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How to design a house to last 1000 years

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#71

Post by AtlasBarfed »

dahfizz wrote: post #15

Constructing a building that would last 1000 years is not particularly hard with modern engineering and materials. The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it. I'm not going to live 1000 years. My great grandkids likely won't even live to see the year 3022. Why would I spend orders of magnitude more for a house if a structure meant to last ~100 years serves my needs perfectly? My friend just n…

The money part of this treatise is the steel frame, right? As they stated, things like warehouses and other buildings get reused because the steel frame is still useful regardless of the other stuff.

The foundation actually seems to be a danger point. I don't know much about pylons/stilts for foundations, but it would seem a better plan because you can adjust those for the life of the structure, can't you? And the design called for a lifted first floor/crawlspace anyway.

And that would enable a basement.

American cities rebuild everything. There's at a minimum 500 year houses and buildings in most European bustling cities.

Which means, I guess, that the structure and its surrounding structures should be integrated and beautiful.

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#72

Post by duxup »

dahfizz wrote: post #15

Constructing a building that would last 1000 years is not particularly hard with modern engineering and materials. The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it. I'm not going to live 1000 years. My great grandkids likely won't even live to see the year 3022. Why would I spend orders of magnitude more for a house if a structure meant to last ~100 years serves my needs perfectly? My friend just n…

I grew up in a semi rural area. In the more rural area it was not uncommon to have on old farmhouse rotting and a new house next to it.

At some point those folks wanted a new house and presumably the cost of what they wanted to remodel was close enough to new that they built news.

The available space that you note can also facilitate just building a new house.

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#73

Post by c2h5oh »

elmolino89 wrote: post #47
johtso wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the case when using modern wood burning stoves though right?

Unless it does turn wood into a pure gas without a trace of sulfur, silica etc. it must emit such stuff. Or it comes with filters cleaning fine particles, nitric oxide etc. In the end it does emit CO2.

Wood pellets largely solve this.

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#74

Post by MichaelApproved »

Gravityloss wrote: post #17

Why have the chimney outside? It's very inefficient... https://www.quora.com/Why-do-American-houses-often-have-the-...

If we're talking about chimney efficiency then we should talk about including heat exchangers within the chimney walls.

Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters added one to his house and talks about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T3nIk3S8Wc

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#77

Post by jethro_tell »

chrisseaton wrote: post #56

Look around you at the houses which are still standing after 1000 years. Copy their design.

  1. Be rich
  2. Don't not be rich
  3. Make sure your kids marry in a way that keeps the money in the family
  4. Build a castle/house of stone.
Congratulations, you own a castle

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#78

Post by EricE »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #54
yourusername wrote: post #45

I doubt this house would make it to 50 years in places with a moderate climate. The lack of insulation makes it way too expensive to use as a dwelling or office (ignoring that you could not get a building permit in many places because it would not be able to meet energy efficiency guidelines). It is mentioned as a detail to be worked out but it is a critical detail. Around here not being able to be made energy effici…

> Adding interior insulation makes the house much more comfortable, but also changes the thermal dynamics, potentially causing freeze/thaw damage in the brick, and allowing moisture to accumulate between the brick and the insulation. This is one of the many details that would need to be worked out for the complete design of the home. Yeah, this comment struck me as a more major detail to be worked out compared to the…

Yup, that's when I stopped reading. It's clear the author has little practical, real world experience with building. In another comment I pointed out if he started watching Matt Risinger's YouTube channel he would see that things like his concern about bricks and moisture have been solved problems, with even better solutions that handle the issue better while decreasing construction time and cost.

Also is 1000 years really necessary for the vast majority of housing? There has to be a balance to these things and that seems like way overshooting for most needs.

Rather than shooting for something silly like 1000 years, how about focusing on building to climate of the area the home is in? I'm thinking of the picture from about 4 or five years ago of the major hurricane in Florida where an entire area is wiped out except for one house that looked practically untouched. The home owner spent about 20% more and got something that survived a major hurricane. 20% more is far more feasible and will get at least some people's attention - but what this person is advocating is a complete non starter for any kind of broad adoption. The costs are just too great.

Another example is all the above ground housing in tornado prone areas. We should be building partially buried houses with domed earthen roofs - no sharp edges sticking above the ground for wind to get under or drive debris into at high speed. Would be simple to implement - partial in ground houses have been a thing since the 70's and had their share of problems but as time and experience builds, we have techniques and new materials to make their construction pretty routine (and they can still be light and airy inside despite being partially underground). The real problem is people - a major culture change is required to drive acceptance of different home styles. Good luck with that. Maybe if the government stopped handing out disaster relief funds unless the funds required people to take steps like the above to prevent future disasters on the same scale - might be the only way to get people to think more of long term consequences.

The tales of the grasshopper and ant (and the cultural analogs) are thousands of years old for a reason. It's far easier, short term, to be a grasshopper :p

Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years

#80

Post by azalemeth »

ghaff wrote: post #25
dahfizz wrote: post #15

Constructing a building that would last 1000 years is not particularly hard with modern engineering and materials. The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it. I'm not going to live 1000 years. My great grandkids likely won't even live to see the year 3022. Why would I spend orders of magnitude more for a house if a structure meant to last ~100 years serves my needs perfectly? My friend just n…

>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…

I grew up in a 600 year old house. That isn't particularly unusual in the part of the UK I was born in. The village church is 1200 years old. There's a chapel not too far away that dates from around 600 AD.

We're not going to change it much. We fix it when it breaks.

Most of North America (or at least, the bits I've visited) seems to be fixated with new buildings of sometimes questionable construction standards, and they tend to get replaced fairly regularly. One of my Canadian friends told me that "People prefer to live in new houses". Here, the opposite is much more common.

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