Did he just make a castle with more steps and not as good?
How to design a house to last 1000 years
61–70 of 402 posts
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#62You should still use reinforcement in the concrete: Use basalt rebar instead of steel; it will not corrode. Use a nylon fiber in the mix to protect against impact and spalling from fire. Use 5000 psi concrete instead of 2500. This is much stronger and will be less likely to break down under any environment. Use a vapor barrier underneath to help prevent moisture and gas from coming up into the house. Put the foundati…
And build it either on bedrock or on a stable sand layer. The foundation is key.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reconfigured / recycled easily makes sense. Tough to build a product in 2000s for life in the 2900s. That said the cost to make homes reconfigured/recycled easily is probably quite high and who knows if there will be people with knowledge to be able to perform that work in 400 years. Whereas a shelter can always be used by humans...
I personally believe that you need to find a compromise between a framework that lasts very long and party that can be recycled so you can adopt the house depending on your needs without needing to redo everything (for example foundation and some integral supports could probably be designed as a framework that can be adapted while walls, windows, room configuration, doors, etc. need to be changed eventually and there…
We already do this with commercial construction. Every floor is just a big box that can be sectioned off as the new owner sees fit.
The key is that the structure is basically self standing with nothing but the outer walls, and if it's a tower, the center core instead.
Add a vertical chase way too to bottom for easy reconfiguring of cables and pipes and you can basically do anything you want until the structure fails.
Modern residential doesn't build like this because it would be expensive and probably pretty ugly. It's a lot cheaper to get your structure in bits and pieces by stacking walls on walls on the foundation then have just an outside structure and then have the floors and roof spanning outside to outside.
But it could easily be done with the materials we have.
Another major thing is the drop ceiling. It's designed to make access easy so that you can run cables and new plumbing anywhere you want.
It's ugly so you'd want to find a way to have a modular ceiling that isn't a drop ceiling, but maybe that works for you.
Last, for residential, you may butt up against height issues as to be modular like that you're want to have a couple feet extra between floors so you have room to move things around without opening things up.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#64Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#65If I were to design a house with the idea that it should serve future generations, I'd design it to be reconfigured, recycled, or torn down easily. After reading some of Stewart Brand's writing, I've learned to love ugly buildings.
Agreed. The idea that homes don't last 1000 years because of their construction quality is conflating correlation and causation. Homes don't last that long because ideas about what (or where) a home should be don't last 1000 years. Heck, in recent times, they hardly last 100 years.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#66You should still use reinforcement in the concrete: Use basalt rebar instead of steel; it will not corrode. Use a nylon fiber in the mix to protect against impact and spalling from fire. Use 5000 psi concrete instead of 2500. This is much stronger and will be less likely to break down under any environment. Use a vapor barrier underneath to help prevent moisture and gas from coming up into the house. Put the foundati…
I think the constraint of expanding the house prevented a build like you're suggesting. I personally think it's a silly constraint when the plan is already 3000+ sqft, which is larger than anything used as non-communal shelter by humans for our species' duration. I also dislike how the author completely punted on insulation. I think that's a very important part of any new building. It's easy to insulate your proposed…
Yes, insulation is very important. I actually built this house for myself. Took 2.5 years...the insulated concrete forms I used have built in insulation for the walls...and for the foundation I used special foam around the edges of the foundation to help with that. A commenter mentioned elsewhere that you would not be able to find contractors to build a house like OP designed - that is a true statement even with my build and that is why I had to build 90 percent of myself (my sons and wife helped too).
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The second problem is making sure people want to maintain the structure for 1000 years, or at least not tear it down. I don't think this is as hard as the other comentors are saying, though. Just don't build the house in a city. I live in about a 200 year old house but it has been extensively reworked over its lifetime including by me. And given that it's on a nice piece of exurban property it's hardly a stretch to…
There's a bit of a question about how much of the house is actually left from 200 years ago. My house was technically built in 1897 but was moved in the 1920s on to a new foundation and we basically knocked the entire thing down and rebuilt it a few years ago after we bought it. Now we're adding to it again. It shares some of the DNA of that house from 1897 but basically none of the parts anymore and is much nicer lo…
Probably not much.
My contractor for a couple of big renovations I did figured that the 4x4-ish posts on the first floor were probably original along with at least some of the subflooring (about half of which I redid because it was collapsing). We think there was a substantial addition (probably including a second floor) around 1900. That's when the demolished barn on the now adjacent property dated to.
The house I grew up in was similar. It dated to either the 1700s or possibly even late 1600s. But the original house was just two rooms (two stories) built into the side of a hill.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#68If I were to design a house with the idea that it should serve future generations, I'd design it to be reconfigured, recycled, or torn down easily. After reading some of Stewart Brand's writing, I've learned to love ugly buildings.
Seems like a lot of the article is about just that. A really robust, reliable structure & foundation, with progressively less permanent things attached. A brick facade can easily last hundreds of years, but not a big deal to replace. Interior walls made of non-load-bearing-wood makes it "easy" enough to reconfigure rooms.
He mentions how the building shape is just a rectangle, which makes it reasonable to repurpose for many uses (he mentions office & separate apartments). He takes care to allow for routing of utilities under and inside the building.
It's not quite as reconfigurable as I think you're getting at - optimized for being torn down, but it's much closer than a typical 100yr house would be.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#69Why have the chimney outside? It's very inefficient... https://www.quora.com/Why-do-American-houses-often-have-the-...
Why was that done traditionally? Because if you had a chimney fire, you could hook your mules to it, pull it down, and save the house.
This seems right but I don't know enough about chimneys, mules or even houses to determine if it's true.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#70What's more important? Building a house that lasts a thousand years, or building a culture that lasts 1000 years and can build houses on demand?