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Sure, but we have concrete buildings still standing from Roman times - most famously, the Pantheon. I grew up in a cottage a couple of hundred years old, with
by barrkel 7y ago
Sure, but we have concrete buildings still standing from Roman times - most famously, the Pantheon.
I grew up in a cottage a couple of hundred years old, with thick walls built from stone and mortar. It's not unusual to live in a house that's over a century old in Europe.
I've also lived in a wooden house - more of a three room + toilet chalet, really. Biggest irritations were all the noises from thermal expansion in the summer, and the fact rats could eat their way in. I think it's a bit more effort to actively maintain wood and be sure it's in good condition than brick and concrete construction.
That cottage, btw - the roof had a wood frame, but it wasn't the original - that had burned down along with the thatch at least once, and been replaced some time before we moved in.
- benj111 7y agoIf concrete is similar enough to reinforced concrete. Isn't engineered wood similar enough to normal wood?
- pjc50 7y agoReinforced concrete has different failure modes. The UK built a lot of precast concrete "panel" houses after the war, some of which are disintegrating badly: https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-non-traditional-construction-common-property-defects-6/ https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-non-traditional-... Another e.g. concrete disintegrating due to use of mine waste: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/nov/29/mundic-test-crumbling-concrete-mortgages https://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/nov/29/mundic-test-cr...
- benj111 7y agoDifferent failure modes, different tensile strength, not really the same at all. That was kind of my point :)
- willyt 7y agoRoman concrete doesn’t have the same chemistry as modern concrete.
- jabl 7y agoAnd, Roman concrete doesn't have steel rebar which rusts and cracks the concrete.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoEh, properly done reinforced concrete should last hundreds of years. Of course it's possible to use the wrong concrete formula for the job (the concrete for your driveway is not the same as the concrete for a boat ramp) but if done right it should last.
- marmaduke 7y agoWhat’s different? I’m aware of the modern mix with cement sand stone, but I’m guessing romans didn’t have the cement?
- jbay808 7y agoAs far as I know, the romans had better cement. We're still trying to reverse engineer it.
- lsc 7y agothis is my understanding as well... but I wonder how much of that is that they just had more variable cement, and the stuff that wasn't incredibly great turned to dust long ago? Certainly, our modern processes are more repeatable and produce a narrower range of results. What if the existent buildings are outliers of the roman process?
- jbay808 7y agoAttributing the accomplishments of the past to survivor bias is a popular line of thought these days, but... It's unlikely. They used a completely different chemical formula than we do. If you have two processes X and Y, and you observe consistently that Y >> X, and you know that Y and X are produced by different processes so you don't have a strong prior on the mean of Y being similar to the mean of X, then you should conclude it's very likely that the mean of Y is greater than the mean of X. Even if you know for certain that you only have the best samples of Y. But more importantly, we don't really care if the romans also built a bunch of bad buildings using counterfeit cement with a botched formula, that failed to last until today. What matters is that we don't have the technology today that can match their best work. That's what makes it worthy of study.