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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)."
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Two words:
Regular Maintenance
The longer you let it go, the more nature reclaims it. You have to plan to fight entropy continuously.
I took a tour in the NE US a few years ago and the guide told us, "Our ancestors built these buildings with the intent that thay would last hundreds of years!" There was a crew on scaffolding against one building tuck-pointing all the mortar on one wall.
I pointed out to the guide that if it wasn't for the regular replacement of the mortar, none of these building would have lasted 50 years. His response was, "Yeah, but they were smart enough to build these buildings so that we _could_ replace the mortar."
I thought it was a stupid answer at the time but later I realized that he was right. They didn't build things they couldn't repair, replace or maintain.
I have friends that live in a 170 year old, wood frame house. Of course, the banister was replaced sometime in the 1920's and the oak posts in the cellar were changed to steel in the 1960's and several steps have been replaced and the siding's been replaced several times and the chimneys have been rebuilt,... you get the idea.
But, it's still considered a 170 year old house even though probably less than half of it is actually 170 years old.
My point is, structures that are maintained, last. Those that are not maintained, don't. It doesn't really matter what material you build with, if you don't or can't maintain it, it isn't going to last anyway.
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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.
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.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."