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Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
- shen 8y agoThe article title is confusing architects with structural engineers.
- ska 8y agoOn the other hand, some architects could stand to learn quite a bit from structural engineers...
- jaclaz 8y ago>On the other hand, some architects could stand to learn quite a bit from structural engineers... ... and viceversa. As said above as I see it the real issue is the (modern) separation/specialization of those professions.
- jaclaz 8y agoYep, but the issue is that in "modern times" the two professions were divided. Up to roughly the end of the 19th century (and in some cases even in the early 1900's) an architect was also a structural engineer, and a structural engineer also an architect (and BTW in the classical times the architect was also the structural engineer and the site director, in some cases even the builder/contractor). The gap between the two professions has become - in my experience - wider, and with the (needed) addition of other professional and "specialized" figures (geologists, plant engineers, etc.) each profession has become narrower in scope, to the point that sometimes it is difficult to have an architect and a structural engineer communicate properly, as they each lack a "global" vision on a project.
- oh_sigh 8y agoIt is also confusing in the sense that it uses the term "sound engineering" with 'sound' being the 'good/sturdy' definition, whereas the whole phrase is interchangeable with a field of study within architecture(sound/acoustic engineering)
- marssaxman 8y agoThat threw me; I wondered all the way through when the author was finally going to get around to the part about acoustics.
- waivek 8y agoAs a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of competence is so high that six months of concentrated effort is simply not sufficient for an outsider to become a professional architect.
- goatlover 8y agoWhat, no architectural bootcamps? No shiny new frameworks? No this will disrupt everything? No hype cycle?
- SilasX 8y agoMeh, I think architecture has its own version of it, with extreme form-over-function, and new projects insisting they have to look clever and pretty, even when those aspects make them near useless. A friend on Facebook recently posted about an example of a bike path with three sharp turns that made no sense for being used as a bike, but -- the architects were happy to point out -- made it look like a big bike wheel from above. Hooray!
- abcanthur 8y agoRe: bootcamps, there are several non-credit summer programs offered by major architecture programs (Harvard, Berkeley,..) that help prospective students expose themselves to architecture school and more importantly, help them develop a portfolio to apply to the full program. These programs are proportionally just as (very) expensive and (extremely) time consuming. A not small number of degree seeking students come through that track.
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- chadash 8y agoTo be fair, the most well known examples of architecture tend to cost a lot of money to construct, and people spending lots of money want someone with experience. If you look at painters for example, a lot of them produce great work at relatively younger ages than architects, probably because the barriers to entry are lower. Still, it seems that in the arts, you can continue to produce great work for a long time. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built and Leonardo Da Vinci was over 50 when he painted the Mona Lisa.
- tim333 8y agoI found it interesting wandering around the ancient sites in Egypt to see what survived 4000 years. Granite was the easy winner followed by heaped structures of softer rocks.
- travisjungroth 8y agoThe problem with that for architecture is most structures are meant to be occupied, and being inside a heaped structure of softer rocks isn't very nice. I do wish that I got to see a structure meant to last millennia built in my lifetime. On that timescale, I _just_ missed Mount Rushmore.
- TremendousJudge 8y agoThis, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
- briga 8y agoConsidering how many structures from thousands of years ago are still around, I'd be shocked if there weren't any 21st-century buildings standing thousands of years from now.
- Spooky23 8y agoThousands of years ago, the king did a levy for labor and demanded whatever he wanted. Today, you need to build a building designed to depreciate in 30 years to maximize your taxes.
- Someone 8y agoRebar makes buildings a lot stronger, but also has the unfortunate property of rusting. That makes it less strong and expands it, damaging other parts of the structure. It also is more or less everywhere. Also, modern buildings often are designed for a given economical lifetime. If you order a structure that can be maintained for 50 years at $1M a year, that’s what you will get. You likely can keep it standing for centuries, but at ever-increasing maintenance costs. On the other hand, we are building so much that, statistically, something will be standing thousands of years from now.
- pgnas 8y agoThe megaliths of Bolivia and structures all over the world which man could not replicate prove this. It would seem that the more we turn our back on the natural world and our history, the more we hold ourselves back from break throughs in many areas.
- rafiki6 8y agoWho says we can't replicate them? It's just not economical to do so and really serves no purpose. The world has generally moved past projects with superstitious/dubious meaning attached to them and does an actual cost/benefit on most large scale endeavors. Except for some developing countries with growing economies who have something to prove.
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- empath75 8y agoI wonder what the budget would be to make a more or less exact duplicate of the Great Pyramid.
- polityagent 8y agoI hear that slave labour and not worrying about workplace injuries really reduced budgets for the original.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoYou are correct we probably can today. The biggest prehistoric megalith blocks are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 tons, perfectly milled. The modern record for the largest structure lifted by crane is 20,000 tons. So we have an order of magnitude capability on be ancients. However what is certainly true is that there was a long period in between where we couldn’t. From at least 1000 BC to sometime in the 1900s AD it would’ve been physically impossible to recreate Baalbek. Yet somehow thousands of years before that ancient people did it. My pet theory is they used compound reed boats, canals, and locks to do it. But in the end we don’t know. What’s clear is there were people more similar to us than we are to the Elizabethans in terms of technological capability, and they were totally wiped out. No stories, other than myths, no pottery, no metals, nothing left of them except the most durable giant stone remnants. In other words: the up and to the right trajectory of history is wrong. There are bigger cycles in civilization than all of history combined can illuminate.
- KingMob 8y agoThe Lindy Effect in action again. People should always seriously study things that have survived a long time, instead of downplaying them due to neophilia.
- yiyus 8y agoThis MIT professor looks like a very intelligent guy, and I agree with what he says, but the article shows that the reporter did not understand some things. Plasticity theory is presented as an alternative to the finite element method, but in fact they are usually used together. While plasticity theory explains how materials deform, the FE method makes possible to apply this theory to complex structures. In any case, the problem cannot be FEM, but how it is applied and how the results are interpreted. It is very likely (even expected) that applying the requirements used for steel or concrete structures to the Pantheon will give you wrong results, but that does not mean FEM is the problem. Blindly doing simulations without having a good model and being very careful of how boundary conditions are applied and how to interpret the results, on the other hand, is becoming a greater problem as the necessary hardware becomes more affordable.
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- booleandilemma 8y agoI hope one day they say the same thing about us programmers of the present time. Hello from 2018 and sorry about JavaScript!
- natmaka 8y agoIsn't part of this talent gained thru motivation, in turn judged necessary as they had "skin in the game"? https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roman-engineers-required-to-stand-beneath-their-bridges-as-they-were-tested https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma...