Use a cave. You get shelter and a water supply. Costs nothing, zero effort up front. Great view. 10k years guaranteed: a million potentially!
How to design a house to last 1000 years
321–330 of 402 posts
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#322The 1800s era core buildings at MIT (1906) and Stanford (1892) are made out of bulk sandstone/limestone and are still standing. Post WWII concrete crap are crumbling and being replaced by fake-stone cladding buildings. One gem ironically called the Terman Engineering Building had to be torn down after only 30 years because of severe deterioration.
The core buildings might last a half millennium.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can, however, apply modern technics and materials when they make sense : insulation, windows, waterways... The article raises an important point that could be a problem when trying to mix old and new build techniques. When talking about brick walls it says: > One tricky thing with this type of assembly is that while it has performed well historically, it doesn’t necessarily play nice with more modern, energy eff…
Construction seriously depends on location. However, the simplest solution if you want high insulation factors is to have a second air tight structure with an air gap to your brickwork. Just make sure to properly ventilate that air gap. The same approach can then be used on a slate roof. Essentially you end up with a home inside a shell. There are several advantages to such structures such a potentially great sound i…
>Essentially you end up with a home inside a shell.
Which then works against the headline design goal: a house that lasts for 1000 years. How many times would you need to rip down and replace the interior shell? How much more difficult would be demolition if you can't use large equipment and smash the whole lot flat, but instead doing by hand from inside, carefully avoiding damage to the outside shell?
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#324You 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…
Thanks for all the insights! I have a few questions regarding your suggestions: > Instead of slate..use aluminum shingles - Is this purely a question of price? > Use Fiberglass windows. The best ones will outlast any hardwood. - Wouldn't long term exposure of the fiberglass windows to the sun weaken the fiberglass (this effect seems to be called "Fiber Blooming")? Finally, do you have any links to share regarding the…
Slate can be easily damaged by hail and your kids baseballs. Aluminum will be resistant to all the sizes of hail except biblical sizes. Aluminum also will reflect pretty 100 percent of the heat from the sun - allowing you to have an insulated/conditioned attic if you want. As to cost - aluminum shingles are pretty expensive too so probably no cost savings there.
The higher quality fiberglass windows have resins and treatments that are pretty much impervious to UV light...so that has been a problem with fiberglass windows but not so much anymore. Another option are steel or aluminum windows. There are some very high quality windows made out of that material as well.
I do have links...will post them later.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#325As someone who is living in a generational home this article brings several questions to mind. (But it’s a fun thought experiment)
1) presumably this home isn’t going to be built by someone in their 20s and will likely be built by someone who has accumulated some wealth. That puts them at 30-60 years old. Is the 1000 year benchmark because you want to pass the home down to your kids? 2) if so, do you think they will like your design choices? Will your kids kids? 3) since this is likely to be built by someone who is affluent it will likely be built somewhere with a high land value. Do you think that there is a good chance that the land won’t be cleared and something else built in its place in the next 100 years? This being the case it seems that the target of 1000 years is probably 10x too long. A home built to last 100 years is likely to be the better investment. You’re bound to save big on material cost and building codes are likely going to dictate the correct wind/seismic strength anyway. If you pass it down to your kids they will be able to level and rebuild or refurbish the home to meet their needs more easily as well.
I live in a home that was passed down to us and we are going to remodel it as it was built for very different circumstances. Having to do this with some overbuilt fortress would likely triple the cost to remodel and severely limit the labor pool to artisans and craftsmen. I could see a building that wasn’t a home shooting for 1000 year lifespans (say a library or school or maybe high rise) but even that seems overkill to me.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I had an unlimited budget and was aiming for >1000 years I would pour the piles to bedrock with stainless rebar inside fly-ash concrete and top those pilings with plate connectors into which you could socket large wooden columns (perhaps 8x8) and build the structure with large wooden members connected with steel connectors and column caps, etc. Are there any existing buildings constructed that way that have stoo…
York Minster in England is mostly 1000 years old. There are some nice stories about how it handled a serious fire in 1984 here, (starting about 18 minutes in) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0007pws . eg, the 2000 year old Roman drainage system got used for the first time in 1000 years because lots of water got inside the building from the fire hoses. When rebuilding it, they had to decide whether to remake it in…
When planning to rebuild Notre Dame de Paris, there was a proposal to use titanium beams instead of the flammable oak ones that caused the deflagration in the same place, but they opted to go the original route, which involved finding old oak trees across France to harvest.
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I had an unlimited budget and was aiming for >1000 years I would pour the piles to bedrock with stainless rebar inside fly-ash concrete and top those pilings with plate connectors into which you could socket large wooden columns (perhaps 8x8) and build the structure with large wooden members connected with steel connectors and column caps, etc. Are there any existing buildings constructed that way that have stoo…
Could be prone to some survivorship bias.
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Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#329[deleted]
Re: How to design a house to last 1000 years
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can, however, apply modern technics and materials when they make sense : insulation, windows, waterways... The article raises an important point that could be a problem when trying to mix old and new build techniques. When talking about brick walls it says: > One tricky thing with this type of assembly is that while it has performed well historically, it doesn’t necessarily play nice with more modern, energy eff…
My pet peeve is when people claim that heavy old cast iron radiators are "always better" than new flimsy steel ones. Yes those are better for old houses with old insulation or no insulation because then you wanted radiator to keep warm so you can sit close to it and get yourself warm. Where with new thing ones you want to heat up the air so you don't want radiator to be warm but air in well insulated building.
> here with new thing ones you want to heat up the air so you don't want radiator to be warm but air in well insulated building.
This is more complicated than this, and the construction industry has actually gone back and forth on this topic for the past 40 years. A few consideration against your point:
- When you heat air, you dry it up, which can be pretty uncomfortable for the inhabitants.
- Air stratification is a big concern: when you heat air up, it raises up to the ceiling, warming nobody but the spiders in the corners. It's not uncommon to have a multiple Celsius degree difference between floor and ceiling, even in an air-tight room.
- A house cannot be air-tight because you need to bring new air for breathing, but also to avoid excess moisture in wet rooms, which means your precious warmed-up air is being vented away, and you bring cold air from outside instead. There exists sophisticated systems with heat exchangers to collect heat from the outgoing air and warm the incoming air, but those are really expensive and far from ubiquitous.
- Under standard conditions, thermal comfort comes in roughly equal part from the radiative flux (from the walls) and conduction/convection (from the air) one. So you can achieve a similar level of comfort with lower air temperature when you have a warm radiative surface in a room.
At the end of the day, old cast-iron radiators are pretty good from a heating standpoint. (But they have multiple drawbacks, like being really big, and so heavy you can't move them when you want to refresh the room paint, etc. which means that nowadays, people usually prefer underfloor heating instead)