4 ms·

You should look to the Roman Pantheon building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

• kragen 11y ago
  Yes, the Pantheon is a good example of what I was talking about — except that it's built with Roman concrete, which is substantially more weather-resistant than modern concrete, for reasons that are still not well understood. It's probably a matter of using slightly different pozzolans, but the Roman concrete manufacturing process was lost with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So if you were to try to build a Pantheon today, you'd have a good chance it would fall down in only a century or two. Lime cement, though, we do still know how to make, and it has the advantage of having a lower TCE, which will reduce thermal-cycling stresses on your wall when combined with other low-TCE materials like granite. Both lime cement and Portland cement can suffer pretty badly from acid rain, a problem that was only discovered in 1853 (just yesterday, in the lifespan of the aqueducts or the Pantheon), and which I think we're well on our way to solving. It might come back, though, and it's harsher on lime cement than on Portland cement. This should reinforce my point above about surprising failure modes in things that you think you've "overengineered" to last for the ages.