This article makes an interesting comparison to ancient Roman concrete. While the Romans built a tremendous amount of infrastructure in concrete, survivorship b

This article makes an interesting comparison to ancient Roman concrete. While the Romans built a tremendous amount of infrastructure in concrete, survivorship bias means that the few bits that have hung around are seen as some sort of superior quality to Roman understanding of concrete. However, if you go to Rome, most of the surviving bits are millions upon millions of stacked and mortared bricks, and most of what has survived are uninteresting walls. [1] For some reason, our collective memory of Roman ruins is that they're all aged concrete or stone. But when in Rome, you end up seeing lots of this [2], which when built probably had a layer of facade material on it. And it makes sense, stacked, weather resistant, often covered in a prettier facade, baked bricks should last more or less forever until the elements wear them down. The widespread reintroduction of concrete as a building material really didn't happen until around the turn of the 20th century. And reinforced concrete didn't find widespread use until a few decades after that. Not particularly confusing, the first generations of buildings built with these fairly new and only partially understood materials are the buildings that the author is mostly writing about. The real culmination of exposed, reinforced-concrete-everywhere, finally happened in the 50s with the advent of the eye cancer called brutalism. Today a tremendous number of brutalist buildings today are absolutely falling apart, and I blame that on a lack of understanding of how reinforced concrete should be used and the availability of more modern materials and perhaps an overenthusiasm and misuse of materials where they shouldn't have been. But still, if we fast forward a thousand years, there's bound to be a percentage of those structures still around and survivorship bias in the future will lead some to speculate that the engineers of the 20th century were geniuses unrivaled by any in the future. 1 - http://previews.123rf.com/images/13th/13th0902/13th090200009/4338560-damaged-brick-walls-in-the-ancient-Roman-city-Pompeii--Stock-Photo.jpg http://previews.123rf.com/images/13th/13th0902/13th090200009... 2 - http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5185/5762585618_10a11f5a38_z.jpg http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5185/5762585618_10a11f5a38_z.j...