Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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.
I've read that many of the ancient Japanese builds one visits in Kyoto, Nara, etc. are periodically rebuilt in parts. The claims of a building being 1000 years old are absolutely true, but not in exactly the same sense as we might use in the West to say 100% original woodwork and such. You may not be looking at the original floorboards, ceiling beams, or anything actually.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
Every now and they someone discoverers a pensioner somewhere in the fatherland that's been dead in their home for a couple years. It seems that one can arrange things so that the government payouts are deposited in an account, and all your recurring debts are automatically paid from there. If you don't have friends or family that care enough to visit, you're free to die and go unnoticed indefinitely.
Think of it... somewhere in Berlin or Hamburg there are skeletons propped up in chairs with bowls of chips in theirs laps, faithfully watching to tube. Now all we need is apartments that last hundreds of years. At some point a certain percentage of units will have 200 year old occupants that never come out.
BTW, this isn't urban legend. It's been widely reported on several occasions.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Absolutely!
Dyolf Knip
Houses built of wood 100's of years ago are still standing and our wood products now are much stronger/better.
... the upshot is that housing material is worse and construction is shoddier than in the past.
I don't think that's true. An architect friend of mine once mentioned (and I'm quoting from memory so I'll have to paraphrase) that houses built in the 20's will last for 110 years, in the 50s for 80 years, 70s for 50 years and most modern houses 30 years. It was something like that
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Right, but the heat at which steel looses its stability is far above and beyond what wood burns at.
Mod point free since 2001
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
(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)
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.
Good points - even copper piping (which can outlast galvanized in many enviornments) is still prone to corrosion and eventual leaking. Basements are a funny thing. My current home was built in the 1930s with block construction for the basement, and not sealed on the exterior. The block is solid, and there's no problem with cracks, but without the moisture blocking paint on the walls (and the poured floor), the humidity level rises rapidy in the summer and in very wet times could even weep. Many newer homes have been built with poured walls/floors with a thick tar layer on the outside to protect against moisture. If the ground is solid and the footings were well done and settled prior to the walls going up, there aren't usually many problems, but even a little shift can crack a wall or floor - but usually leaves the tar layer intact. That combined with good lanscaping and drain tile can keep a basement dry quite well.
Some of the best stuff I've seen from a basement standpoint is probably the foam block with rebar cement inside for walls. Great insulation, stops moisture, and still has the same strength as a normal poured wall. Great stuff. Wood foundations are attractive, but I don't know how they'd hold up over time (probably as long as the tar layer keeps the moisture out).
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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 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.
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.
Well, since you started the wood vs. steel idea, here's 2 cents from this Civil Engineer:
.9 (permanent) instead of the more common Cd = 1.0 (10 years)
Tips for good timber construction:
Don't use a residential contractor. Use a comercial building contractor. They are used to having people check their quality, and do better work. However, you're going to pay for it.
Insist on good lumber.#2 spruce-fir is good for sawhorses and houses that only last a few decades.
Make sure the Engineer uses Cd =
Glulam and other laminate beams are good. beleive the hype. The problem with most solid sawn timber is the quality since we've used all the old growth. Glulam is a step back towards that quality.
The big problem with steel studs will be corrosion.
They come electroplated or zinc dipped. some are punched and formed _after_ plating, leaving unprotected edges. You then go and poke holes in them with screws, and leave corrosion points. If you go with steel, use bolts in pre-primed holes and paint over the bolt heads.
If you go with concrete, use galvanized rebar. You'll shit a kidney when you see the cost, but it's the best thing since, well, rebar. Bar corrosion and the ensuing spalling is what will eventually weaken your foundation.
Personally, I've been doing some thinking about the house I want to build/ have built when I retire:
concrete foundation, doweled stone walls, glulam and bolt trusses (damn near no structural walls or columns in the envelope), Granite roof.
I think I need a new sig here.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Houses that are supposed stay cool in the summer should be well insulated.
That's what I thought and that's what common sense is. But not here in Japan. Summer is humid and long (not just 1 week humid hot like it is usually in Germany once in a year). 3 Monthes humidty of easily 70% up to 90% and temperatures of 30+ centigrades. At night it often stays between 25 and 30 centigrades.
Now imagine a cool inside...you can nearly feel the mold growing. It would be ok if you never need to leave the house, but open the door and, baaam, humidity comes in.
So the perfect solutions would be something that keeps the inside insulated from the outside (temperature wise), yet allows a free flow of air. That seems to be tricky. I have not found a solution.
Old houses in Japan have a clever air circulation system: the top of the room walls are open (can be closed in winter) and as hot air moves up, it's pushed out by a slight breeze. Many of the outside walls can be opened using sliding doors. So if there is any breeze outside, it's not too hot inside. 30 degrees outside or not.
Unfortunately it became unpopular to have the top part of room walls open, as there is no privacy any more. Any noise in a house is audible in all connected rooms. And air conditioners completely changed the way of cooling, introducing the humidity problem. And all this is amplified by having a lot of concrete, increasing the outside temperatures even more on a sunny day. Most days in summer are sunny. That's modern Tokyo. But that's another problem.
Modern houses in Japan are really built to last 20 years. Maybe 30. I live in one which is 16 years old and the owner probably would like to rebuilt it (which is not soo expensive as one might think, as the ground is a very expensive part of a house, and the house itself is built by "wood and paper and plastic". Not many stones here...
One of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ships (The United Kingdom) had a skeleton found in it. He was painting the ships innards when he was riveted in, and was forced to drink paint. This was the 1800s.
:)
Yup, the Brits rule
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Indeed. Same is true with the Brooklyn Bridge (the concrete piles that go to the bottom of the water) and the Golden Gate Bridge.
It might seem hard to believe now a days, but back when they were first creating these types of structures a lot of people died. And some bodies were unrecoverable in some of these structures.
If a decaying body would have lead to the instability of a structure, it would have been removed in some way or another.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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
Um, your info is quite outdated.
First, MODERN concrete structures are MUCH better than those of years gone by. Additives increase strength, add flexability, and can prevent cracks. Some of these are acrylics, latex, glass or carbon fibers, etc. Google has lots more info on this. Just because Your builder is ignorant and hasn't kept up with modern technology doesn't mean that the technology doesn't exist and works.
Second, prefab panels can be MUCH better than traditional stick-built structures. First, being put together in a factory means that they can be built to higher tolerances, under ideal conditions using materials and methods that simply can't be duplicated at the job site. Stress skin panels are an example of this.
Cost is the big reason most modern housing sucks. Builders are simply not using the technology available as it would increase the price of a home by 20% - 100% or are using sloppy labor. You also need to use the right materials for the right environment. You wouldn't use the same building methods and materials in southern California than you would in Wisconsin.
Lastly, it's a well known fact that the BIGGEST reason building structures fail is WATER. Keep water away from the foundation and out of the house and it will last Much longer. This means that you need a decent roof system that is maintained (Nothing lasts forever), proper grading, keeping landscaping under control (no trees too close to the house or foundation) etc.
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.
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.
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
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
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.