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> 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 su
by 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".