No post body was provided.
How are Rome's monuments still standing?
41–50 of 218 posts
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#42They’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alternative purpose. Yes, there are some construction techniques they used that contributed to better survival rates than some other structure types. But mostly we’ve ended up with what was lucky enough to survive. Replay the historical tape again and we might be…
> for the same reasons we preserve Victorian era buildings. Not really, christians destroyed a huge amount and ruthlessly, and tons of marble was 'repurposed'. The best chance of a building to survive was being used as a church
Destroying symbols of a previous rule was (is) commons practice. Constantine realized that some building and monuments were worth preserving and repurposed them as "Christian", thereby ensuring their preservation for hundreds, or even a thousand of years.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#43TL;DR: their concrete was different. > Roman concrete, on the other hand, is a simpler mix of quicklime made from baking and crushing limestone rocks and, most importantly, volcanic rock aggregates of various types, which were abundant in the region surrounding Rome. In contrast to the aggregates used in modern concrete, these volcanic materials used by the Romans are highly reactive and the resulting concrete remain…
It is both..... so both the author and you are correct. Modern concrete has rebar, which eventually gets rusted, and corroded, and fails (in 150-200 years). Also, roman concrete was just thicker/used more material. Also simple stone survives forever, while brick a bit less, and 'simpler mud bricks' and wood a lot less. SO, from Roman times, really only the strongest buildings survived, and everything else is gone. So…
Using survivor bias to our benefit though. Evolution for buildings as it were.
While the article title is a blanket question on ALL Roman monuments - which clearly didn't all survive - the article is about people investigating how the long lasting ones do what they do.
Which sounds great to me.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rome lasted for many centuries, so I imagine they were familiar with what worked and what didn't.
Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
The interconnectedness of the bronze age was amazing. To make bronze required combining metals sourced from thousands of miles away from eachother.
In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#45Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#46They’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alternative purpose. Yes, there are some construction techniques they used that contributed to better survival rates than some other structure types. But mostly we’ve ended up with what was lucky enough to survive. Replay the historical tape again and we might be…
Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
I don’t have the energy to revisit the arguments about Roman concrete that come up every time it is mentioned on HN. Needless to say, the notion that their “superior” method was “forgotten” is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened.
Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternative one (such as a church). It speaks to their value specifically as architecture and is mostly orthogonal to their construction techniques. There are plenty of old buildings (such as Hōryū-ji, Ruwanweli Maha Seya, Mousa Broch, etc) that don’t use any kind of magical construction techniques but have stuck around because of their value to the surrounding society and active efforts at preservation and/or repurposing.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose I just don’t find that substantially different than the National Trust repurposing say Ickworth into a hotel. I understand that contemporary society places a higher value on a certain type of “accurate” preservation than many societies that came before but if people had truly wanted historical Roman buildings gone, they would be.
tons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount
I agree? My original reply’s point was we have a very small minority of what the empire constructed. And much of that is because it was purposely preserved, if for alternative reasons.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
I don’t have the energy to revisit the arguments about Roman concrete that come up every time it is mentioned on HN. Needless to say, the notion that their “superior” method was “forgotten” is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternat…
> which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose,
that's a fallacy.
A lot of buildings were useful back then, it wasn't easy to build them nor cheap.
But most of them collapsed, because they weren't strong enough.
You get roman buildings everywhere in Europe and Northern Africa, a lot of civilizations lived there in the past 40 centuries and their remains are scarce at best.
It is like saying that Amazon beat many other startups of its times because they got lucky, it's simply because their execution was better than the competition.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#49Surely it should be "why are Rome's monuments..." Or am I mistaken, I'm not actually sure
'how' sounds a bit wrong to me, too. But it's popular in the USA.
Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?
#50They’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alternative purpose. Yes, there are some construction techniques they used that contributed to better survival rates than some other structure types. But mostly we’ve ended up with what was lucky enough to survive. Replay the historical tape again and we might be…
Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
The article did bring up some ways modern concrete is superior in the shorter term:
"Among the biggest obstacles to wider adoption of the Roman recipe are its long curing time – it can take up to six months to reach full strength, compared to standard concrete's' 28 days – and lower strength (Perucchio said it's approximately 10 times weaker than modern concrete),"