TLDR: they don't need buttresses, hence the savings.
Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
111–120 of 278 posts
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#112The important part is https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/11/19/crinkle-crankle-ca...
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Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#113Soda cans also have a counterintuitive efficiency feature: concave bottoms. If a can with a flat bottom held the same amount of soda, it would be shorter and have less surface area, but its metal body would need to be thicker to withstand the same pressure. In the end, it'd require more aluminum. https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0414... ^Probably not the best article for this, but it was easy t…
Same about waviness on plastic bottles.
https://www.riverkeeper.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bottl...
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'space wasted' on an estate of many hundreds, if not, thousands of acres is minimal. Given that often the bricks used were made and fired on site, it definitely saved on resources and labour. There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the gr…
It cost even less labor to use minimal bracing for strait walls, these are curved for athletics. I suspect they are imitations of curved fruit walls popular in the 1600’s before greenhouses took off.
I don't think this is the case.
A wavy wall with a wave amplitude of X has the same toppling resistance as a straight wall with buttresses on both sides of length x/2.
Assuming this stackoverflow answer is correct[1], the sine wave has (slightly) less bricks.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have plenty of space but you're tight on money, it's an ingenious solution.
Good point. I'd say if you're tight on money I'm not sure a wall should be at the top of your to-buy list.
Historically, lots of countries had laws saying you had to enclose your land. If you didn't, then you might lose it.
In the days before wire, brick walls were a cheap longlasting enclosure method, especially if wood or stones weren't easily available.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#116This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design. Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
> *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall."
If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#117I think one should also consider the failure modes when, for example, a tree falls into the wall. For a straight wall, it is possible that a falling section will propagate the failure along the entire length of the wall. For a wavy wall, it is likely to fail in shear, limiting the damage to one section.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#118Has someone figured out the ideal frequency / amplitude of the wave? Maybe the frequency that matches the strength of a one-brick straight wall? The pictures strike me as possibly wavier than needed.
wouldn't that depend on how tall the wall is?
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that what we're doing? If I remember correctly, the walls around the houses in my childhood neighborhood were only one brick in width. Also walls around cemeteries and such, I could swear they are not double-width walls.
One brick wide walls often have a thicker pillar for stability every couple of meters.
And two brick thick walls often have pillars... So pillars aren't a good indicator.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. I'd say if you're tight on money I'm not sure a wall should be at the top of your to-buy list.
Pre industrialism, almost everyone was dirt poor by current standards.
They were also dirt poor by current standards after industrialism started. It was well into the 19th century that laws like the Education Act of 1870 and the Trade Union Act of 1871 started distributing power to the common people of Britain outside of the traditional quasi-feudal system.