131–140 of 402 posts
I stayed at a farm in South Tyrol, Italy this fall. (South Tyrol is actually in northern Italy, near the Austrian border.) The oldest property record for the place dated it back to the year 1200. It's a large, normal looking house, and the walls are made out of irregular stone blocks mortared together. For what it's worth, buildings like this aren't that uncommon in Italy.
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Yes, another way to spell Slate roof = work. The reason is simple: Slate, layers of fossilized leaves, has a rough surface and frost and the weather in general will work on it and split the layers apart, seeds will find enough purchase to germinate (the handy supply of water certainly helps) and lichen and moss just love to grow on slate. This whole article to me reads: "I'm planning on an overpriced construction for…
I don't think slate roofs are that bad - our house is an exceptionally exposed spot and has a slate roof and we lose maybe one or two slates a year to storms. Our wooden windows and doors are a far bigger maintenance headache than our roof.
And one or two slates per year is indeed manageable, assuming they are in an accessible spot. If you're unlucky they are not and then you have to get to the spot to apply your fix without breaking more slates, which can be quite a bit of work (remove slates to make a path to the spot, fix, then rehang all the others, and hopefully they were uniform).
I've had one storm bad enough in NL that we lost some rooftiles, which were fairly easily replaced. Since in the rest of the country people had lost whole roofs and other houses in the same street were in much worse shape and comparing with the few houses that had slate I'm pretty happy with my good old 'dakpannen', which are almost maintenance free (due to the angle of the roof).
The worst is thatched roofs. Those require pretty much bi-annual upkeep and tend to become rodent infested. They look pretty in the first 10 years, a bit garish in the second and depending on their state of maintenance horror shows in the last 10. I'll never live in a house with one of those, people like them for status but they tend to be people that can afford to pay others to do their work for them.
The moment I saw the diagram text "Seismic moment connection with Fuses", I knew it was not meant to last 1000 year. The moment you introduce seismic fuses, you need active Repair post a large earthquake. This is like expecting to keep repairing every few years and claim Life. My first though reading the title was, you need to build it with STONE. So was "Taj Mahal" and many other religious structure lasting LONG yea…
Stainless steel rebar is an often overlooked option. In theory, solid SS rebar should outlast the concrete, but it is a difficult thing to accurately study. In favorable conditions, regular rebar reinforced concrete starts to need major repairs after ~40 years due to corrosion. The Progresso Pier in Mexico was build over 80 years ago with SS rebar, and reportedly has not needed any renovations. A pier built 20 years…
Since it’s 2000 years old now.
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I would surmise that by not sourcing new materials (that currently aren't that green from a carbon footprint perspective which is probably the largest part of your footprint) you are saving a lot of carbon cost. There are challenges with old homes such as sealing the building envelope and updating wiring/heating etc. Maybe I am telling myself that - I'm not sure. My argument does resonate though. New builds require t…
I have yet to come across an old house that I did not want to gut. To update wiring, plumbing, gas lines, central air, siding, roof. By the time you are done, you are only saving on replacing the frame, but tearing down a frame of spaced 2x4s and plywood sheets are not that much waste in my experience.
I stayed at a farm in South Tyrol, Italy this fall. (South Tyrol is actually in northern Italy, near the Austrian border.) The oldest property record for the place dated it back to the year 1200. It's a large, normal looking house, and the walls are made out of irregular stone blocks mortared together. For what it's worth, buildings like this aren't that uncommon in Italy.
Do you have a picture?
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Seems to me like, given the expense and duration goals, you'd be much better off forgoing steel entirely and creating a stone gravity-bound structure, and making the places where you can't go with stone easy to repair or replace, something for which I'm not sure structural steel is ideal. > Our other option is slate. Slate roofs have extremely long lifespans and are extremely attractive. But, like copper, they’re mor…
Yes, another way to spell Slate roof = work. The reason is simple: Slate, layers of fossilized leaves, has a rough surface and frost and the weather in general will work on it and split the layers apart, seeds will find enough purchase to germinate (the handy supply of water certainly helps) and lichen and moss just love to grow on slate. This whole article to me reads: "I'm planning on an overpriced construction for…
25 years ago, when I saw some roofers working to replace an old slate roof on a church outside Philadelphia with asphalt (I was horrified), I asked them why they were taking this (to me) horrible step, since my parents live and stay in homes in the UK with slate roofs that are between 300 and 500 years old.
The roofers laughed and said "yeah, that's probably welsh slate. The stuff here in PA is so much worse than that. Freeze-thaw will destroy it in 20-40 years"
So the observations you're making about slate are true but only for specific slate quarries. There are slate sources that can provide slate which could last for centuries.
The UK seems not to have much of an issue with moss & lichens causing problems with slate roofing (it grows but it isn't much of a problem).
Solid, 3ft thick, limestone walls. Lime mortar. Probably no foundations, there has been quite a bit of movement previously but none recently. In one room upstairs the floor slopes by nearly a foot from one end to the other.
As far as we know the majority of the roofing/floor timbers are original.
Limestone slate roof, this needs replacing about every 70years.
Stays cool in the summer and relatively easy to keep warm in the winter. Not efficient in the modern sense though.
The way we live changes, trying to build a house for how people will live in the future is impossible. All we can do is build something that’s maintainable, solid and hope for the best.
I think the danger is that if you aim to design something that will last 1000 years you will over engineer it and it will be difficult to maintain and modify.
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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…
What do you get with new houses? Well, you get wiring, with outlets conveniently located. You get modern plumbing. You ought to get good insulation. You may not get good design, you may get shoddy construction, true.
I think a lot of the bad press that goes on about new builds in the UK at least at the moment are due to "chicken coop Barrett Homes", i.e. a large developer building the largest number of houses possible with the cheapest construction method. There are horror stories in the tabloid press of people buying houses from ~2000 that are starting to have major structural problems, or have other major flaws. The rooms are meaner in size and there is a lot of resentment about developers making ~£300k profit on each property (and building ~200 of them at a go).
Obviously, there's a massive selection / survival bias here. Bad homes are more likely to be demolished. Good homes are more likely to survive.
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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.…
If you build with trusses for floors instead of joists, you can get a lot of the same benefits as a drop ceiling without the ugliness. You can run plumbing/vents/whatever though the trusses without destroying the whole ceiling to get access. You might not need to cut into the ceiling at all depending on what you’re doing and what existing access you have (e.g. an unfinished utility space may allow access to supply new power cables).
Of course patching the ceiling is hardly a big concern if you’re talking about a structure surviving for 1000 years.