get a modern projection TV in more than a few rooms without a crane and a large window.
Unless you have an oracle, you aren't going to be able to design for the future. If the house of the future was designed and built in the 30s and 50s, we'd all have elevator shafts in our two and three story homes, except we wouldn't be using them because they don't have a good price/performance ratio. Therefore we'd convert them to badly sized closets and storage (well, I'd have a firepole in mine, but that's not the point). Even if you overdesigned chances are good that they would still not fit well.
However, as an academic excersize it is an interesting question. Kind of like putting Linux on the atari 2600. You could, but its more fun talking about it than it would be implementing it.
-Adam
I think about building a house all the time, so I am always interested in different home designs. I live close to the city (Portland, Oregon) so I see old/new houses as well as old/new buildings. Some which are pushing 100+ years old. I like the thought of being self-sufficient in regards to land, food, energy, etc, as well have the option to expand my dream home if need be. In the past few years I have tinkered around with solar energy to expand my knowledge of a clean-energy lifestyle.
I recently came across solar pyramid home design. While these homes are not anywhere near most people's visions of what a home should be. I like their uniqueness, as well as their structural integrity from storms, earthquakes, etc.
Some interesting things that I've noticed. I bought my house a few years ago. It was built in 1890. The house is only on it's third owner (me). It is in pretty nice shape considering how old it is. As long as you keep up with the maintance on an old house it will last a very long time.
Find a house that is older and has had a relatively low number of owners. This tells you they were in the house taking care of it all along if it still looks good.
Once in your house be pro-active... What I mean is actively look for problems or potential problems that you can fix. For example, fix that small crack in the steps before it ruins the whole steps. Keep your wood painted, and repaint every few years as needed.
My house is withstanding the test of time, and when originally built had no electrictity, and was heated with fires. Then it was updated with gas lighting, and again with electricity.
One interesting thing about my house is the amount of labor that went into building it. There was no such thing as drywall, which is fairly easy to put up. The walls are amazing if you ever need to take one down, there are inch wide boards with only a quater inch sepearting them, that run all thru the walls to hold up the old plaster walls.
You would pay thru the roof to have a crew of people hammer each one of these boards in, but when my house was built cheap immigrant laber was everywhere, and it was used / abused. Good luck recreating my house in it's exact for for under $300,000 in labor alone!
And I think that's why old houses do seem to last forever. The amount of skilled labor that was put into it, at such a cheap cost.
Brick. Dont paint it usually looks the same over time. As well the morter between the brinks harden over time. Plus if you want a more natual look plant some ivy around it and in a hundred years you have a nice ivy cover. I woldnt care much about Wireing it because Wireless is dropping in price and is more adjustable. Plus it is wolf proof.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Your a fag?
You will be after seeing this.
Now tell me if you want to fuck a girl again?
you funny, silly people down south.
:)
frost line is one thing, but 60 degrees below zero is another
good luck, bugs.
EOM
I don't know what kind of fashion statement they will make in 100+ years (or now for that matter) but modular geodesic structures can be made out of very hardy materials such as steel and lexan and have the added benefit of a cheap and easy replacement or reconfiguration of panels. Adding new rooms is as simple and building another dome and reconfiguring the panels for a passageway. Great insulation, really great lighting...just watch out for peeping toms... =)
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
In the very long term, the durability of the building materials might have less to do with the viability of a particular house than the real estate it sets on. Most of Andrew Lloyd Wright's homes have survived quite nicely despite the fact that many of them are maintenance nightmares due to their specicial design qualities, much as there are a lot more 1957 Chevies at a car show than 1958 models. The mechanicals were mostly the same, but the styling of the '57s stayed more desireable over time than the '58s. A solid, well built house is no guarantee that it will last for the ages. A section of Fifth Avenue in New York was known over a century ago was known as Millionaires Row. Each new house was larger and more ostentatious as the last, and they were the homes of the Gate's and the Waltons of their era. This period lasted for less than 30 years, and with the exception of a couple of houses converted into museums, most of these homes are long gone, These houses would cost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to recreate today, but the invisible hand of rising real estate values turned these palaces into rubble upon which was built. commercial enterprises which supported the price the land they sat on commanded. Their former owners took the huge wad of cash their palaces commanded and moved to even swankier digs up the Hudson and out in the Hamptons.
Once nobody cares about a structure for a while, it will inevitably start falling down. A window breaks and lets the rain in, and after a while even oak and cedar starts to rot. Even slate roofs crack and leak after a while. After a few decades of this, reconstruction becomes as expensive as building new. Once a building reaches this point, the only thing that can really save it is that someone (with deep pockets) perceives something architecturaly or historicaly valuable to make it worth the trouble to rebuild. Otherwise, that fine old Victorian gets leveled to make way for a 7-11, a strip mall, or an apartment complex. Happens all the time!
If you want to build so that the building remains pretty much the same over the decades and centuries, use of good materials is important to help keep the building desireable, and hopefully able to survive periods of abandonment and neglect. What can be done? Building well with good materials with a unique and well-thought out design may help give the building some special appeal which will survive rennovations, disasters, and so on. The community is important is well. I would build in a stable community that has a diverse and stable employment base, and a sense of its own history, and some surrounding natural beauty. A decaying industrial town will probably continue to deteriorate, and the home may eventually face abandonment. A rapidly growing community will probably put irresistable pressures on the real estate the land sits on, either through tax assesments or property values to force or entice the owners to sell out to someone who has other ideas for the land. A good infrastructure in the community may hold off the highway builders from taking the property, which nearly happened to a fine stone colonial my uncle owned and meticulously maintained. Nothing can guarantee survival over the long term, but a close look at the community can improve the odds.
that will last forever. it will even beat stone. also it is cheap and cost effective
Why would you want to create a structure to last for hundred of years? Why not build a sturty structure that will last about 50 years and a relatively inexpensive price. That why as times change and with new technology, you can tear down the structure and build something new and wonderful for the current time. It's just like a car. You can buy a $200,000 car or buy a bunch of cheaper ones.
And the stones! The stones are 50 foot high, 30 foot long, 20 foot deep, and other measurements as well. And the stones are not from round there! That's the amazing thing. I mean, remember, this is B.C. *mumble*. This was before the B.C./A.D. changeover when everyone was going... You didn't have to wind your watch back - you had to get a new bloody watch! As if A.D.'s enough - fuckinell... And the Muslim people going, "A.D? Who's he?" Yes. Good laugh there.
And uh... So, yeah, the stones are from 200 miles away, in Wales. So these guys in Wales were obviously carving the rocks out of the v - very living mountain... "Fantastic, building a henge, are we? That's a fantastic idea. That's a marvelous religion the Druids have got. Yes, got a lot of white clothing, I like that. There we go." And they smash out a huge stone and then they put tree trunks down to roll it along on. "All right, walk it along, here we go, here we go." Buuuhbuuuhuuh. "Help you push 'em along. It's not far, is it?" And the Druids going, "Heave everyone, heave! Well done, everyone, you're doing very well. You'll love it when you see it. I've seen some of the drawings already, it's very special." After 200 miles, "You fucking bastards! You never told it was 200 miles! 200 miles in this day and age - I don't even know where I live now! *sigh* I wish the Christians would hurry up and get here!" And they set all the stones up and the Druids still there tinkering around going, "No that stone and this one - can we swap them around?" So that was the Pagans.
[Courtesy of Eddie Izzard: Dressed to Kill]
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
The house we live in is about 200 years old. I finally figured out the house. Every room was once a porch. Originally, it was just a fishing shack. Then, the resident said 'this house needs a porch'. Then he/she said 'this house needs another room' so the porch was enclosed. Then the next resident said 'this house needs a porch'. After living here 5 years, we decided it needed a porch, so we put one on. Two kids later, we need more room...
If you want a great example, buy some of that cheap plastic shelfving, and store some books on it. In 6 months you will have a nice permanent dip in the middle. Left alone, the shelf would stretch itself out to the floor.
Creep actually tears the chains of molecules, so flipping the material over periodically won't help.
Now, steel reinforce the plastic and you might be on to something...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Whew. I just got through reading the original question. I think I will refer to the poster as "The Fourth Little Pig."
Things that last tend to have relatively simple designs. Don't go for a work of art- First priority of course is having enough space for you, the family, and your stuff. A thought to modularity might be useful. I don't mean buy a modular home, but think about the possibility of expansions. You don't want to have to take down half the house to add a small room in the back. Keeping in mind the possibility of future expansion when you initially build it will help in being able to expand without damaging integrity.
Redundant supporting beams and the like are certainly good to consider. It might be fine without it now, but I've seen old houses where the second floor is bowing down and it looks like only a few years until it caves in. If those houses had just one more supporting beam in the critical spot, out of the way of traffic/stuff stored in the room, they would have held up much better.
Most importantly, take care of it. Don't put off needed repairs. Smoke alarms not only can keep you alive, but can alert you to a fire soon enough to salvage the house as well. Simple design helps here too- If you do need repairs, a simple design will make it much easier to effect those repairs.
Don't skimp on costs. That lumber you save 25% on, may be lower quality than the solid oak stuff you get elsewhere. Obviously you should try to save money, but do not trade quality/durability for cash. You would probably be better off in the long run with a slightly smaller house made of top quality materials than a huge one made of the cheap stuff. You can always expand it later when you have more money.(simplicity strikes again- the simpler the design, the easier it is to modfiy without disrupting a fragile balance).
Cordwood houses are unlikely to last as long as stone ones (usually > 500 years) but they rival brick for longevity and cost a fraction of what it costs to build with stone or even brick.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
There are many 300+ year old timber frame structures in the US, and 500+ year old timber frame structures in Europe and Japan.
Large timbers are relatively safe from fire, because of the large size they are hard to ignite and even in a fire the outside will char which protects the inside. Heavy timber structures fare better in fires than do steel structures.
The primary concern for longevity is protection from water damage. That means a good roof and good drainage away from the house. Many types of construction will last for centuries if given proper maintenance and protection against water damage.
Ventilation/breathing is a factor, many centuries old timber frame structures started to rot a few years after being "improved" with addition of vapor barriers and airtight insulation.
Stone is good for foundations but poor in tensile strength. Reinforced concrete is very good, I've read that there are a few surviving concrete examples from the Roman times.
After 40-50 years, the county building inspectors will decide that your home is no longer up to today's building code, and it just so happens that there will be no exemptions for "grandfathered in" code variances. They will shake you down for thousands in order to possibly persuade them not to bulldoze your home, let alone the further shakedown it will take to get the house signed off as "up to code."
No matter if it's built like a brick shithouse.
USE QUALITY MATERIAL!
If you go into any long standing, 200 year old home that is still in good condition you will notice they didn't use chinsy material. They were built to last.
Now take a look at 99.999% of the sub divisions you see going up. They use cheap cheap cheap junk. I mean for christ sakes they put PARTICLE BOARD FOR THE FLOORING. Like DUR its gunna start to fall apart and the glue will eventually dry out and you'll literally go through the floor one day. Do you really trust your stove, dishwasher, and fridge will be able to stand on particle board flooring, reinforced with one single fricking joist?
I think the fact society is getting dumber and people have less of an interest in how its built lets these companies get away with it. Not to mention the lowering of building standards.
Why build something that will last 200 years when you have no idea about what the world will be like.
Why not, instead, design a home that is easy to rebuild and recycle so you or your descendents can have a different vision and easily remake it.
I am amazed that with all the mention of steel/concrete/brick that few people have mentioned using hard or treated wood. Most 2x4's are made of soft, untreated wood and purchased from the lumber yard that gave the lowest quote.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Raised conduit will only look like a "cross between a prison cell and a boiler room" if you don't make an effort to make it otherwise.
Let's say that instead you put in an inch deep baseboard covering a two inch deep recessed channel. The baseboard, since it will be unusually visible, will be oak or other material chosen to look pretty and age well. A matched crown molding with tapered base fills it in. If a third horizontal is done in the form of a chair rail then there is plenty of room to run anything that we have reason to know to foresee.
Since many of the approaches mentioned here would work best with nine foot or taller ceilings, all of this should be nicely in proportion. If, as I suggest further down, window seats, shelving, and other such things are built in out of matching materials, then the room should actually look quite pretty.
A few things to keep in mind:
-All conduit should be attached with brass or other ornamental nuts and bolts. No nails, no hidden connections. This reduces the risk of some nitwit cutting into the baseboard or other conduit because they can't see that it was meant to be removable. Best case scenario would be to have a few small places in the house where vertical conduits have small glass windows so that people can see that stuff is running inside.
-Verticals could be made to look mock-tudor or some other style that typically has visible beams and supports.
-"Spiking" the inside of the surfacing with thin, long ceramic rods might be a good idea. This, again, is meant to reduce the odds of some ignorant future person just starting to slash away. Nothing like hitting industrial ceramic in what seems to be wood to get a person's attention.
- Color code the various types of things running through the conduit with lots of labels in more then one language.
I can't say that crazyphilman's approach is quite mine. But I can see the viability of it.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
dude if you're gonna live in one house for 100 years you need some serious help!
Domes, etc. are fine, but what about 50 years from now when some new heating/cooling technology makes whatever you put in obsolete? Make sure you leave a way to get at and replace the "guts" - fibre-optic cabling throughout is nice, but it doesn't do any good if the electrics disintegrate.
There's a reason the standard house today is the way it is - it works, more or less. It's not fancy, but it can stand up by itself for a reasonable amount of time, it's economical to build, and you don't need 25 PhDs in engineering to supervise the construction.
BTW, when you buy a house, used or new, make sure you put aside at least 10% of the purchase price for things you'll need in the first year - everything from the big (a new roof or furnace maybe) to the small (a garden hose?). Murphy (from Murphy's law - remember him?) was a homeowner.
I just bought a Barratt home. They just build them and they fall to bits. Barratt are good at that.
just build on the moon!
In the next couple of years I will be using a SIP (structural insulated panel) made a unique way:
http://www.tridipanel.com/. Most SIP's are polystyrene with waferboard skins for strength.
This system is a 3D grid of steel piercing the polystyrene and covered with concrete/stucco. There are no termite problems, resistant to wind, highly insulated, and can be constructed by DIY.
Wiring is by conduit that is clamped to the wire mesh before the concrete goes on. Use as much as you want for future use.
Additionally, it is ideal for radiant floors so heating can be cheaper and more comfortable.
Costs are $2-$2.5 per square foot of wall before the concrete goes on.
Only two materials have the track record - stone and concrete. (A not not that flimsy stuff sprayed over steel mesh. Roman concrete). Thnk Parthenon. Stone. In any temperate zone in the world, wood rots, steel rusts.
Check out this place.. My wife's ancestors build this house in 1636 and it's still standing. Sure, it gets a lot of love & attention, and nobody really lives in it anymore, but it's still there.
For an insightful discussion on what makes a building a classic. You're right that overspecialization can kill a building. But Brand suggests ways of building that are flexible for future use...
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
According to this the Bin Laden family has a construction company with $3-5 billion annual revenue.
Their product [buildings] must be good and bomb-proof. Otherwise Osama wouldn't have survived US bombings.
I lived for a couple of years in a very beautiful farmhouse in Germany that is about 450 years old. Thick walls which made it cool in summer inside. Unfortunately, the windows were crap so the heat went out easily in winter. They were also quite small so there wasn't enough light. Due to monumental protection regulations they could not be replaced by modern ones if those weren't very expensive special ones and we were just renting the house, so heating costs were high, as were overall maintenance costs. The house didn't have a cellar. It had a wooden structure and brick walls. I have no idea whether these properties are a must-have for a long-lived house, but it seems to have worked for this one - constructed in 1637 IIRC, in the middle of the 30 years war.
Imagine the time... Connor McLeod was a measly 100 plus change years old, and a young Strom Thurmond turned to politics.
it doesn't sell to the masses- but does strike a cord w/ some folks.
call: 703.713.1900 and ask for the 'engineering tech line' and they'll fax you some 'tek-notes' on 'residential masonry design' for free (there are purpose built "residential" volumes that you can purchase if you're so inclined)
If she floats, she's a witch.
Philadelphia is also home to the oldest continually inhabited street: Elfrith's Alley. Some of the homes there are all well over 300 years old.
The homes are all brick townhomes, about 4 stories tall. They have been kept in good repair for all of their existance.
Most of them started off as rental properties for Sea Captains and Trader's who frequented the city. They whole block narrowly dodged a fire in the 19th century, and were almost demolished to make room for I-95 in the 1950's. The only thing that saved them was a community organization and a historical designation.
I think someone about pointed out: having a house last hundreds of years is primarily dumb luck. Continual upkeep and habitation helps. After a while you need nothing short of a historical designation to keep it from being knocked over by progress.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Im surprised no one has mentioned earthships. I heard about them about a year ago. Imagine a house built partly into the ground that used solar panels to regulate temperature more efficiently. Alternatively you could have your house built out of dirt cheap materials. (Used Tires) Economically it is inexpensive, efficient and I believe durable. Well, the website is http://www.earthship.org
void
void
bullshit. I *LIVE* in a strawbale house, and the straw is packed so tightly there's no chance anything is getting in there.
unless your friend is one of the many lame hippies that infest the strawbale community, who seem to confuse "hay" with "straw".
insect OR rodent infestation is extremely difficult in most well designed strawbale structures, as well as providing superinsulated soundproof walls that withstand heat way beyond anything your stick house would sustain.
cob is OK, it's in the same category as rammed earth and/or adobe. they're great building materials in the right environment, but they can get really ugly if you don't plan correctly for drainage, etc.
we had to put extra-large overhangs on our roof to accomodate rainfall, so we have a much better chance of maintaining lower internal strawbale moisture. it's all about thinking about what you're going to do, rather than listening to some dumbass contractor suggesting 2x6's and rollup insulation. sheesh.
standard construction = WinME
EOM
Buy yourself a cheap house, and spend your money on your kids.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
If you google around, you will find that although the pyramids were a massive 'public-works' project, the workforce were farmers who had nothing to do during the flood season. The workers even received beer as a refreshment.
For some reason, that little exchange brings to mind "War of the Worlds". A rather different book entirely.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/27/0042251.shtm l?tid=133
True, but until about 150 years ago, 'concrete' was not as durable and rarely reinforced with steel. It's like comparing a Goodyear Radial to a wagon wheel.
Properly constructed these houses can last for centuries. Recycling timber from demolished buildings is a nice (necessary) touch.
Timber Framers Guild
...is to build a house of such esthetic value and livability that your heirs will consider it worth taking care of. And if you don't, who cares?
rj
although I already e-mailed this to the questioneer, here's a copy for everyone else.
:)..Brick of the 17, and 1800s was solid, while today's BV has holes in it. It also seems the brick of yesterday was made of some different material. More 'sandy' than todays.
:)
***
As an appraiser in rural Kentucky I've seen LOTS of old buildings. I think the majority of the homes I do, are at least 50 years old, and some I've done have dated back into the 1700s. (without going though my records it's hard to say exactly)
From the way I see it, the things that help keep a house useable, is quality of construction, and thickness of your wood. I've been in houses dating back to the late 1700s, Those floors are thick hardwoods, 2 or 3" Not this thin stuff of today. Also if I remember right, the wood was oak or cyprus, the 'marine wood' Brick is another thing that makes a home last. Vinyl is nice to look at, but brick will be what lasts. Sadly, today's brick is not the same type. Today, it's called 'brick veneer' (BV) - not sure what 'veneer' means, but I call it 'holey' brick
Here's some tips I've learned on how to make a home last.
a) Water is the BIGGEST enemy of homes. You want the house dry. Use guttering and downspouts (only metal, vinyl guttering/downspots don't last), especially continuious guttering, and pipe it away from the house using underground pipes. make sure water isn't going between your brick and frame, or getting though the roof, or in the walls. A word of advice, do NOT use stucco. It's been shown to be a major water trapper.
b) Make your crawl space (the space under the home) to be dry as well. Dig a mot around the foundation under the house so it collects the water, make sure your foundation has plenty of ventation, put in a sump pump if you have too, put down vapor barrer (a heavy sheet of plastic to keep the water from the ground from getting into the house. Have the under the house treated for termites as well, and keep an annual inspection going. Those too can be a major house destoryer.
c) Your crawl area should be big enough to crawl around in, and use a flood guard around any windows, and the door. You can use the crawl area to house an AC unit. Do NOT put an AC unit in the attic. I was at a friends home, and when we returned this huge 1,000 pound AC unit had come crashing down from the ceiling! Thankfully no one was harmed.
d) Metal roofs, especially the new inpreganted with color metal tiles are great. They'll last centuries and look like shingles. This brings the subject to the roof.
e) Make sure the roof has PLENTY of ventalation. the cooler it is in the attic, the longer the roof will last. Put in turbine vents, which cool without having to use electricity. Also be sure to insulate the attic. What to use? Well I'd ask around. Many use rolled fiberglass, some blow in fiberglass, some even use celleious (paper in essence). Also put in gable vents, as well as fans you can turn on. Some fans can be set up with a thermastat, so they kick on automatically. (In the hottest part of summer in Kentucky, I've measured attic temps as high as 150 degrees. These was old metal roofed homes, with no ventaltion now
f) If you have a fireplace, keep a screen and a roof on it. Keeps pests, and birds out of it.
g) Landscaping. Do NOT plant trees any closer than a meter from the house anywhere. In fact, read the directions on tree planting closely. Most now say how wide the trees get. Add a meter to the maximum size to be sure.
h) Location, I agree this is very important. One tip I can give, is talk to someone who can get you flood records/maps of the area you want to build, or buy. Appraisers are the best, for we're required by law to have flood maps. Insurance places may be another. Your PVA/County recorder (where deeds and taxes are collected) may be another good place.
That's about all the tips I can think of, at the moment. Ask your realitor, appraiser, and contractors for more advi
The problem is that some of the wood needed replacement and a professor was curious how it was made. It turns out they didn't fully document the process and it now has a few fastenings in to keep things together,
One thing that's still very common in many parts of Appalachia are old log cabins, most of which are uninhabited. Granted, the vast majority of these have fallen in, but when you consider that most of them were constructed by crews of volunteers in only a few days, then you realize that the ones that are still standing were built strong to last long.
Consider this, most log cabins that are over a hundred years old are made of tough wood, not pine, spruce, or fir. Take a look at hickory, but chestnut is much better if you can find it or afford it. Chestnut used to be very common in Appalachia until the blight killed most of it in the 1840s (I think it was that decade anyway). Dove-tail joints and hewn logs make the straightest walls which is more asstetically pleasing to many people. They are also arguably the strongest joint for log cabins. Saddle joints (the way you traditionally think of logs being put together one atop the other) are another very strong joint that is at least as popular and doesn't require hewn logs.
Flooring is done with two (or three) sills (long thick logs hewn on all four sides, and sleepers (the rough equivilant of 4x4s laid in between the sills). When flooring is laid atop them, it makes for a very sturdy, secure floor.
For roofing you can't beat tin. Tin roofs are rated for 50 years, and often last much much longer. Take a drive down through my neck of the woods and you'll see many structures still standing that are well over 100 years old with tin roofing (albeit with many of these roofs laid on years after the fact when the original wooden shingles needed replacing).
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Take a look at the Monolithic Dome Institute's website. It's a very interesting concept.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That last line was great. You should make it your sig. I sat here thinking "Who the hell is Connor McWhatever?" Then it sank in, and I read the rest. Great joke, really.
By the way, why does he pronounce it McCloud, when it's not spelled that way? "I'm Connor McCloud of the clan McCloud." But then when I see it spelled out, I think "That should be "I'm Connor McClee-od of the clan McClee-od."" Do the Scottish just pronounce "eo" as "ow"?
You know, that CRAPPY TRASH made of glue and sawdust/wood chips!
. html
And cut your own wood! Get a DIY sawmill, I mean really get one, they are not that expensive.
Measure some boards from the lumberyard and see why.
Measure a 2x4 and get back with me. Or measure a 2x12 and see what you get.
In the day of the 11ozs of coffee in a 16oz can consider that they are screwing you on wood.
Cut 8x8's or bigger. Go look at some of the old houses built during the 1600's and 1700's up in the northern states. They built those houses to last a LONG time, and they are still here 200 and 300 years later.. No chipboard or sawdust boards in those homes!
Or, just go buy a used castle. There are some islands for sale that have castles on them.
http://www.vladi-private-islands.de/home_e
Start using stone to build stupid houses, that helps greatly to keep the thing together a little further than the 10 years mark.
I'm always amazed when I go to SF or any other town in the US at the fact houses are made of... WOOD!
In european terms, thats called a "hut", not a "house".
And wow, a "castle" that is 400 years old is not OLD in "europe", it's a young upstart. Most plain houses in old quarters of european cities have parts that were VERY OLD... 400 years ago.
For the sake of truthfulness... Twinkies have a shelf life of around 30 days, most definately not 200 years.
— darco
...to the new apartment they've chewed for themselves inside your walls.
Cordwood is much like the game GO, in that you can learn to do it in a short period of time, but it can take a lifetime to master! Seriously, we are currently designing a home with those thoughts in mind, durability, cost effective, mostly enviromentally friendly.
Cordwood, also known as stackwood, stovewood,etc, is simply softwood (cedar, pine) "fence" posts that are cut to 8" - 16" lengths and laid into a bed of mortar lengthwise. Thus if your logs are 16" inches long, your walls are 16" + thick. This is a highly effective wall adding both thermal mass and good insulation. There are reported cordwood-type structures still standing after 1000 years, and there are many examples in the US that are over 100 years old.
For a pretty geeky look into a cordwood home being built, check out
daycreek.com (2,000 sq Ft, solar collection, doublewalls).
For the sake of Peace, the Sword.
I agree. Anyone else?
Same thing applies for rot mildew: As long as you keep the bales from getting soaked or sitting in water, they will naturally air-dry and decay will not be a problem. A good roof with deep eaves, and a well-drained foundation, and you're good to go. YMMV in extremely wet places, like Florida. But it works fine in Northern CA, which isn't exactly dry.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
another slashdoter in the construction industry... :-)
and i thought i was the only one
My house (which I designed myself) was the first in the Southern USA to be built with a technology first brought out (I believe) by a company called 'GreenBlock'. (http://www.greenblock.com)
This stuff looks like giant pale blue foam polystyrene Lego bricks.
In fact, each basic 'brick' is a 2' long by 9" by 6" block made out of two foam plates (each about an inch thick) tied together with carbon fibre 'webbing'. There are studs on the top and receptacles that they plug into underneath - so the analogy with Lego is not entirely without merit!
You lay conventional foundations (ours is a 'waffle' slab design) and then build the outside walls - quite literally like building a giant Lego house.
As you lay the bricks, cutting holes for the windows and doors with a hand-saw. You thread steel reinforcing bars down inside them - and when you are done, you hire a concrete pump to dump very runny concrete down inside the bricks.
(It's a little more complex than that - the ReBar in the walls is tied into
the slab - so they become an integral whole with the slab rather than just resting on it.)
In about two days, the outside walls are done (although we are told that it'll take years for the concrete to COMPLETELY harden). You end up with steel reinforced concrete walls with the original foam bricks forming an inch of foam insulation both outside and inside the walls. You can then sheetrock the inside of the house and either brick, stucco or conventionally clad the outside of the house. This is essentially only for decorative purposes...you really don't want a giant pale blue foam polystyrene house!
Although the house is immensely strong, the primary reason for doing this is energy efficiency. Hence the interior of the house is then built conventionally...although you could do it with the same approach I suppose.
Your walls come out about a foot thick and have an 'R' value of about 50. Even in the height of Texas summers, our electricity bill for a 2500 sq.ft house is between 80 and 100 dollars. Most people I know get $300 or more electricity bills for equivelent sized homes.
We believe that this house will still be standing in 100 years - it's claimed that it'll be tornado-proof - although clearly this doesn't stop the windows from blowing out and the roof from being ripped off in the event of a direct hit.
Since our builder got into building this way, he's subsequently built dozens
and dozens of houses in our area in the exact same way - as far as we know, all the owners are happy with them.
However, the bigger issue is how you'd demolish such a house when it's not wanted anymore!
www.sjbaker.org
2030 - 2040 actually translates into 2038. Ooo, ooo, oo - Isn't that the year unix systems run out of dates???
Well, there's some things that can be done to make it better.
1) rebar is 'passive' tensioning. as such, it requires that the concrete yield slightly before it grabs. This much, you have said in different words. To make this work better, move to 'active' tensioning. Post-tensioning. The real kicker is then getting the P/T right.
2) most of the cracking and spalling is due to a combination of: insufficent rebar cover; plain bars.
This is the chicken and the egg problem. How do you keep the bars away from the forms? Use chairs (little 'seats' for rebar). Now you have the chair penetrating the surface of the concrete, which can be just as big a problem. so, rigid rebar cages and plenty of cover to the resuce. As for plain bars, the problem is this: when steel rusts, it expands. (think of the flaky stuff around rust spots on an old car) As the corroding steel expands, it blows out the concrete. Solution: use vinyl coated or galvanized to prevent the corrosion.
As for dry, you can use rubber mastic waterproofing for stuff you don't mind looking ugly (foundations) and a paint-type sealant for the above ground parts. Many states are going to this for their bridges.
Of course, I'm a big proponent of steel. Give me a big steel bridge over a concrete one anyday.
I think I need a new sig here.
It's gotta be 100% titanium, like everything else these days. And you'll like the mob-proof aspects, since the environmental destruction caused by the titanium industry is sure to win you a few enemies.
My grandfather's houses are over 200 years old, and still loook good.
To reach 400+ years:
Build foundation GRANITE stones joined with concrete. Make walls at least 45cm thick (1.5') with Brick throughout (not just outside the wood). Don't use the small, polished US brick. They would be perhaps durable enought but are not porous enough to be insulating well. Usec mortar with added cement.
To improve, build foundation of concrete and granite stones, and put a thick tar-paper about 1' above ground level to stop the moisture to elevate through the porous bricks.
Then cover the outside brick wall with facade that has also added pebbles, mica and cement powder besides sand and whitewash. When half-dry, scrape pebbles that stick out with a plank. This lasts 25-50 years before the facade has to be scraped and redone.
1000+ years: Make major gorce bearing walls of hand-fitted granite. Use tar and high pressure concrete to join.
And, really, there are few castles as young as 400+ years in Europe. At the turn of the 17th century they started to use brick instead of stones and those would be less durable, might more appropriately be called palaces rather than castles. The reason for change was partially that the Turks came with cannons, that made fortifications inefficient and obsolete.
While you may design a house to last for 200+ years, would you currently want to live in one that had been designed 200+ years ago? Back then, there was no electricity, running water... those things were inconceivable back then and if they are in your 200+ year old house, they have been "hacked" in.
Even your garage... 200 years from now, do you think cars will be nearly as prevalent as they are now? What were they using 200+ years ago? Horse & buggy if I recall correctly. Who knows, maybe 50 years from now air-cars will be the new big thing (such as pre-wiring homes with CAT-5 is now) and your garage will open upwards! How many friends do you know that have a room over their garage that would suddenly make it obsolete? But do you count that against them? No, you can't because as many experts know, you can't predict the future (otherwise those that could would make a killing in the stock market).
Like computers and cars (and well, just about everything else) homes have a designed-in obselescence. Why else do you think the majority of houses are made out of wood framing? A 5-year old knows wood rots eventually. Even the design castles, while seemingly everlasting, where only state of the art for a short period (gunpowder anyone?). Their withstanding of time is purely a side-effect of their design. And honestly, would you want to live in a castle? No insulation, no air conditioning, few windows....
Alright, I think I've made my point... build a house like you would a PC: knowing that 8x AGP slot will only be state-of-the-art for a year or so longer than a 4x, and it might now be worth paying 2x as much for a motherboard just to get that. If you do want to pass this house down to your kids, just plan for expansion rooms and make it so it's not too expensive to knock down if they decide they don't like your 21st century design. It's going to happpen sooner or later, not even diamonds truly last forever....
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
...because I hear that houses created with century old technology and which are industructible will be really hot on the market in 100 years!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
There also used to be a rumor that skeletons were left inside of the Hoover Dam, but as this would have, if nothing else, greatly weakened the structure as the body decayed, no bodies were left behind (this is also why skeletons wouldn't have been left inside of the Great Wall).
Shall I go through your post and pick it apart? Sheesh, i just want you to stop talking shit here... -Foundations 'joined with concrete' will in fact decay faster than those built with a good proper mortar. -Bricks do not insulate. Ever. Well, not enough to be worth considering, anyway... in fact a porous brick is a GOOD idea... the wall will last longer -Nobody uses tar paper for a DPC... cheap and flimsy Want to know more? Read a book sometime, and I don't mean the time/life series
If you want something to last, stone seems to be the way to go. George Washington stayed at this place!
http://www.stonehouseinn.com/
Seriously, it's in amazingly good condition for its age.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Why I think it is interesting ? my "family house" in Bern canton in Switzerland is still there. The writing top of the door says 1152 and the local history tells all the stories of the family and the house. So - get a Swiss log house - have a nice day - tuomo stauffer ( a common last name there )
The houses that have lasted a hundred years are the good ones. There were many more bad ones, virtually all of which have disappeared. The people we know as "Victorians" were the rich people of a hundred years ago, who could afford houses with lots of gingerbread, tile, fine woodwork, and other expensive, craftsmanlike touches. These people were relatively richer than the rich people of today, so the homes you're thinking about were even beyond the MTV Cribs and HG channel stuff.
Even the smaller, more low-key homes that are revered today, such as Greene and Greene's craftsmans, were premium products for the well-heeled. They've lasted so long and appear so well-made now, becuase no expense was spared back then.
Do some research into some of these old neighborhoods, and see who used to live there. It wasn't average folks, trust me.
a Slashdot Inside sticker. ;)
what happened to spell check? please decode the above comment to your best ability.
I own a stonemasonry company in Toronto, I think that it's great that you want to build something durable, perhaps the idea is not just about # of years it will last, but how long it will last related to the resources put into it... in which case a low-resource shack that stands for 20 years is just as responsible as a palace that stands for 800. Subdivision houses are a big no-no, they're all about a smooth finish on top of a shitty frame/foundation... disposable housing. So I'm saying that if you decide you want a house that will last 100's of years, it's all about the structure, don't be impressed by nice drywall work. And research about the elements of a home you're buying... suprising how little many people know about quality of work... and many contractors take big advantage of this fact.
Germany(and possibly other european countries) has (or at least had about 15 years ago) a very rigid building code which asumes that residential homes will last about 300 years. the impression i got was that it was actually mostly a featherbedding system for their construction industry but their math is still good i'm sure. They required post and beam construction for one thing. The beams were hardwood railroad tie sized things. Roofs were tile and heavily sloped. Some short of municiple city site should point you in the right dirrection, assuming you can read it.
This whole 'pioneer' syndrome is a part of why north americans are so often demonized... there simply aren't enough resources or space for us to each do it our own way... we ought to live in old buildings, share in their history... instead of tearing down and making fresh ones... the best architects are the ones who can work with what already exists, not those that wipe the slate clean and begin fresh...
Seriously, does anyone actually talk like that unless they are drunk almost beyond measure?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The houses built 100's of years ago are made of much higher quality woods and were typically overengineered. The ones that weren't aren't around anymore.
I have a 250+ year old house and the beams are solid oak from old growth forests, some larger than 6"x12". A modern 2x6 is a) not actually 2x6 and b) made from soft pine. You can build houses from oak, it's just expensive and time consuming.
The real key to building a long lasting house is to keep water and to a lesser extent the other elements out. Water will ruin a house in no time (relatively speaking). Engineered lumber products are even worse than regular wood when it comes to water damage, ever see what water does to plywood vs. a plank ?
You should get one of these...or take a page from their design book.. Live is a missile silo
virtros
Worst. Sig. Ever.
That's an easy one, just use beer cans and tires.
trying to make person last for centuries. I think that's a better place to start ;)
It will always need maintenance no matter what materials you use. The big thing would seem to be to make it valuable enough that it will always be worth maintaining.
If it's beautiful, functional and inexpensive enough to maintain, it will last. But those qualities are subject to fashion which you can't control. It won't last long if the neighborhood goes to seed. It won't last long if the neighborhood goes too far the other way either--the land will become too valuable not to use for a mansion, a mall, a park or something.
Mangling a quote from C.S. Lewis, the more up-to-date it is the sooner it will be dated.
Consequences ensue.
Oh well. Because Negra Modelo is better than Dos Equis.
http://www.monolithicdome.com
Build a concrete monolithic dome house.
What is it with you Americans and wood ? If you tried to sell a house constructed from wood instead of brick in the U.K. people would think you were mad. Even the three little piggies know you shouldn`t build your house out of wood !!
Machine the entire thing out of a really big block of aluminum. Hard anodize (you can even get pretty colors). Reanodize periodically. Sure this would cost ridiculous amounts of money but it would work. The issue is not so much materials, beyond making sure they are regionally appropriate. The issue is workmanship and upkeep. If you buy a poorly built frame and plasterboard house, its going to cost a mint to keep it going. If you buy a well built beam and block house the operating costs will be lower, but you will still have some. The Victorian houses that keep getting mentioned are still around because they were used and maintained.
As you mentioned, there are castles and such that have lasted for centuries. However during those centuries there have been generations of servents doing cleaning and maintenance.
Swimming pool bottoms for vinyl liners are sometimes made with 'soft concrete', which is concrete made with vermiculite and portland cement. I was looking at houses in New Orleans and it occurred to me that perhaps one could pump this relatively lightweight mix into stud cavities, which would serve several purposes, but primarily to stabilize it in case of rot and termites. It would have a higher r-factor than concrete thus a good potential insulation material that would seal the walls to make air-conditioning more efficient, and lower thermal mass to discourage solar heat gain. These statements are all hypothetical, but seem to be accurate descriptions of the 'soft concrete' material. Any thoughts?
Oh, certainly, each of the things that you mentioned make it better (In fact, I was talking about those coatings w/ bellus quies last night. Soft to touch but rip your skin off if you pull along it).
But none of those techniques will make concrete, shall we say, archival.
Now, as it happens, I spent an hour in a cathedral today thinking about this topic (stuff like this is kinda on my mind) and looking at *truly* long-term solutions. Well, I've gotta admit that I spent part of this time looking at a five hundred year old piece of furniture and thinking that technically, according to my obsessive standards, this thing, made of *wood* for crying out loud, certainly cannot be considered entirely waterproof. And yet there it stands. Mocking me.
But nonetheless, anything that adds steel to the interior of an object will eventually create weak spots in that object. You might be able to get something to one hundred and fifty years. But that's pretty paltry on the scale of the original question. Especially since you still have not addressed the temperature issues or the slight changes in tension as the concrete cures. And trust me folks, it takes a big hunk of concrete decades to finish curing.
Now, just in case there was any doubt at all, I am not an engineer. I'm certainly not a P.E. But I stand behind my statement. If you want concrete to last for centuries then do not add big hunks of metal to it. Not even small hunks. Leave it be.
btw tex, nice switch you did in the subject line.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Oops. My bad.
Sorry.
But I still think that, given the comments in the Niven interview, that such a richly slashottian (?) perspective deserves first dibs.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
The Roman coliseum is still standing.
The insect approach: make many houses. If they're not totally crap, and you're lucky or do very nice designs, some will last for centuries.
:).
The all eggs in one basket approach:
Make a huge pyramid. They're a stable well tested and proven design. And put it in a stable location (not too much rain).
Pyramids too old fashioned? Build using granite and other tough rocks - they're stuff that last out in the open for thousands of years, a few centuries won't matter to them
You can use some marble esp inside but they are more prone to damage - acids, pollution etc.
Only a few metals endure.
Too bad he doesn't live in soviet russia, where houses build you!
Ron Paul 2012
Jesus you're a moron. Read the entire post you're responding to before you post.
People used to carve bricks out of rocks. Look at the Egyptians, just sheer man power was used to build something that even today is still pretty hard to do. I have little faith that buildings build with todays' mass-production throw-away materials will last 500 years. Modern houses last rarely over 100 years... maybe it some ways that's better, who knows what new and better materials will be invented in 100 years, or how much the landscape would have changed; but in a way, it's sad that we won't leave much of anything behind - except maybe some plastic crap and a highly poluted planet.
Part of the difference is simply in attitude. Germans build their houses to stand decades, and because this is a small country with a high population density, land is far more expensive than, say, in the U.S. or Canada. A house is a major investment and is treated that way: In fact, building a house in Germany gives the same sort of return stocks do (uh, make that "did"). The whole concept of using houses as an investment form is rather rudimentary in the U.S., but then, renting a flat is the normal state of affairs in Germany.
One of the main differences is that you use stone and brick instead of wood. If this is done well, you can rip everyting out of the stone shell (the German word is entkernen, "to rip out the core") decades later and put new "soft" stuff like insulation, wires, and pipes back in. There are lots of beautiful pre-WWII houses where that has been done in Berlin: Redo the interior, repaint the exterior, and it is simply glorious.
This all, however, is rather expensive, and might not apply to you. First, there are no earthquakes or tornados in Germany: Occasionally there is some flooding in some parts, but that is it. Second, trying to find an American contractor who can seriously build in stone and rock is going to be a problem, and the last time I was at Home Depot in the States, they didn't have the kind of brick-and-mortar section every hardware store has here (just how is a guy supposted to build a Gothic cathedral in the States? Out of wood? And where are all the peasants?).
The differences go right down to the tools: The standard German hammer has a square head, a wedge-shaped reverse side (for smashing mortar off bricks) and a sturdy wooden handle. American claw-hammers with their leather grips and thin steel-tubed handles wouldn't last long in this environment -- and the German hammer is just not very good for wood work.
Wood quality has a lot to do with the
quality of the trees cut down - in general
younger quickly grown trees are NOT as
dense/solid.
... that you haven't read the two books that were about architecture but started the patterns movement in software! The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et. al., gives a set of patterns for building buildings and communities that last by building life into the structures. It's a good read for anyone considering houses or cities at any level.
That is all.
I never lived in a house which was built in this century (I used to live in Paris then switched to province). Best I got was 1897. "Oldest" was probably 1780-1820. Yes you read right. Although its deck was made again and canalisation added. Most of those house were built in the same scheme : massive stone about 60cm*25*25 (2.5 cm ~ 1 inch ?). GRanted there was no "inner" wall and the deck was broken but the wall still stood. And the tower not far from there was even older, so old that there was already no trace of when it was built at revolution time. PS: it seems to be also the same type of stone used in aqueduc not far away from roman.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Just as an example, our house is now nearly 200 years old. Back then there were no fancy high tec materials, so everything was made from wood and stone.
:-)
Wood that was smoke treated has no insect damage, where later brought in painted wood is damaged. Insulation with straw is really great and much better than everthing build between 1930 and 1980.
I have no doubt that a well made wood structure will last up to 300 years or more. I cant say anything aboput termites, we dont have them here in Germany (except maybe in Hamburg where they came via imported goods on ships
You cannot expect that a whole house will last so long. One day you will start to renovate, move walls, change this or that, but the main structure can last long enough. If one just concentrates on the structure you can surely build something long lasting. The less concrete and stone is used the less trouble you will have to lay new pipes for heating, water and cables through the walls. They dont last longer than 50 years. It does not make sense to stick with old technology in all places.
Dont forget to make the doors high enough. 200 years ago the people were much smaller, so we have some 1.8m doors and some ceilings are a bit too low. We now changed the doors to 2m, enough for my 1.8. But today standard door height is beeing changed to 2.1m. People are getting taller much faster.
Wood is the best building material you can dream of. Makes me sad that we waste it for newspapers and throw-away goods. Its impossible to get really good quality from the current mass production saw mills. This fast dried cheap stuff wont last a fraction of what it could do.
Here's how you do it:
(1) build in a conservation area
(2) wait several hundred years
(3) the house will have to be maintained properly as it will be illegal to pull it down or let it fall down.
...if a building is underground, is it ever "standing"?
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Monsanto-Disneyla nd-HomeoftheFuture.htm
Tough little sucker.. Virtually no sag after 10 years or so..
"A dead furnace can be a real inconvienence; Coming home from a week in Bermuda to find the water heater burst 5 days ago could be the end of your house as an inhabitable space."
That's why my water heater sits in a vented drainage tub. Saved my bacon when the water heater went.
I believe the oldest know house still standing is 6,000 years old, which predates the pyramids by quite a bit.
Some information on the Kap o' Howar here
http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/knaphowar.htm
I've personally seen this. It's in amazing condition - looks like it could have been abandoned only a few decades ago.
For real durability stone is the only way to go, but recognise that just because the external structure will survive hundreds or even thousands of years, the interior won't. The house I'm in at the moment is about 250 years old with nice 3 ft thick stone walls. However about 15 years ago it was a complete shell missing a roof in parts and used as a cow shelter. It was redeveloped by completely gutting it and building a 'new' house within the walls. So the house I 'effectively' live in is 15 years old, even though the shell is over 10 times that.
DON'T try building a wooden house when you want it to last a couple of hundred years.
Also, you might try to keep out of areas with frequent earthquakes, tornadoes, forest fires.
Check the federal german building standards. The laws for german building(s) are *extremely* conservative by american standards. They have every detail, including fundamention, covered thoroughly. :-). In the end they had to be glued to the walls!
I live in a common house from the 50s (early post war) and it's only a little shoddy because they had to stretch the plaster with to much sand just after the war. You can't drill a hole without half the wall plaster coming down. And directly behind it there's brick, concrete and steel that won't budge a millimeter no matter how long you drill it. That's a real pain for hanging up a shelf, I tell ya.
Apart from that I'd presume it could easyly last another 100 years with no big fuss. Houses that are 100 - 200 years old are nothing special around here. The only reason you won't find them extremely much is that lots of the german towns where carpet bombed to bits by the allies during the last phase of WW2.
BTW: If you want to see buildings that can't even be demolished check some of the old german Nazi bunkers. I know of one huge ugly block of a air defense bunker in Hamburg near the Domplatz that is being reused as an avantgardistic art gallery because they just can't take it down. The last try was something like in the 80s. Then they had severe problems getting picturehooks into the wall. Even with german drills
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"At first glance, cities in the United States like San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh have all gone through 10-20 years spells of nastiness, but have been fairly stable cities at the macro level for a hundred years."
Unfortunately San Francisco can't really be considered stable on the "ohmygodit'sthebigonewe'reallgonnadie" level.
I was amazed at the construction techniques when I came to the US (from England). Houses were bigger/cheaper, but at the cost of having to replace the roof every 25 years, the siding every 50(?) and paint it every 5-10, and an acceptance that houses were transient. In contrast one house I bought in the UK had listed on the inspector's report "May need repointing (a minor procedure) during the life of the mortgage" (25 years), and that was considered unusual.
The houses that have lasted a hundred years are the good ones.
Yes, a lot of the examples on this thread basically prove that rich people can afford to build houses that last. But it doesn't always work that way.
Our house in the Luberon (SE France) is probably about 600 years old, and was probably built by a group of nomads who settled in our area and manifestly didn't know much about building. So they started by digging half the rooms out of the (very soft) bedrock, added a few barrel vaults made from what they had dug out, made all the walls 3 foot thick and kept the distance between walls to less than 12ft. The walls themselves are two piles of soft stone held together with lime mortar, with the gap filled up with whatever they could find (including a lot of straw AFAICS.) It's the weight of the infill rubble that keeps the vaults strong.
Now the advantage of having a house that is basically a slightly organised pile of rubble is that, in entropy terms, there just isn't very far for it to degrade. When we bought it there was a huge crack down one wall, and we just filled it up with some more boulders and lime mortar.
All this in a low grade earthqake zone, where the French army tried to burn most of the villages to the ground at one point, but the only effect of this was to make the roofs cave in and make the walls black (as you see when you start drilling holes).
On a related note, the first suspension bridge in the world, in Bristol, UK, is also one of the most stable. Why? Because, like most things that Brunel built, it is overengineered by several orders of magnitude. If he had had a beowulf cluster to do his simulations on, it would be a lot lighter, and would probably have fallen into the Avon Gorge some time ago :-)
Virtually serving coffee
Thank you for educating the geek world, Slashdot!
Dried compressed mud, also known as pisé can last incredibly long under the right climate. The most fascinating construction is the Arg-e Bam, in the middle of an iranian desert. It was founded 2000 years ago, and abandonned 200 years ago, and it is still here. Of course, very little rain there, or else... It is said that the citadel was never defeated; the only time an army almost conquered it, they had to make a river run against the high walls; when they tumbled, they realized there was much more thickers walls to get to the citadel, so they gave up.
Bam is now under heavy restauration, it is a highlight of every tourist trip in Iran. I highly encourage everyone going to Iran to get there, despite the long long boring trip by bus to reach it.
Look at the construction the mormons use on their temples. The temple in Salt Lake City is made of solid chunks of granite, up to 30-40ft thick in many places.
If you want your building to last long, use stone for the walls, slate for the roof, and make all the wood very thick indeed.
Only the structure will last long, so stuff like wiring, plumbing, etc should be treated as consumables, as it will only last about 50 years anyway. How people live will change a lot over 100 years.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Sounds like a lot of the maintenance projects I've worked on. Ie systems that got built in the 60's and rebuilt in the 80's with a life expectancy of 5 to 10 years, and all were still going in Y2K. Yikes.
These systems were built like suburbs, with the durability of a paper house in a storm, but too large, important, and complicated to tear down and rebuild. Programmers had no idea what components of the systems were important until they removed them and the users complained.
And I've worked in several office blocks with a life expectancy of 15 to 20 years, that are now pushing 30 years. What does happen when a steel beam rusts? I've seen the steel framed fence posts slowly explode from rust on the inside. I don't like thinking of my steel and concrete 20 story office block doing that.
Some things seem old but you're really looking at patches on the patches on the patches.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Today's Pattern, keep grabbing 'em, and eventually you'll see that soooo many of the ideas here aren't human centric
and here's a Thunderhouse ( just for contrast ), and
OwnerBuilderBook.com's Construction Bargain Strategies
Cheers.
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
Slightly off the topic of houses, but on-topic as far as lasting a long time - I remember hearing about another of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's bridges. I don't know offhand where it is (was), but apparently it was becoming unsound, so the Royal Corps of Engineers was called in to bring it down. They applied the calculated volume of explosives and hit the switch. The bridge went up and dropped back near enough in the exact same place, strong enough for the Engineers to drive their truck over...
I figure I should see at least three comments about how if it was the US Army blowing up the bridge, that bridge would right now be passing Pluto and heading for deep space...
...all of which is good information. The original question was, how to build a house that will last for centuries, to which the answer is: "pay for quality work".
Never mind that the cheap Victorian houses have all disappeared - the same is going to happen to cheap American houses, and cheap German houses, and so on...
I don't know if the story is true, but, if it isn't, it should be. You are wrong about the US Army though: the bridge would still be standing and the village nearby would right now be passing Pluto :-)
Virtually serving coffee
If you look around the world, you'll see houses of all varieties and climates that have stood for centuries. For example, the Norwegian stave churches are made of wood and endure a brutal climate, yet have survived nearly a thousand years. Likewise, houses in and around York, in England have survived despite being build of wood and plaster. Here in Chicago, a place with a terrible climate, wooden structures have survived 150 years or more. Stone, of course, is more enduring than wood, and most of the long-lived buildings are made of stone rather than wood; yet some wooden buildings have survived while stone structures have fallen into ruin.
As long as good-quality materials are used and you pay attention to foundations and drainage, nearly any material will last a long time *as long as it is maintained*.
So, if you want your home to last a thousand years, build it well, of whatever material you prefer; but the most important factor is making sure that someone will maintain it after you're gone. Build it beautifully, so it will be treasured; and make it part of a large family or community - preferably religious, since religious communities have long memories. You might also want to arrange for some historical event to occur within your home (say, get yourself elected president); but that's a little tougher to arrange.
[this
I've collected some thoughts not just on making a house that will last for a long time (though I think that's a great idea), but on households in general, at my angelfire site.
...
Always looking for new suggestions.
However, right now I don't live very much like the way I describe here, much to certain people's dissatisfaction
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
King Kong?
that houses are built like crap nowadays (planned obsolesence and all that).
Here in New Orleans we have thousands of home that and over a hundred years old and many of those are over two hundred.
One of the main things here is protecting yourselves from flooding. Old builders built the houses 4 or 5' off the ground - problem solved. New builders expect you to buy flood insurance. I have to laugh at all the surburbanites here whose 10 year old houses are sinking because they were built on slabs (the grounds' too soft) or who are wiped out by floods.
They built the houses off the ground here for a reason, ya know.
theres a high tech material called bricks, that can be used to build houses, not only wood. :P
The Gallarus Oratory on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland has stood for 1300 years, and it's constructed of stacked stones with no mortar. The method of stacking provides stability and keeps the inside dry.
Whenever someone quotes the old testaments, you should remember that it was a collection of jewish memories for the use of the jewish people.
When the Bible speaks of the Jewish people being slaved to build pyramids, just remember that they forgot to mention that almost the whole of Egypt was working on the pyramids, and not just the jews.
Also, if you look at modern history sources, you will see that whole congregation of worker where wholly devoted to the construction of pyramids ALL YEAR LONG, and that this particular caste was living by the old pyramids... Think Generations of stonemasons passing knowledge...
The bible (old testament)is just ONE point of view from what happened at the time... the jewish one.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Culling the data that people have suggested, I would say that the top three ways to build a house to last is:
The temples/pogadas in Japan were designed to last a thousand years. In fact there was a special award/honor for the builder of a temple when their building was able to stand a thousand years.
meh
Helen and Scott Nearing wrote a book called The Good Life that details their efforts at homesteading in the early-mid 1900's. You may not agree with their politics [I think they are raving communists in a lot of ways], but they detail how they built all of their buildings of concrete and local stones. They used "frames" to build the walls a section at a time. I'm willing to bet that those buildings will last a lot longer than most anything else in Vermont.
Very good read if you are interested in building with stone and concrete with the thought of lasting.
Build a treehouse in a redwood!
Look at the ewoks!
Look at the elves!
I've been interested in building one of these for a while. It's a dome made of a concrete-foam sandwich that's sprayed one layer at a time onto an inflated form.
http://www.monolithicdome.com/thedome/index.html
The houses are extremely strong and durable and stand up to earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes quite well.
Unfortunately, most dome homes I've seen are quite ugly, but there are a few that look good to my eyes.
Until it gets hit by a bomb in nuclear war.
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
--I have read all of the replies 0 and above as of late last night. After serious contemplation, at this time, my recommendation is earth bermed or underground construction. The reasons are all valid, it has a superior better energy model, it has a model as to "long lasting" which fit the criteria, and the design is by far the best when it comes to both natural disasters and man made disasters. Ignoring the potential for both of the latter is naieve, in my opinion. I would consider that to actually be the primary consideration.
I would also insist into any construction plans a definite way for planned air in and air out, and to make use of exisiting technology to filter and sterilise this air, and to have a ways to do that independent of the electrical power grid, although that can be "one" of the energy sources.
I will also recommend two books to start with, by the same author, a respected and recognized personal home structure architect/planner and geopolitical analyst, Joel Skousen. The two books are "The Secure Home" and "Strategic Relocation".
I guarantee you will need both those books, and will enjoy them. They are excellent for the tech library and for anyone considering a move or a new home or both.
His website is joelskousen.com easy enough to remember, and a lot of information there onsite.
The various underground/earth bermed/ earth ship styled construction techniques and tips and gotchas are easily researchable using normal search terms.
If you'd like to see what I consider to be a pretty cheap (real cheap really) but doable system, goto waltonfeeds website, look at their "grand daddy of all root cellars" project. It's pretty spiffy.
If you would like more book recommendations, just ask. Good luck on your new home! I think it is excellent you are thinking along these lines. Quality, safety, comfort, responsibility to not only yourself and family and this generation, but generations to come. That's the way to think and act!
I certainly saw some interesting concepts presented in the thread, most of them I were familiar with already though, a couple of new ones to me. One I noticed wasn't presented yet, it might be by now, is the norwegian-viking styled massive logs construction. It is log home construction using very few logs, but those are whoppers. Watched it once on one of the home shows on TV, forget which one now, this old shack or whatever.
For those out there that like to travel, go to Angkor (Siem Reap) in Cambodia to see just what nature can do to a building. I forget the name of the temple that they have decided to let Nature keep, but I have a couple pictures.
Basically, over time soil was deposited on the roofs of the temples, and seeds took root. The root systems of the trees went inside the buildings, down the columns, and tore everything apart.
Many of the temples have been restored... but it is interesting to see what the jungle can do to even the most massive structures of stone.
Tornado driven telephone poles bounce off 'em. The are made by inflating a elastomer dome, spraying the inside with foam, embedding the rebar ties in the foam, and application of "shotcrete", a sprayed concrete product that cures to a very strong product, to the inside of the shell. If you then bury it, it will last quite some time. Since the interior does not contain load bearing walls to support the outer structure you have quite a lot of flexability in interior layout. Super insulated (and you _could_ bury the wiring ducts in the walls during foaming...) with little to no annual (exterior) maintenance. Essentially just the grounds if you bury it. I always wanted to do one with "tube" skylights to the surface and put "mushrooms" (well mushroom shaped) light gatherers on the surface. Don't want to bury it? Take some stone facing material and cover it instead ... You want to keep maintenance low, so don't just paint it. Use a material that is stable and blocks UV. Paranoid? Put a layer of pond-liner clay over it before you bury it. The dome is self supporting and since the concrete is not required to be watertight, minor cracking is not an issue. Use high quality material to avoid any aging problems. And since you'll have most of the equipment on site anyway, "Gunite" the interior surface when complete for a finished plaster surface that is very durable.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Those of you interested in long term projects might want to read about the Millenium Clock project headed by Danny Hillis, the guy who designed the Connection Machines series of supercomputer in the 80s.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The second point is the way you lock the structure together. The Elizabethans would use round pegs and square holes (guess where this saying comes from!!). I'm not certain if they used water retention or some other way of varying the sizes, but they'd simply alter the dimensions so that the peg would fit, then adjust them back to normal so that it was firmly locked in place. By then sealing the end with tar, again they could guarantee that that would more or less remain the case forever.
Personally, I'd go for interlocking. Use tiles which interlock along each axis. The reasoning behind this is that stress is a major cause of problems for structures. By having interlocking, stress is localized. A tornado or an earthquake might punch a few small holes, but they won't rip the entire building apart. When the world sorts itself out again, you go out with some fresh tiles and patch it up.
Walls absolutely absolutely should have an internal airgap. It's essential for decent insulation. This is often restricted to external walls, but in today's world where each room might very well want to be at a different temperature, you're much better going with airgaps in the internal walls as well.
Back to longevity. Foundations are a critical part of the structure. It should be impossible for the fondations to crack under any realistic scenario. That means that you need channels under the foundations to keep the ground consistant. (If the ground sinks uniformly, it's not going to be nearly as much of a problem as if one corner falls away.)
Next, you need a reasonably sloping roof - flat roofing is cheap and adds an extra floor, but it makes for a lousy design if you get hit by rain or snow. You want sloped roofing, and preferably slate or a very good synthetic material. This is probably the number one point where buildings sustain needless damage.
Now you've taken care of all external menaces, you've got to pay some thought to the internal ones. Fuses exist for a reason. Use them. I would strongly recommend having each room's power on a seperate loop, rather than looping the entire house. Power spikes and other nasties can then be localized much easier. You probably want a Faraday Cage in the airgap on the outer wall. All arials must then be placed outside, sure - no EMF radiation will cross the boundary - but it will also stop Really Nasty Things happening to electric appliances in a Big Thunderstorm.
Oh, and fuse the arials.
The last aspect is fire. Use fire-retardent furniture and furnishings. That's a big start. Fire extinguishers are handy, too. Now, if you place fans such that fresh air is ALWAYS pulled in at ground level, and ALWAYS expelled at ceiling level, then you will always have a region guaranteed to be free of smoke.
If you want to get even more elaborate, and have the budget, halon fire supression systems in any room used solely for storage, and possibly also in the airgaps, would be a good idea. That way, fire could be isolated, keeping the building as a whole intact.
A further advancement on this theme would be to have a building "skeleton" built in stone, and then build the house through and over this skeleton. Airgaps would be between floors as well as rooms. In this arrangement, fire could not spread upwards. (The halon would shut out the airgap, and if the fire breeched the ceiling, the halon would then douse the fire below.)
The fire could not spread between "ribs" on the skeleton, as stone doesn't burn. This means that even a "worst-case" scenario is inherently limited.
Now, back to those outer walls. I would put a degree of tension within the interlocking tiles, and pla
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Indeed, if you look at pretty much any village anywhere in Europe you'll find the same. A stone structure given a modest amount of maintenance will stand indefinitely. Given no maintenance at all, the walls will stand for three or four hundred years, even if the roof falls in.
There are downsides. 802.11b does not work through metre thick granite walls. Drilling holes in those walls to run cables through is not for the faint-hearted.
But it isn't going to fall down any time soon.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Our current house is about 100 years old. Like pretty much every other hundred year old british building its still here because its been fixed. It suprises some people when they discover there are three hundred year old buildings where the walls are in fine condition because someone supported all the innards carefully, removed the outside walls and rebuillt them around it again.
It helps that brickwork is a little flexible (it isnt an earthquake country so old houses are not built on solid plinths), but when we bought it we still had to remove a small lake from the cellar and get the beams across the front strengthened as they sagged over time.
Don't built a house to last four hundred years, build a house thats easy to maintain. The roof will develop leaks, the window frames will decay, the plaster will crumble. If you use plastic it will age and crack, if you use concrete it'll decay crack and powder.
"This is my grandfathers broom" as the saying goes "My father replaced the brush, and I replaced the handle"
Alan
You can defend that point with machine gun fire, should there ever be a revolution.
At the end of WWII, as Budapest was being liberated from Nazi occupation, the elite Nazi troops made their last stand in the castle, which is on top of a hill.
The Russians parked on another hill and shelled the castle. Game over.
In the event of a revolution, you'd better hope the Bramblethorners are on the side of the guys with the airplanes and bombs.
This Like That - fun with words!
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but concrete breaks down after about 80 years. That's not to say it's not still effective in some applications after it's structure has changed, but as far as I know, after 80 years, it turns to powder (very tightly compacted powder, granted, but powder none the less). Concrete seems to be quite a ubiquitis building material these days (and for some time now), and I was wondering if anyone had any notions of alternatives to concrete?
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
I'm currently a student at Oxford which is full of
lovely ancient buildings, but perhaps the most
remarkable feature of these buildings is that they
have nearly all fully withstood hundreds of years
of student abuse. My college is from Henry VIIIth's time and has varying degrees of quality of building. The great Tom Quad is simply stunning with lots of offices, Peck full of rowdy second years has areas of damp but still is faboulous and has withstood many a rampantly smashed window and battering. The Meadows building however is fundamentally flawed in that it was built to fashion and not to style and solidity. Let's really not mention Blue Boar, the 1960s addition made of expensive portland lime stone cleverly made to look exactly like concrete.
Anyway, partly the college is so well preserved simply because the stone walls are ridiculously thick, and partly because they have a continuous and ginormous maintenance program going on. Somehow us students dont seem to make that much difference.
The difference with modern buildings is that we want total convenience along with preserving the building. These two things don't intrinsically go together. Those that live in the beautiful peck quad cannot have en-suites because it is a listed building and quite obviously tampering with it will not help it to last. We can't also have cooking facilities etc due to this also (we suffer by eating a served three course formal meal wearing gowns in the hall where Harry Potter was filmed for £2).
My very long winded point is that people now do not want nor need long lasting houses. Technology and ways of living change so fast that an old house is a huge expense due to maintenance,
and the more modern the house, theoretically at
least the more economical.
That said, I wouldn't give up my beautiful oak panelled set in Peck Quad for the world...
i met a man who was a traditional indian stone mason and accomplished builder and teacher.A UNESCO heritage person. He builds stone shrines. He said all things crumble, stone lasts longer, but the factor of longevity of a structure is nothing but SIZE. referred to pyramids of egypt as example. nothing but size played the main role in longevity, he said.
Really the House is only as good at those that vote them in...
oh wait... RTFA?
I have to vote for Shipping Containers for expats.
whats the big deal? 100 years not enough for you?
threescore and ten.
dress it up. paint animal murals on the wall. when you get tired of the place, seal it up. reopen after 12,000 years. this has worked, but hasn't been patented. think its called artistic licence, not gpl.
Steel is a quite general term. There are many sorts of steel with different mechanical (strength) and chemical (corrosion) properties. Is the "construction" steel really the optimum w.r.t. corrsion ? I highly doubt it. It's probably a tradeoff between strength and price, with the price being the more important factor. There are, for example, special steel grades for marine applications, which have to withstand salty water for decades.
Another point: there are other metals besides Iron (steel). One would be Titanium, which is also very strong but does not corrode in the same way as Iron: it's very reactive but it develops a protective oxide layer on the surface and oxidation does not penetrate into the depth as in Iron. Yes, it's very expensive, but if the ultimate solution is required, one should consider other materials as well.
Perhaps you should qualify this, as I presume you mean 19th century American as opposed to truly Victorian. The UK still has hundreds of thousands of 'working class' (i.e. lowest grade) Victorian houses that are not only structurally sound, but have been retrofitted with gas and electricity supplies, and still have surviving fittings. I have lived in many of this type, and frequently noticed original glass in the windows.
There are lots of low-tech building approaches using earth and/or building underground -- building with tires (http://www.earthship.org/), cordwood masonry & earth-bermed housing (http://www.cordwoodmasonry.com/index.php), and my personal favorite, cob (http://www.cobcottage.com/).
These also mesh very nicely with the earlier post regarding non-toxic housing, and incorporate passive solar design, can support rainwater catchment, greywater reuse, etc. Plus you can build them yourself, for way cheaper than buying a crappy stick-built rectangle in a hideous burb.
I'm starting the process to do just this -- I will build, within the next five years, a sustainable low-impact house with no new cement, no new lumber, and probably spend less than twenty grand (including the five acres of land) to do so.
I encourage anyone interested in real alternatives to suburban tract housing to check out the numerous resources available for owner-builders -- I've just scratched the surface, there's lots more out there. A house should last a century, and still be livable. A house should heat and cool itself, and provide its own water and even electricity. All this is possible today.
Well, saying "wood" is misleading, it's like saying "metal". Teak was used to build ships because it doesn't rot and bugs don't eat it. And if you want a solid house, build it out of that wood that grows in Africa, primarily used for musical instruments. (iron wood?)
Those aren't conduits... they're Jeffries Tubes.
Anyone who has seen a Tudor or earlier house England knows that the way to make a house last is to throw away the plumb bob and the set square
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
She probably deserved it for being a racist twat!
"As mad as a Muslim"
Why not have a geodesic dome?
http://www.bfi.org/
http://www.bfi.org/domes/index.htm
Contributed by my friend George.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
It is now Saturday Afternoon March 15, Pacific Time, and I have yet to confirm this via Google.
who could afford houses with lots of gingerbread
the gingerbread houses I build generally don't last more than a couple of days...
c-hack.com |
There is a lot of discussion about using old or new materials. As was recently driven home by the article about non-toxic housing, a lot of new materials emit all sorts of chemicals. I would recommend researching your materials carefully to make your home not only lasting, but a healthy, safe home for your family.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Face it, if it rains and is humid in your environment, you cannot use any limestone or concrete (man made limestone).
I question why such a long lived home is necessary.
If it takes 2x the money/energy/materials to build, then the extra cost in money, energy and materials compounded over the lifetime of the home will greatly exceed the cost to tear down and rebuild over and over again.
Secondly, eventaully the cost to buy and existing home or to rebuild a tear down home greatly exceed the lifetime income of any possible resident. This leads to greatly overcrowded slums.
Check out San Juan, Pureto Rico
Jakarata, Indonesia,
Surabyaa, Indonesia,
and Mexico City
There are downsides to such long lived homes. In earthquake prone areas where concrete + steel is preferred, you eventually have large populated areas consisting of very unsanitary slums since the neighborhood tends to go downhill over time as the homes decay.
There are houses in manomet ma that are timber frame that have lasted for almost 400 years. The two that I know of were built in 1660 and 1680. Try buying an old barn, if you get lucky, it will have been built from chestnut.
I'm sitting here and remembering a conversation that I had a number of years back. Remember how I mentioned knowing the senior jobsite engineer for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty? Well, I was callow enough once to, in her presence, say something about building a permanent structure using stainless steel.
Now, she's a very dignified woman, so she didn't laugh in my face, much. But being Israeli and having known me since I was fourteen, she wasn't exactly respectful either.
Ya see, along with the statue, the same project also rebuilt the surrounding facilities and, of course, Ellis Island. And they had to spend quite a lot of time tearing out and replacing "stainless" steel that had been corroded by all those saltwater storms. She didn't exactly let me escape after a sentence or two either. So when I read somebody else making the same blithe, confident assumptions that I once did, well, that's not a mistake that I will ever make again.
It all comes down to good old high school chemistry. Remember how the different "stripes" on the periodic table correlate with different properties?[1] Iron is just a very happy go lucky element. It *likes* to bond. And even worse, it likes to two-time and then bond with something else.
Yes. That's right, folks. Iron is a slut.
So even when you get it into some great tight bond, well, tight is relative.
Think about the things that are found in nature. Elements do sometimes turn up in metallic form. In fact, as per this conversation, so do most classic building materials, in a general sense. Glass? Check. Wood? Of course. Thatch, mud, and so on? Yeah.
But then you get to the metals. Now we all know that gold turns up in elemental form. Think of the forty-niners. And twisty little copper wads are not that rare. And, relevant to all of this, those hunks may well be older then civilization.
But there just isn't much history of iron or metallic iron compounds sitting out in the rain while the Babylonians were succeeded by the Romans were succeeded by the Europeans.[2]
Unattached iron is iron looking for a friend. And even iron with a friend is iron looking for a new friend. And oxygen will do just fine.
Now, as you had mentioned, there are a number of more specialized options. I *think* that you may have been thinking of Core-Ten steel when you talked about more high-end, corrosion-resistant options. And those certainly are better. And, like Core Ten, titanium and aluminum do indeed form a "shell" when subject to corrosion.
But part of what we're talking here is the great old game of engineering, how much does it cost to get what I want? There is a reason that engineers have been laughing about physicists and their spherical cows for decades. That old differnce between what is physically *possible* and what is likely.
Let's say that we find a very corrosion-resistant metal and we're comparing it to concrete. Then I have a simple question. With the practical exception of gold[3], everything is corroded by something. Including, of course, concrete. Well, I ask a simple question. How many gallons of reagent would it take to dissolve a two inch diameter hole in a typical concrete bunker?[4]
How many gallons for titanium?
If you really want to propose a house built, as one does with long-term use concrete, of fifteen solid inches of titantium, well, may the gods help you. But as for me, concrete is, *ahem* dirt cheap and even when things *do* go wrong, whomever is the current caretaker of the house should find it practical to repair the damage at reasonable cost.
Now, as I said above, I am not an engineer. Nor am I a physicist[5]. I don't even play one on T.V. But in my experience and from what I've looked at, I stick to my initial statement. In fact, I'll expand it. Iron compounds = BAD. Is this a universal statement? Well, look at what I said about the wood furniture in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But I still say that anybody considering this should think about what bridge
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
I've seen two bale structures and have talked with the construction teams for both of them. They're in southwest Vermont, so the environment is not the most stable. I am not a building expert, but I'm very interested.
:) And there's a certain appeal to a really thick wall...
Tip: find a builder *with demonstrated experience in straw bale construction*. While it may seem to be a simple, attractive technique, everything has to be done right - duh, yes, but here more seriously. Just a little tiny open space in the masonry, and you get a drip, which means a crack, which means more drips, which means rot, which means your house is not only structurally weak but a fire hazard too. Any windows, doors, or other holes are serious points of weakness. Keep in mind that rain during construction is a problem greater than work stoppage.
The insulation value is great only if the structural integrity is not compromised. You're counting on a massive *sealed* airspace.
That said, the building (a house) that isn't cracking (and is storied, timber framed for load) is beautiful and warm.
[|]
Back when I lived in New Jersey in the 80s, my general opinion was that a house that was 50 years old would last for another 50, and a house that was 20 years old would last for another 20, and a house that was 100 years old would last for another 100 (though occasionally when we were house-hunting we'd see houses that were obviously 30 years old 29 years ago :-) I helped do a lot of renovation work on our church parsonage, which had some parts that were colonial, and a large part that was mid-1800s farmhouse, which had a lot of 9x4 beams, some of which had been termite-chewed to about 20% wood and 80% airspace.
My house there was built in 1931, had a wood frame, cedar siding, real plaster inside walls, real wood floors, cinder-block and concrete foundation, and ship-lap 1x12 floors in the attic - none of the cheap sheetrock or particle board that too many later houses had. On the other hand, the plumbing was getting kind of funky, and some of the parts weren't replacable because they changed design in the 40s, and the original electricity had been knob&tube, which had been replaced by metal conduit in the earlier replacement and romex in the later upgrades, and the phone wiring was several generations of weirdness. The heating system was a steam boiler radiator system, originally coal-fired but upgraded to oil-fired by putting a burner into the fire chamber of the coal boiler.
Some technologies are more extensible than others - building spaces into a house that can have stuff added helps a lot, so for instance forced-hot-air ducting that can later have air conditioning added or heat sources changed is convenient. Conduit for running wires through is more extensible than specific sets of wires which become obsolete more quickly. One- or two-story buildings with an attic and a basement or crawlspace are much easier to modify than three-story buildings or buildings with neither way to access all the rooms. Interior walls that aren't load-bearing are a lot easier to edit later than load-bearing walls.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai is in great shape. It's from ~400 AD, and while the "Burning Bush" there is unlikely to be the one Moses actually saw, it's still been the official Bush for 1600 years or so. On the other hand, the hot water system at the hotel by the monastery also feels like the original ~400AD system, which is not what a hiker needs to find after coming down the mountain :-)
And the Anasazi pueblo areas in the US Southwest would mostly still be fine housing today except for the lack of water and plumbing and the inconvenience of building vertical driveways. We'll see if Arcosanti survives at imitating them...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We visited Bradford-on-Avon when I was a kid. The local tourist kiosk recommended that "you should go see the new church - it's Norman"... The old one was also interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The place has been brewing the same black beer for about 600 years. I suspect the tables are newer, and the building's probably been extended a bit, but the continuity of the business has let it stick around. (On the other hand, in the newer parts of Prague had lots of concrete building that was being gutted and renovated, presumably either Soviet-era construction or at least Soviet-quality maintenance.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My grandparents farmhouse was built in 1918 using wood that was available on the land they owned. It was insulated with Vermiculite (available today in garden centers for use in potting soils) If you open up the walls, there are no 2x4's, just logs ~4" in diameter with two faces planed off and the bark still on them. Home longevity is not a matter of materials really, its a matter of maintainance. Keeep the roof from leaking, keep the walls and floors sealed from moisture, keep the house painted and siding and shingles repaired and your house will last as long as you want
..they're ugly blocky tasteless shite. So naturally people want rid of them. But a well designed building built for both usefulness and beauty should last hundreds of years, its use changing but its structure and basic appearance remaining.
Why have "tastes changed"? They haven't, some semblance of taste has merely been reasserted, displacing the 60s "big brick with windows", "concrete barn" and "prefab cardboard box" styles that were always more ideological / cheapskate than an honest attempt at beauty.
And plasic doesn't hold up well to direct light for prolonged periods of time. It gets very brittle. Same goes for cold temperatures.
Michael Loves Me!
The main factor in the longevity of buildings is not the quality or type of construction, given reasonable competence on the part of the builders. It's whether or not the people who live in the houses are happy with their dwellings. If they are, they will maintain them lovingly and they will last. If not, they will rapidly decay. For an example of the latter, taken to an extreme, see public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green. Using exactly the same construction techniques could have yielded buildings that would have been considered wonderful places to live.
To that end, I can recommend a terrific book called A Pattern Language. In short, this book is a collection of "rules" for making communities and buildings as livable as possible. The rules are distilled from centuries of vernacular architecture-- in other words, homes built by those who would live in them, rather than by architects working to somewhat theoretical design parameters. To a large extent, these rules were developed based on the kinds of buildings that have survived many generations.
It may seem unscientific to base a home design on these simple rules, rather than by some organized system of thought (like Bauhaus, to give a really dreadful example of design detached from the requirements of real people.) But once you read some of these rules, their validity seems unimpeachable. Just as one example, see if you don't agree that this rule is a very good one: a room should have natural light coming from at least two directions. Think about the submarine rooms you've been in that have only one set of windows at one end of the room. Compare this to rooms that have windows in at least two of the walls. Which room would be more pleasant to live in?
Houses that are well-loved endure. All else decays rapidly.
Yeah, modern construction is crummy, featuring large helpings of built in obsolescence. I wince when I see crappy cinder-block estates rising everywhere.
But OTOH, how many times have you seen a 50+ year old house sitting on a lot worth many times more than the value of the structure? Will your structure be the most appropriaate for that community in 50 years time? Why bother building for 100 years when the majority of occupants will want to gut the place every 20 years to get the latest fixtures? It can be argued that building for more than 50 years lifespan is bogus economy in most instances.
Also, I prefer quality housing. But from first hand experience, 90% of the populace doesn't care about quality as long as the house has stainless steel appliances and a jacuzzi. Sigh...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Most new houses are designed for a life of about 60 years before major renovation (because that's how long most roof materials are good for - oddly, thatched roofs are virtually as good as tiled roofs in this respect). However, based on the current clearance and rebuilding rate, an average British house needs to last for over 2,000 years. Frightening.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
All over Japan there are temple complexes dating back hundreds of years which are made all or mostly of very perishable materials like wood and bamboo. They are good exdamples of persistant but (relatively) non-durable structures. These buildings are periodically torn down and rebuilt using the original plans and methods but all new materials. Would these kinds of structures fill your criteria? It makes more sense to bend with the wind then to attempt to remain rigid. This sort of rebuilding scheme has enabled Japan's cultural sites to survive in a very geologically unstable and natural disaster-prone land.
and thusly you sir (or madam) seem to show what an enlightened populace you live among in your superior country.