211–220 of 402 posts
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> If I had an unlimited budget at some point on the price scale you can just build a titanium cast for a house and pour molten rocks in, probably a basalt. what's the yield strength of igneous rocks? maybe the roof need to be arched.
So, a cave in a basalt mountain then. I like your thinking. ;)
/MontyPython style...
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> If I had an unlimited budget at some point on the price scale you can just build a titanium cast for a house and pour molten rocks in, probably a basalt. what's the yield strength of igneous rocks? maybe the roof need to be arched.
Is that something that we've actually done at any kind of scale?
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It's fascinating how culture has effects on architecture. So many older American homes have small kitchens that are separate from a formal dining room. Historically, a family member or cook would be making food separately, out of the way, and then it was presented in the dining room. Today, everyone wants a kitchen that's integrated with the dining area. Cooking has been culturally elevated – people don't feel like t…
Not just American homes. In Europe all the new flats and houses are designed with kitchens merged with the dining room. Even the old flats are often redesigned by owners or developers by tearing down the wall(s), separating the kitchen from the other room(s). I personally hate this trend because I don't like getting cooking odors all over the place. I'll probably just build a wall whenever I'd be forced to buy such a…
This is a very odd design document and it makes me think this author has thought a lot about materials and buildings but not actually built anything . The steel moment frame, to someone with shallow knowledge, sounds so strong and resilient . But in fact, a rigid steel structure is more vulnerable to seismic (and even wind) loads than wooden framing which can flex and move and dampen those loads naturally. The stainl…
"rigid steel structure" Steel is springy. Tall steel-framed buildings and bridges routinely sway in wind, which is usually harmless to the structure but annoying to occupants. Unless you get harmonic oscillation, where the energy stored in the motion builds up, which can be a problem and has destroyed bridges. Much of seismic design involves connections which raise the resonant frequency of the structure so it can't…
This is my favorite topic and I could go on and on about this. Point: it is a matter of precise definition. How rigid are we talking?
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"rigid steel structure" Steel is springy. Tall steel-framed buildings and bridges routinely sway in wind, which is usually harmless to the structure but annoying to occupants. Unless you get harmonic oscillation, where the energy stored in the motion builds up, which can be a problem and has destroyed bridges. Much of seismic design involves connections which raise the resonant frequency of the structure so it can't…
> "Steel is springy. Tall steel-framed buildings and bridges routinely sway in wind, which is usually harmless to the structure but annoying to occupants." exactly, i recently mentioned my swaying-in-an-earthquake story[0], which was in a class A (steel+concrete) highrise office building. driving steel into the ground doesn't automatically mean it will rot and/or break in the first earthquake/windstorm that hits, eve…
With regard to your skyscraper experience:
I'm not sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison.
Skyscrapers are not made of skyscraper-height columns - they are a stack of elements that are connected every X height that has a well known flex per connection. It's also (hopefully) a uniform flex at every connection.
But a smaller building would, indeed, have unbroken steel members (like a column) and you might "successfully" connect them to one another with an incredible amount of rigidity.
It will either be tremendously strong throughout (good for you) or there will be some tiny piece of the chain that isn't as strong and can fail.
I would be confident attempting this on a very small building.
I would be hesitant to attempt this on a medium, two-story building. I would want wood framing.
For aesthetic reasons, I would want that wood framing to be big timbers. I'd rather spend my money on those than on stainless steel roof framing :)
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> in Japan they often don't last past one owner This has been brought up before on HN and I remember a comment mentioning that they thought it was due to the fact that earthquake proofing technology advances quickly in Japan so an old house might not be up to the most current standard. Curious if that's correct, and if not, why is this so common in Japan then.
A thing I've noticed while attending school in Japan was that many old "Machiya" houses get torn down and more modern and western houses get built. At least this was the case in Kyoto. Earthquake-proofing the house is one aspect but I think people in Japan prefer to own a more western home. It's too bad because those old Japanese homes are getting taken down
What you see as a "more western home" is a more energy efficient outer shell. Which just happens to be fairly universal.
Hurricane Katrina and the Christchurch earthquakes created a lot of green spaces afterwards. It was amazing to see a house disappear and be replaced by grass before long. Or sometimes just an empty section with a letterbox.
In my experience it's better to work with entropy when it comes down to it.
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> It's not like we are running low on examples of 1000+ years buildings ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_century_in_architecture ). These castles, cathedrals, farms, were built to last, so it's appropriate to use them as examples. This is an easy place to run in to a survivorship bias problem - pick a random 1000 year old farmhouse. How many farmhouses built exactly the same way didn't last for various reasons? I…
It doesn't matter that the others fell, we now know what definitely didn't fall - which is all we need to get to.
If 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 f…