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)."

Comments

Here is something cool to check out...

[TedTschopp]

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

Use stone.

[SexyTr0llGal]

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.

Cob

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

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.

Re:Cob

[telly333]

Cob buildings building built in Devon, England buit in the 15th Century are still around and habitable.

Cob is a carefully adjusted proportion of sand, clay and straw (for 3 dimensional reinforcement). This mixture is extrememly strong when dry and has the added bonus of drying into a monolithic structure, unlike adobe or stone where the mortar and joints become the weak point (think seismic resistance). Walls are also fireproof and can be load-bearing.

There has been a rebirth of this art, particularly through the Cottage Cob Company (some cool photos) of Cottage Grove, Oregon, which offers classes and workshops throughout the U.S. I also Recommend thier book: The Hand Sculpted House""

Very Good.

Their style of "Oregon Cob" has the added advantage of using nonlinear designs, curved walls, etc. to create an even stonger structure (no corners)

Surprisingly, this type of construction is well suited for damp climates such as the Pacific Northwest and England, and much of the U.S., except where it gets extremely cold. The walls have good thermal mass, though not the best insulators by themselves.

~scott

How buildings learn

[linuxwrangler]

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.

Re:Flexibility

[Jester998]

"our wood products now are much stronger/better"

Bullshit. Modern wood isn't milled the same way as it used to... they now get more board feet out of a tree, but the wood is also more prone to twisting and warping (they now cut it perpedicular to the grain instead of parallel, or vice versa, I can't remember which way is which).

Having worked in construction for 8+ years, and having worked with both old wood (from renovating old homes) and new wood, I *much* prefer the old stuff... much more solid.

- Jester

Rammed Earth

[Gilmoure]

My wife and I are planning on building a 200+ year house in the near future. We've settled on a mix of wood frame and rammed earth.

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).

Re:Building a structure that lasts

[piyamaradus]

Plenty of Roman concrete (not 'reinforced' in the modern sense of internal iron structure, but cased with brick on the outside for better wear) survives and survives well. Some of it's still in use. Look at the Pantheon in Rome, which was built in the 2nd century CE with progressively lighter densities of concrete (the top of the dome is primarily pumice), and survives just fine. And unlike things like the Great Wall or the pyramids, Roman concrete architecture was used for everyday living spaces, including multistory apartment buildings, which survive (not quite livable though) in places like Ostia (the port at the old mouth of the Tiber).

Absolutely not

[joggle]

Actually, there are very few (if any) skeletons in the Great Wall of China and almost certainly none "crunched in" inside of the pyramids (I'm assuming you mean Egyptian, there are pyramids all over Earth after all).

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).

Re:Pyramids not built by slave labour

[reverseengineer]

I wonder why the oldest history book we have says that the Egyptians Imprisoned the Jews for work; slavery.

I suppose none of the labor on the Pyramids was slave labor?

You suppose correctly, actually- the pyramids predate Israelite captivity by centuries- the pyramids at Giza were built 400-500 years before Abraham, actually. The Israelites built a number of storage cities for the pharaohs, but no major pyramids. Also, I'm assuming that when you write "the oldest history book we have" you mean the Bible, which is incorrect- there are extensive Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Chinese historical records that all predate the writings of the Pentateuch.