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> 100 years ago, it would have been an acceptable dwelling, or even desirable. I don't think a mud hut was ever considered acceptable in any moderately advance
by xienze 11y ago
> 100 years ago, it would have been an acceptable dwelling, or even desirable.
I don't think a mud hut was ever considered acceptable in any moderately advanced country back in 1915.
- andallas 11y agoThank you, if people kept agreeing with him I was about to have an aneurysm. I have a rental property in upstate NY that was built in 1895 and is at least a century ahead of a mud hut. I'd argue several centuries, but I guess it depends on which civilization you are comparing it to.
- logfromblammo 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)#Modern_cob_buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)#Modern_cob_buil... http://www.sotaconstruction.com/project_details.asp?id=42 http://www.sotaconstruction.com/project_details.asp?id=42 Even mud hut technology has advanced well beyond huts. The "greenest building in Pennsylvania" is a glorified mud hut with underfloor heating. It contains more than just one century of advancements over the most basic earthen construction. And perhaps you haven't seen the sort of houses that people lived in, even as late as the 1930s, in some parts of the country. Let's just say there is a good reason why pre-manufactured homes are popular in certain places. Upstate New York may not exactly be a representative sample for the housing conditions in 1915.
- marssaxman 11y agoThe idea that technology has some linear progression is an illusion. I stayed in a "mud hut" several years ago during a trip to Morocco which had running water, flush toilets, and electricity. It was built of mud not because the builders lacked access to "better" technology, but because big mud bricks were a simple, practical, and economical building technology well suited to the desert environment.
- kang 11y agoI live in India and my parents lived in mud homes. My grandparents just upgraded 5 years ago. And by no means am I poor.
- kragen 11y agoI grew up in New Mexico. Adobe construction ("mud huts", if you want to get all ethnocentric about it) was ubiquitous there in 1915 and is still common there today; it's substantially more comfortable than most of the modern alternatives, but also more expensive. Some of my relatives there had outhouses when I was growing up in the 1980s.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoI remember doing a heat transfer simulation in a modeling and simulation class -- seems that the typical adobe wall was just about thick enough to induce a 12 hour phase shift in heat transfer (so that the heat of the day would reach the inside of the dwelling during the coldest part of the night, and vice versa). Thus cool in the heat of the day, and warm at night (this works well in a desert climate where it's very hot in the daytime and quite cold at night). It probably took generations to arrive at the optimum wall thickness.
- kragen 11y agoWe have surviving adobe walls from four hundred and fifty generations ago at Çatalhöyük, but it seems likely that they've been in use for much longer than that, and just haven't survived. So we've had several generations to experiment. :)