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Not quite the same thing, and I meant for tall buildings. Venice is built entirely on a clay swamp, the wooden piles support the full weight of absolutely mass
by buro9 3y ago
Not quite the same thing, and I meant for tall buildings.
Venice is built entirely on a clay swamp, the wooden piles support the full weight of absolutely massive stone structures including St Marks Square, the tower and cathedral.
https://sites.google.com/site/engineeringvenice/ https://sites.google.com/site/engineeringvenice/
Given that the relatively short wooden piles combined with clay produce such strength... what's stopping very tall wooden buildings existing?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 3y ago> what's stopping very tall wooden buildings existing? Buildings are generally valued for the space they create internally. Filling the inside with clay and piles is rather less convenient, you might as well put those in the ground. Which is exactly what we do.
- supermatt 3y ago> the wooden piles support the full weight You kind of answered your own question. The clay is just supporting those piles, and the clay is supported by the substrate surrounding it, etc. Aside from the wattle and daub examples (of which I have seen 4-story examples) there are many large structures built with clay (in the form of bricks for load bearing walls, pillars, etc) and timber framing. Also, consider the density with which those piles are packed in venice - you would essentially end up with a building with no interior space - just piles.
- jaclaz 3y agoBricks are cooked clay. Venice substrate is wet clay.
- supermatt 3y agoI don’t think that required clarification, but yes that is almost correct, in the sense that bricks don’t need to be cooked (the term used is “fired”) as they can also be left to dry naturally.
- jaclaz 3y agoSure, though the fired ones are much more resistant than naturally dried ones. The note was more about the fact that clay in different states (wet/fired/dried) has very different properties and that the parent comment was ignoring that. BTW the way a foundation may work (wooden piles in a wet clay substrate) is very different from how a vertical structure (pillar/wall) or a horizontal one (beam/deck/slab) behaves. In the case of the foundation, the wooden piles distribute the vertical forces through lateral adherence (as opposed to applying it directly to the top surface) over all the inserted length, and in the particular case of the tight grid used in old Venice buildings, the wooden poles act also as containment, they are also called "friction piles".