7 ms·
This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not ju
by geeky4qwerty 3y ago
This feels a bit like diet clickbait...
"use fewer bricks than a straight wall"*
*A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design.
Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
- turnsout 3y agoIf you have plenty of space but you're tight on money, it's an ingenious solution.
- geeky4qwerty 3y agoGood point. I'd say if you're tight on money I'm not sure a wall should be at the top of your to-buy list.
- turnsout 3y agoIt is if you're selling sheep milk and you don't want to lose your flock.
- bee_rider 3y agoI think that’s typically a job for fences, right? This sort of wall is, I think, just an aesthetic way of marking a property line/get some privacy.
- devilbunny 3y agoDrive through rural northern England and you will see vast numbers of sheep moving through pastures that are bordered by old dry-stone walls. The roads will even have equestrian gates alongside them when they have stock grids to prevent the sheep from using the road. It's all about adapting to local materials. The same technique was used by early settlers in New England (think about the ending of The Shawshank Redemption) because they had to get the stones out of the ground in order to plow and harvest - rather than just make a pile, they used the stones to build walls separating fields.
- toast0 3y agoDepends on how long you intend to keep livestock and what materials you have access to. Well built walls can last a lot longer than well built fences; but fences may be less costly initially. But it might also depend on how crafty/destructive your livestock is.
- gswdh 3y ago[dead]
- scott_w 3y agoIt's relative. You might be "tight on money for building a wall" so you save money by building a wavy wall.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 3y agoIf you own a large amount of land than the savings add up. Especially if you live 250 years ago (or you want to match the walls from then) when bricks were not produced and delivered in massive industrial processes and large estates were more common.
- araes 3y agoEven in the modern era the cost is still relevant. Bricks are still pretty expensive. If I have 100 acres (square), I need ~2.5 km of wall, at ~150,000 bricks for a 1m wall single brick-width wall (deter animals, mark property). At the online prices I'm seeing ($0.65), that's ~$100,000. If I have to make it all double width, suddenly its $200,000. $100,000 delta is still pretty relevant for a modern small scale farmer.
- HWR_14 3y agoThe difference is people enclosing 100 acres today are either wealthy estates or using non-brick fences for farmers.
- CalRobert 3y agoI have a few acres of land and annoying neighbours. Stuff like this is relevant (though in the end I just went with hedging, which is cheaper and good enough for privacy)
- BurningFrog 3y agoPre industrialism, almost everyone was dirt poor by current standards.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoThey were also dirt poor by current standards after industrialism started. It was well into the 19th century that laws like the Education Act of 1870 and the Trade Union Act of 1871 started distributing power to the common people of Britain outside of the traditional quasi-feudal system.
- londons_explore 3y agoHistorically, lots of countries had laws saying you had to enclose your land. If you didn't, then you might lose it. In the days before wire, brick walls were a cheap longlasting enclosure method, especially if wood or stones weren't easily available.
- kragen 3y agowire dates to ancient sumeria i think; it was used for money before coins (because it's easy to measure out any desired amount of gold or silver)
- hammock 3y agoDo you also think corrugated cardboard is wasteful?
- geeky4qwerty 3y agoYes, of course I do, just like I believe that the Australia, like false equivalencies, don't exist.
- vehemenz 3y agoThe extra space doesn't have to be fully wasted. You could plant bushes or small trees in the concave sections.
- hammock 3y agoApplies to flat walls not wavy, but espalier,[1] a way to cultivate trees in tight spaces, is one of my favorite things ever. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier
- developer93 3y agoI mean I don't see a reason why it couldn't be applied to wavy walls if they were high enough, it's just training isn't it?
- hammock 3y agoFair point. I've personally never seen it
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoThis article mentions them, with photos: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-farming.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-fa... Serpentine or Crinkle-Crankle walls, apparently a Dutch innovation. > Although it's actually longer than a linear wall, a serpentine wall economizes on materials because the wall can be made strong enough with just one brick thin. The alternate convex and concave curves in the wall provide stability and help to resist lateral forces. Furthermore, the slopes give a warmer microclimate than a flat wall. This was obviously important for the Dutch, who are almost 400 km north of Paris. > Variants of the serpentine wall had recessed and protruding parts with more angular forms. Few of these seem to have been built outside the Netherlands, with the exception of those erected by the Dutch in the eastern parts of England (two thirds of them in Suffolk county). In their own country, the Dutch built fruit walls as high up north as Groningen (53°N).
- yboris 3y agoEvery dip in the wave is an opportunity to plant beautiful bush, flowers, or shrubbery.
- DrBazza 3y agoThe 'space wasted' on an estate of many hundreds, if not, thousands of acres is minimal. Given that often the bricks used were made and fired on site, it definitely saved on resources and labour. There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Retric 3y agoIt cost even less labor to use minimal bracing for strait walls, these are curved for athletics. I suspect they are imitations of curved fruit walls popular in the 1600’s before greenhouses took off.
- londons_explore 3y agoI don't think this is the case. A wavy wall with a wave amplitude of X has the same toppling resistance as a straight wall with buttresses on both sides of length x/2. Assuming this stackoverflow answer is correct[1], the sine wave has (slightly) less bricks. [1]: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1500468 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1500468
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Retric 3y agoA single repetition of the wave is misleading. For N repetitions of the wave you need N + 1 buttresses not 2 N. Also, while brick is stronger in compression a buttress increases toppling resistance in both directions so you need to consider material properties not just the geometry.
- tomxor 3y agoWalls have purpose beyond neatly cut lawns. This wall would work well at road field boundaries where a couple feet makes less practical difference than the large saving in materials.
- tetrep 3y ago> *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall." If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
- kbenson 3y ago> so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal. Not necessarily. You might need a straight wall to be thicker or have more buttressing in that case as well. The requirements for each (waviness, thickness, buttressing) likely change to different degrees based on height, so wavy walls could become less ideal, or they could become more ideal.
- oatmeal1 3y agoAlso IMHO it looks horrible.
- travisgriggs 3y agoAmen to this. In a tabloidish sense. I read the title and thought "duh". Maybe others were intrigued and clicked, but for me, this is just obvious. I had lots of legos, and own more now as a grandpa than, er, uh, I should. I guess spatial reasoning about bricks just is second hand at this point. What the article likely leaves out, is that the all of the "corner only" touch points are going to create a more "pourous" wall. And collection points for crap.
- pm215 3y agoYou can see from the photos in the article that the amount of waviness is not so large as to result in large angles between adjacent bricks -- the usual mortar between bricks connects them and doesn't even look like it's all that much larger a mortar join than for a straight wall.
- wkdneidbwf 3y agothis is an overly cynical take. headlines are brief by necessity. nobody would read that and think that a curved line from A to B is shorter than a straight line between the same points. the first paragraph explains it, > these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
- 93po 3y agoI think you overestimate what people would reactively think when reading this headline
- geeky4qwerty 3y agoI recognize the cynicism in my observation, but is it fully unmerited? I put the following prompt in GPT4: create a professional title and a click bait title for the following article Then provided the article. This was the output: Professional Title: "Crinkle Crankle Walls: The Aesthetics and Efficiency of Serpentine Wall Construction" Click Bait Title: "You Won't Believe How These Weird, Wavy Walls Use Less Bricks Than Straight Ones!"
- gweinberg 3y agoYes, it's clickbait and nonsense. Obviously a straight wall would use fewer bricks. Your brick wall is going to be one brick thick either way, nobody is going to try to somehow make the straight wall as strong as the wavy wall. Most likely the straight wall is already way stronger than it needs to be.
- samus 3y agoIf either design is too strong, then over could just use thinner bricks. However, as the article indicates, the straight wall would not be as stable as the wavy wall. It needs buttresses to prevent toppling. That's the key advantage of the wavy design.
- surfpel 3y ago> This feels a bit like diet clickbait... This is fun clickbait. Straight to the point, totally random quirky trivia, and most of the page is nice pictures. Love it.
- amelius 3y agoThe solution for the space problem is obvious: just make the wall wave in the longitudinal direction instead of the transversal direction.
- tomxor 3y agolol, a compression wall! sounds good, but is it?
- quickthrower2 3y agoNo space is wasted, unless you need to squeeze in a rectangle thing (e.g. tennis court, driveway) into a tight lot. But boundary disputes in urban areas are already bad enough so trying to define a wavey boundary wont be fun! That said how much freaking character would this add to a back garden!
- m463 3y agowikipedia says: "leading to greater strength than a straight wall of the same thickness of bricks without the need for buttresses." I was trying to figure out how lengthwise it could have fewer bricks.