This might work in a universe with spherical cows but they seem to hand wave away all human elements. My eyes rolled a loop in my head when they advised an urban location. That's a great way to ensure it gets demolished when a marginally better use for the land comes along.
If it were me I'd just build some monstrosity of a palace in somewhere that nobody wants such a thing and I'd build it out of stuff that's highly inefficient to repurpose, not steel beams. The best way to keep something around is to make its continued use better than any other option so that people take care of it and give it the capacity to withstand a couple generations of neglect without falling in on itself. A castle (metaphorical or literal) on some cheap land along the highway in North Dakota should suffice.
I think the reconfigured / recycled easily makes sense. Tough to build a product in 2000s for life in the 2900s.
That said the cost to make homes reconfigured/recycled easily is probably quite high and who knows if there will be people with knowledge to be able to perform that work in 400 years. Whereas a shelter can always be used by humans...
I personally believe that you need to find a compromise between a framework that lasts very long and party that can be recycled so you can adopt the house depending on your needs without needing to redo everything (for example foundation and some integral supports could probably be designed as a framework that can be adapted while walls, windows, room configuration, doors, etc. need to be changed eventually and therefore should be recyclable).
We already do this with commercial construction. Every floor is just a big box that can be sectioned off as the new owner sees fit.
The key is that the structure is basically self standing with nothing but the outer walls, and if it's a tower, the center core instead.
Add a vertical chase way too to bottom for easy reconfiguring of cables and pipes and you can basically do anything you want until the structure fails.
Modern residential doesn't build like this because it would be expensive and probably pretty ugly. It's a lot cheaper to get your structure in bits and pieces by stacking walls on walls on the foundation then have just an outside structure and then have the floors and roof spanning outside to outside.
But it could easily be done with the materials we have.
Another major thing is the drop ceiling. It's designed to make access easy so that you can run cables and new plumbing anywhere you want.
It's ugly so you'd want to find a way to have a modular ceiling that isn't a drop ceiling, but maybe that works for you.
Last, for residential, you may butt up against height issues as to be modular like that you're want to have a couple feet extra between floors so you have room to move things around without opening things up.
> Another major thing is the drop ceiling. It's designed to make access easy so that you can run cables and new plumbing anywhere you want.
> It's ugly so you'd want to find a way to have a modular ceiling that isn't a drop ceiling, but maybe that works for you.
If you build with trusses for floors instead of joists, you can get a lot of the same benefits as a drop ceiling without the ugliness. You can run plumbing/vents/whatever though the trusses without destroying the whole ceiling to get access. You might not need to cut into the ceiling at all depending on what you’re doing and what existing access you have (e.g. an unfinished utility space may allow access to supply new power cables).
Of course patching the ceiling is hardly a big concern if you’re talking about a structure surviving for 1000 years.
The 1000 years is a separate conversation I think than the modular concept. One could lead to another, but depending on how modular you wanted to be, access to the ceiling is a must.
On the other hand, if you make the trusses large enough and give an /attic/crawl access you could go up there and do the thing without needing to renovate. Then all center walls are non structural and you can move them as you please.
Come to think of it, I might build a house like this.
You can also leave the mechanical on the outside and not cover it too. I guess there's a certain beauty to me in the robot parts but I don't think many would like that.
How often you expect to reconfigure is a huge factor. Drop ceilings make complete sense in many commercial buildings, where access to change/move cables and whatnot probably happens every year. For residences, that sort of work happens a lot less frequently.
You can also get away with ugly ceilings more easily when they are higher. A drop ceiling 8 feet or less from the floor is an eyesore. At 12 feet up it’s a lot less noticeable. Of course if you have very high ceilings you can often just leave them uncovered and have a more industrial aesthetic. You have to be more intentional about routing all the utilities then.
The cost may be high, but it doesn't have to be. That's why I mentioned Brand.
An example he cites is MIT's Building 20[1]. It only stood for 50 years, but that's not too bad for a structure that was intended to be temporary. Some amazing stuff came out of that building.
Agreed. The idea that homes don't last 1000 years because of their construction quality is conflating correlation and causation. Homes don't last that long because ideas about what (or where) a home should be don't last 1000 years. Heck, in recent times, they hardly last 100 years.
> Agreed. The idea that homes don't last 1000 years because of their construction quality is conflating correlation and causation. Homes don't last that long because ideas about what (or where) a home should be don't last 1000 years. Heck, in recent times, they hardly last 100 years.
And (IIRC) in Japan they often don't last past one owner, since a new owner will typically want to build a new house for themselves on the lot. An old home actually lowers the value of a lot, since you have to factor the demolition cost into the price.
This has been brought up before on HN and I remember a comment mentioning that they thought it was due to the fact that earthquake proofing technology advances quickly in Japan so an old house might not be up to the most current standard. Curious if that's correct, and if not, why is this so common in Japan then.
A thing I've noticed while attending school in Japan was that many old "Machiya" houses get torn down and more modern and western houses get built. At least this was the case in Kyoto. Earthquake-proofing the house is one aspect but I think people in Japan prefer to own a more western home. It's too bad because those old Japanese homes are getting taken down
I agree on that, although there are residential homes in Japan that implement energy efficient outer shell, while still keeping the Machiya look. There definitely is a preference in Japanese society for western style homes.
As a Japanese, I think modern houses in Japan as just a "house" rather than "western style house". That's the default rather than preference. Traditional Japanese style house isn't an option for most people. Cost and insulation would be a big reason.
Most modern Japanese homes are not "western style" at all. They're usually built by large industrial concerns (e.g., Toyota, Sekisui, etc.) that prefabricate many components at scale. The process of building such a home in Japan begins with a company architect fitting their design system onto your lot. The price is fairly predictable, and relatively cheap—-under US$300K in most places. The home is designed with more or less the following priorities:
1. Safety
2. Ease of maintenance
3. Efficiency
4. Cost
And more recently, considerations for SDGs (sustainability goals) with respect to materials used.
Longevity is not a priority, as homes are expected to depreciate in value over roughly 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but my personal opinion is that industrialization has made it possible to upgrade the technology of the home at a pace and a price that favors rebuilding.
As for machiya and kominka, local governments like Kyoto have tried to intervene to preserve the traditional homes. The "no build" lots do not allow a property owner to build on anything other than the load-bearing structure for the old home. As a result, you have many empty lots and coin parking lots around Kyoto where the old home was unsalvageable or where the owner could not afford a renovation. To be honest, only tourists/foreigners would want to stay in a machiya for the novelty of it. Although they were marvelously engineered for their time, they tend to be rough living compared to the extremely easy and cheap prefab homes. There is also the problem of craftspeople who can maintain these old homes dying out, which adds to the cost of keeping them.
I don't think it's possible to attribute any of this to a general "Japanese" attitude, though. On the one hand, one of the most important and longest-lasting spiritual sites in Japan is Ise Jingu, which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years as a Shinto ritual of renewal. On the other hand, you have some of the oldest and largest wooden structures in the world still standing in Nara.
Earthquake is part of it. However culture is also part. Houses are built to last 20 years: even if you like where you live they still assume you will be rebuilding in 20 years. As such they can cut corners to save money - no problem so long as you rebuild every 20 years.
I think earthquakes, volcanoes and the like may have been the original reason that the culture sees buildings as transitory things. But like many cultural things it's now self-sustaining.
I immediately thought about the schools in smaller towns around here that were built in the 90s, which were built to last, and are now sitting as barely used community or senior centers. Society's needs can change a lot in 30 years, let alone 1000.
Seems like a lot of the article is about just that. A really robust, reliable structure & foundation, with progressively less permanent things attached. A brick facade can easily last hundreds of years, but not a big deal to replace. Interior walls made of non-load-bearing-wood makes it "easy" enough to reconfigure rooms.
He mentions how the building shape is just a rectangle, which makes it reasonable to repurpose for many uses (he mentions office & separate apartments). He takes care to allow for routing of utilities under and inside the building.
It's not quite as reconfigurable as I think you're getting at - optimized for being torn down, but it's much closer than a typical 100yr house would be.
Wood walls are more complext to rearrange, than steel framed walls.(that is why offices have steel frames under that drywall - easy to install and move)
The author basically agrees with you, lots of good commentary in the Conclusion section of the article:
> Designing a building for an extremely long lifespan is in some sense a bet on a certain kind of future - one where tomorrow’s physical infrastructure needs aren’t all that different from todays. And because physical infrastructure is hard to change once it’s in place, it’s also an attempt to bring that kind of future into existence. But if you think agglomeration effects should push cities to get larger and denser, or if you think we’re likely to see some cities shrinking as the nature of the economy changes, or if you think building technology is likely to change significantly, an extremely durable, an extremely long-lived house is perhaps less desirable.
The parent poster is probably referring to "How Buildings Learn", a book by Stewart Brand with lots of architectural pictures and commentary about how various buildings have been (re)used over the decades or centuries.
Brand posits
(a) human needs change faster than buildings age, and thus buildings must adapt to that change over the lifespan of the building
(b) there are two reasons a building lives to be more than 100 years old: either the building is historic / well loved enough that we live with a building's warts even though it doesn't meet our needs perfectly (a Parliament building, a church, a house that cannot be modified) OR it is so flexible or easy (cheap) to modify that it can suit many purposes. (A small commercial building that can hold a dentist office or a restaurant or a law office or a nail salon, a house with an extension, a warehouse that can be converted to a modest factory floor, etc)
Buildings that cannot be adapted are torn down and replaced.
The book is excellent, and beautiful, and I recommend a physical copy to everyone.
It's fascinating how culture has effects on architecture. So many older American homes have small kitchens that are separate from a formal dining room. Historically, a family member or cook would be making food separately, out of the way, and then it was presented in the dining room.
Today, everyone wants a kitchen that's integrated with the dining area. Cooking has been culturally elevated – people don't feel like they need to do it out of the way. But unfortunately, many of these older homes cannot be easily modified. Walls are often load-bearing instead of being reconfigurable.
Not just American homes. In Europe all the new flats and houses are designed with kitchens merged with the dining room. Even the old flats are often redesigned by owners or developers by tearing down the wall(s), separating the kitchen from the other room(s). I personally hate this trend because I don't like getting cooking odors all over the place. I'll probably just build a wall whenever I'd be forced to buy such a place.
The solution to cooking odors is to have adequate ventilation that exits the structure. It blows me away that this is not code in every kitchen and bathroom. I live in rules-heavy CA and my kitchen vent "exhausts" back into the kitchen.
Every time there are people gathering at someone's house, they tend to congregate in the kitchen as that's where the food action is all at. Give me one big open space with kitchen, dining space and a living room all in one. Open concept is highly desirable in modern housing.
With proper ventilation this isn't an issue. My kitchen is centrally located, so I installed a range hood made by a Chinese company (Fotile, approximately $1300 on Amazon). It works exceptionally well. Even the smokiest/smelliest cooking odors don't escape.
This seems cultural for sure. I grew up in an apartment built in early 1970s with separate kitchen. To this day most apartments in my country are planned w/o open kitchens.
It is actually an ongoing joke with my partner, who has lived an open-kitchen life until meeting me.
PS: would be interesting to correlate enclosed kitchen with cost and availability of home labourers (slaves, maids, cooks, etc)
What I see a lot of in my region (US PNW) is open kitchens integrating with informal dining areas (breakfast nook, or seating at a kitchen island) and living rooms. But most houses are still built with a separate dining room. Heck, my house was even built with a butler's pantry to connect them. That's pretty common.
You have a separate dining room if you’re building a 6 room or larger MANSION. Calling a building with a separate dining room on top of a kitchen plus informal dining room as a Regular home seems to be a stretch.
2500sf is 232 square meters. That's three normal family city apartments by European standards. I guess houses just run bigger there but sounds quite excessive nonetheless.
"Excessive" is a moral judgement. City apartments aren't typically 2500sf in the US, either. I was referring to single family detached homes, which are by far the dominant type of dwelling in my region. Land is cheap, wood is cheap. A 2500sf house will be a good bit cheaper than a little flat in most western European cities, I bet.
This is super funny to me. I just bought a house where the kitchen is separate. My parents, and my mother-in-law were all like... "you can knock down the wall and bring the rooms together"... and I was like: "hell no. As if I want a bunch of kids playing tag while I'm chopping things with sharp knives and running around with burning oil."
...Leave me alone to cook an awesome meal in peace. I'm working in there not messing around.
I'm actually designing a new house and was surprised at the resistance I'm getting from the builders/architects in having a kitchen which is out of the way of the rest of the house. Like you, I'm not interested in dumping hot oil all over a kid/dog/mother who decides to run through the kitchen despite the blockade I set up to keep them out.
That, and kitchens require so much maintenance to keep clean and presentable. I hate how my entire house feels dirty because it's visible from any public spot in the house that I didn't get around to cleaning a few pans the night before.
I'd guess that's because of another phenomenon: A "good" house is one ready to sell to the next guy. Youre never living in your own house, always the next buyer's house. Hence the need to keep up with the latest fads, desired by the next guy who is buying from you for the sake of the next guy.
Oddly enough, the value of houses in Japan depreciate over time (like cars). It's kind of a cultural thing. People want to live in a new house of their own, so many houses are built in a pre-fab way, with the intent that they'll be torn down and recycled in 20-30 years.
Stainless steel girders? I see this is a no costs spared build.
At one point the author even considered Inconel girders, but practical considerations on builder experience with exotic alloys made that a bridge too far.
Even so he is planning to have builders come in an brick up the entire frame before the rest of the house is built.
I did like that he realized one of the most important aspects of keeping a house around is to make people want to keep it around. Make sure it doesn't age poorly because then even if the structure is sound people will tear it down because "it is an eyesore".
"Eyesore" also depends on the community. Lots of places will keep an eyesore place gladly because they can't infringe on the property owners rights. Many places in Asia are like this in general.
Sure, but over the course of 1000 years presumably the property will be brought and sold many times. So you need a building at least desirable enough that the subsequent owners won't opt to demolish it.
Of course, designing widely beloved buildings is easier said than done.
Stainless steel is also much more brittle than construction steel. And this matters a lot. Not only in case of earthquakes but also just in construction where you have large tolerances. Construction steel will bend plastically, while a more brittle steel can just crack. Welding stainless steel is also inviting issues, but possible in principle.
That, and using both steel and stone in the same structure brings its own class of problems due to the different expansion coefficients which needs to be dealt with in a very ingenious way if that is supposed to last for a millenium (or more).
Seems to me like, given the expense and duration goals, you'd be much better off forgoing steel entirely and creating a stone gravity-bound structure, and making the places where you can't go with stone easy to repair or replace, something for which I'm not sure structural steel is ideal.
> Our other option is slate. Slate roofs have extremely long lifespans and are extremely attractive. But, like copper, they’re more expensive upfront, and require more specialized skills to install (since they’re less common). A slate roof is also extremely heavy, putting more weight on our framing and increasing the risk of damage during an earthquake.
OP apparently doesn't know that slate roof have to be repaired all the time. Slates will age and break, especially if they're nailed (because the metal expands and cracks the slate).
I've spent 10 years with a slate roof, and it has to regularly be fully checked, and missing or breaking slates replaced (because they'll leak).
Screw slate, give me terracota tiles any day of the week. Lighter, way more flexible, and easier to replace when they invariably break.
Yes, another way to spell Slate roof = work. The reason is simple: Slate, layers of fossilized leaves, has a rough surface and frost and the weather in general will work on it and split the layers apart, seeds will find enough purchase to germinate (the handy supply of water certainly helps) and lichen and moss just love to grow on slate.
This whole article to me reads: "I'm planning on an overpriced construction for my house and need a plausible excuse'. It's a status thing and a discussion piece, not a serious project. If you want to build for a millenium: copy the Romans. Done. And even then you're going to have to re-do all the trimmings every so many years because they'll all give out with use. Even staircases made out of solid stone will wear over such time spans.
I don't think slate roofs are that bad - our house is an exceptionally exposed spot and has a slate roof and we lose maybe one or two slates a year to storms. Our wooden windows and doors are a far bigger maintenance headache than our roof.
And one or two slates per year is indeed manageable, assuming they are in an accessible spot. If you're unlucky they are not and then you have to get to the spot to apply your fix without breaking more slates, which can be quite a bit of work (remove slates to make a path to the spot, fix, then rehang all the others, and hopefully they were uniform).
I've had one storm bad enough in NL that we lost some rooftiles, which were fairly easily replaced. Since in the rest of the country people had lost whole roofs and other houses in the same street were in much worse shape and comparing with the few houses that had slate I'm pretty happy with my good old 'dakpannen', which are almost maintenance free (due to the angle of the roof).
The worst is thatched roofs. Those require pretty much bi-annual upkeep and tend to become rodent infested. They look pretty in the first 10 years, a bit garish in the second and depending on their state of maintenance horror shows in the last 10. I'll never live in a house with one of those, people like them for status but they tend to be people that can afford to pay others to do their work for them.
When I got to the part about wood windows it dawned on me that the author is less clued in than he lets on. Wood windows are a maintenance nightmare. You can't open them half the year in a humid climate, or all of the year in an old house that has settled. No window is going to last 1000 years so might as well pick one that will make you hate your house less in the interim.
> Slate, layers of fossilized leaves, has a rough surface and frost and the weather in general will work on it and split the layers apart, seeds will find enough purchase to germinate (the handy supply of water certainly helps) and lichen and moss just love to grow on slate.
25 years ago, when I saw some roofers working to replace an old slate roof on a church outside Philadelphia with asphalt (I was horrified), I asked them why they were taking this (to me) horrible step, since my parents live and stay in homes in the UK with slate roofs that are between 300 and 500 years old.
The roofers laughed and said "yeah, that's probably welsh slate. The stuff here in PA is so much worse than that. Freeze-thaw will destroy it in 20-40 years"
So the observations you're making about slate are true but only for specific slate quarries. There are slate sources that can provide slate which could last for centuries.
The UK seems not to have much of an issue with moss & lichens causing problems with slate roofing (it grows but it isn't much of a problem).
I think the roofers would have said "oh, and the upstate NY stuff is pretty good too". The slate I've looked at in detail in PA really is pretty bad. It just isn't as dense as the welsh stuff in the UK.
Slate is not made of fossilized leaves; its foliate structure arises from the metamorphic process as flakes of clay (aluminium silicates) align and merge into sheets under transverse pressure. Any organic material present in the original sedimentary deposit will typically result in a graphite inclusion.
Hm, ok! I totally bought this when it was related to me but you are absolutely correct. It always makes me wonder if there is a faster way to cross check everything in your head to fish out the false stuff other than people taking the time to point these things out. Thank you.
I wish there were a service to sort through the ideas in my head and point out the flawed ones too — until I realize that a) I'd have to agree to one implanted product preference for each hundred thoughts scanned, and b) many of my thoughts would be placed behind trigger warning overlays.
>Make sure it doesn't age poorly because then even if the structure is sound people will tear it down because "it is an eyesore".
This is an interesting one, lots of interesting buildings were torn down as old eyesores to be replaced with much more efficient modern buildings in the post-WW2 UK. Nowadays these are considered eyesores ripe for demolition and the buildings they replaced are valued, to the point post-War town planners are sometimes cursed to this very day. Taste changes often, I think the best chance of keeping a building around on these grounds are to make it an interesting or particularly elegant example of a style subjectively considered by most to be timeless.
I know it's purely subjective, but I really think the trend in architecture to do away with ornamentation was quite bad from a 'places real people have to live in' perspective, even if it's interesting from an artistic point of view.
This is interesting. About to do a major reno on an old home (early 1900s) and definitely had questions about making upgrades that would last a long time. One of the greenest things that you can do to a home is not build a new one as I understand it. Another one would be to build it so it lasts ... not like this throwaway society we live in. That said I don't think I can do steel girders to extend the life of the house -- that would be tough ask. Any thoughts anyone? Thanks.
Other green benefits -- electrify as much as reasonable, thermal regulate, insulate etc.
But on the other hand, it's probably greener to build a house to last 50-100 years and then tear it down in 75 years when housing preferences change rather than build a house to last 1000 years and then tear it down in 75 years when housing preferences change.
On the one hand I think this is a worthwhile experiment, on the other hand I can see why most houses are not built this way.
Look into Passive House designs, and videos by Joseph Lstiburek if you are interested in energy efficiency and building structures to last with modern materials.
At this moment in history, building a cheaper 50-100 year house now and letting a future developer rebuild it with hopefully carbon-neutral materials might be more sustainable, assuming that building it to last now would cost more in dollars and carbon and immediate environmental impact. If we haven't figured out how to build in a more sustainable way 100 years from now, then there might not even be any developers around anyway, so it's a win-win (sort of).
> One of the greenest things that you can do to a home is not build a new one as I understand it.
I would need evidence for this statement. There have been many great advances in technology over the years, to the point that I can see old insulation/wiring/plumbing to not be worth repairing and replacing. Not to mention if any of the previous stuff used harmful materials such as lead and asbestos.
I also think it is unreasonable to assume current lifestyles and needs will be satisfactory for future generations.
I would surmise that by not sourcing new materials (that currently aren't that green from a carbon footprint perspective which is probably the largest part of your footprint) you are saving a lot of carbon cost. There are challenges with old homes such as sealing the building envelope and updating wiring/heating etc.
Maybe I am telling myself that - I'm not sure. My argument does resonate though.
New builds require the destruction of the old material, sourcing of new material, energy and time spent to put that together. And if you don't get a good build is all going to have to be rebuilt in the not too distant future whereas the house I have has lasted over 100 years and is still in great shape - I figure I can get another 100 with the proper maintenance/updating etc.
I have yet to come across an old house that I did not want to gut. To update wiring, plumbing, gas lines, central air, siding, roof. By the time you are done, you are only saving on replacing the frame, but tearing down a frame of spaced 2x4s and plywood sheets are not that much waste in my experience.
There is a big chunk of the world that doesn't live in wooden houses, so rebuilding the frame indeed is a big deal compared to "just" redo all the wirings and plumbings.
I would also posit that your own preferences aren't the same as everyone else. Such that there are many people who prefer not living in many of the newer homes.
You should still use reinforcement in the concrete:
Use basalt rebar instead of steel; it will not corrode.
Use a nylon fiber in the mix to protect against impact and spalling from fire.
Use 5000 psi concrete instead of 2500. This is much stronger and will be less likely to break down under any environment.
Use a vapor barrier underneath to help prevent moisture and gas from coming up into the house.
Put the foundation on 8 to 10 inches of 1" rock. This will help protect against soil expansion and allow water to quickly flow underneath or out of underneath the house. It will also prevent critters from digging into any possible underground utilities, etc.
Any cracks after the concrete sets, fill and then seal the entire pad.
Be sure to keep the concrete wet and covered for 30 days to aid in maximum strength.
Instead of a steel frame, use insulated concrete forms, again using basalt rebar. This makes a concrete walled house. Use stainless steel trusses (or onsite galvanized steel) for the roof or build a concrete roof with similar construction methods as the insulated concrete forms.
The siding of the house should be concrete board or other non combustible material (brick or stone)..or both where it makes sense. But be careful on the mortar used..seal it at least if you expose any of it to the weather.
Make sure the eaves are at least two feet out and the eaves over doors more than that. This keeps water away from those areas and the house as a whole.
Make sure you have gutters...good ones.
Make sure your land around the house moves water around it - even in flash flood events.
Have real shutters for your windows.
Where it makes sense, especially those areas exposed to weather, do not use wood.
Instead of slate..use aluminum shingles.
Forget the fireplace...too many potential issues with fire, leaking, etc. They are hard to build for 20 years let alone 1000.
Use Fiberglass windows. The best ones will outlast any hardwood.
Out flat in Edinburgh New Town had built in shutters on the inside of sash windows - these were actually really effective at helping to keep the place warm - far better and easier to care for than curtains.
Edit: I should point out that the Edinburgh New Town is quite old, but not as old as the Old Town, obviously.
Not any curtain I've ever encountered - people used to have net screens for privacy and curtains for warmth. But that's going back a bit (i.e. my youth).
I think the constraint of expanding the house prevented a build like you're suggesting. I personally think it's a silly constraint when the plan is already 3000+ sqft, which is larger than anything used as non-communal shelter by humans for our species' duration.
I also dislike how the author completely punted on insulation. I think that's a very important part of any new building. It's easy to insulate your proposed design.
Yes, insulation is very important. I actually built this house for myself. Took 2.5 years...the insulated concrete forms I used have built in insulation for the walls...and for the foundation I used special foam around the edges of the foundation to help with that. A commenter mentioned elsewhere that you would not be able to find contractors to build a house like OP designed - that is a true statement even with my build and that is why I had to build 90 percent of myself (my sons and wife helped too).
That's awesome! It's a dream of mine to someday design my own home, though more from an architectural perspective and not a technical one like this. Will likely be unrealized, though, for financial reasons. Unless I win the lottery or something, but it's kind of hard to do that when you don't play ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Slate can be easily damaged by hail and your kids baseballs. Aluminum will be resistant to all the sizes of hail except biblical sizes. Aluminum also will reflect pretty 100 percent of the heat from the sun - allowing you to have an insulated/conditioned attic if you want. As to cost - aluminum shingles are pretty expensive too so probably no cost savings there.
The higher quality fiberglass windows have resins and treatments that are pretty much impervious to UV light...so that has been a problem with fiberglass windows but not so much anymore. Another option are steel or aluminum windows. There are some very high quality windows made out of that material as well.
Constructing a building that would last 1000 years is not particularly hard with modern engineering and materials.
The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it. I'm not going to live 1000 years. My great grandkids likely won't even live to see the year 3022. Why would I spend orders of magnitude more for a house if a structure meant to last ~100 years serves my needs perfectly?
My friend just needed to redo the foundation on his house. He could have spent 10-100x what he needed to and installed a reinforced concrete foundation with deep steel pylons. But that would have been a waste of his money when wooden peirs works just as well for all his intents & purposes.
The second problem is making sure people want to maintain the structure for 1000 years, or at least not tear it down. I don't think this is as hard as the other comentors are saying, though. Just don't build the house in a city. The house will be torn down if it's in a city. The house has a good chance of staying a house if it's built out in the countryside on a decent plot of land. Nobody will ever want anything from that structure but to live in it, so it will be maintained.
Yeah, unless I' rich and thinking about building my family somewhere, I wouldn't even touch this idea. And even I do, I'll probably purchase an old, but good-standing building and heavily renovate it. Modern technology also provides means to strengthen the foundation and weight-bearing part of the building.
>The second problem is making sure people want to maintain the structure for 1000 years, or at least not tear it down. I don't think this is as hard as the other comentors are saying, though. Just don't build the house in a city.
I live in about a 200 year old house but it has been extensively reworked over its lifetime including by me. And given that it's on a nice piece of exurban property it's hardly a stretch to imagine someone in that time deciding a teardown just made more sense than all the upgrades that have taken place over that period. Just as one example it presumably didn't have indoor plumbing when the first part of the house was built.
There's a bit of a question about how much of the house is actually left from 200 years ago.
My house was technically built in 1897 but was moved in the 1920s on to a new foundation and we basically knocked the entire thing down and rebuilt it a few years ago after we bought it. Now we're adding to it again. It shares some of the DNA of that house from 1897 but basically none of the parts anymore and is much nicer looking whilst keeping the old timey style.
My contractor for a couple of big renovations I did figured that the 4x4-ish posts on the first floor were probably original along with at least some of the subflooring (about half of which I redid because it was collapsing). We think there was a substantial addition (probably including a second floor) around 1900. That's when the demolished barn on the now adjacent property dated to.
The house I grew up in was similar. It dated to either the 1700s or possibly even late 1600s. But the original house was just two rooms (two stories) built into the side of a hill.
I grew up in a 600 year old house. That isn't particularly unusual in the part of the UK I was born in. The village church is 1200 years old. There's a chapel not too far away that dates from around 600 AD.
We're not going to change it much. We fix it when it breaks.
Most of North America (or at least, the bits I've visited) seems to be fixated with new buildings of sometimes questionable construction standards, and they tend to get replaced fairly regularly. One of my Canadian friends told me that "People prefer to live in new houses". Here, the opposite is much more common.
This is all true (although not all old houses are poorly insulated -- the ~60 cm of thatch and wattle and daub construction also is surprisingly good at insulation. It even comes complete with Tudor-era built in biomass heating!).
I think a lot of the bad press that goes on about new builds in the UK at least at the moment are due to "chicken coop Barrett Homes", i.e. a large developer building the largest number of houses possible with the cheapest construction method. There are horror stories in the tabloid press of people buying houses from ~2000 that are starting to have major structural problems, or have other major flaws. The rooms are meaner in size and there is a lot of resentment about developers making ~£300k profit on each property (and building ~200 of them at a go).
Obviously, there's a massive selection / survival bias here. Bad homes are more likely to be demolished. Good homes are more likely to survive.
It's funny - I grew up in a country with the same mentality as in the UK. But I've now come around a bit more toward the American approach: I still see the merit in preserving history but besides that, what is a good argument for constructing a house to last for a very long time? See, whenever you buy an older house and start renovating it, more often than not you start running into unexpected things that need to be updated. Partly because the original construction may have been especially shoddy (think post-war years), but even for houses that are younger than that, changes in the building code often require updates to the building.
But then, why did the code change in the first place? Some cynics will say "so that they can keep making money" but most of the times it is to synchronize with changes that have happened all around is, including the development of new materials, gained knowledge about the impact of natural factors (not only in earth quake regions), and - in our generation - increased expectations regarding energy consumption (insulation).
All the old houses that do not undergo renovation are way out of sync with modern considerations that manifest themselves in any current building code. So why not tear down a house after 100 years and build a new one from scratch? That process is, of course, quite a bit simpler for the more light-weight wooden houses in North America.
A lot of the construction snobism in Europe against American construction standards is unfounded. As far as residential homes are concerned, I don't believe that there are many advantages of brick constructions over wooden framing besides better soundproofing for most intents and purposes.
Of course, one important thing to consider in this discussion is the availability of land: in North America, outside of the big cities, there is still plenty of land available for building new building while Old Europe is already pretty tightly built up. A lot of the land is in private hands and often unlikely to be turned into lots. Plus, for North America with its car-centric developments, it's easier to find usable unoccupied land that will not force you into crazy long commutes. This is more difficult in some parts of Europe, where the ratio of people to square foot of land is much higher.
A house, or any other infrastructure. IMHO a big factor in America's capacity for reinvention and renewal is not being saddled with infrastructure designed to last for centuries. Disclose: I live and work in England, love old buildings and own a 19th Century home made from Malvern Stone.
> My friend just needed to redo the foundation on his house. He could have spent 10-100x what he needed to and installed a reinforced concrete foundation with deep steel pylons. But that would have been a waste of his money when wooden peirs works just as well for all his intents & purposes.
Is your friend Grady from Practical Engineering? His latest episode talks about foundations and replacing the old wooden piers holding up his house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8
Also reminds me of the classic phrase "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
The money part of this treatise is the steel frame, right? As they stated, things like warehouses and other buildings get reused because the steel frame is still useful regardless of the other stuff.
The foundation actually seems to be a danger point. I don't know much about pylons/stilts for foundations, but it would seem a better plan because you can adjust those for the life of the structure, can't you? And the design called for a lifted first floor/crawlspace anyway.
And that would enable a basement.
American cities rebuild everything. There's at a minimum 500 year houses and buildings in most European bustling cities.
Which means, I guess, that the structure and its surrounding structures should be integrated and beautiful.
I live in an old farmhouse on some nice land. I've done fairly extensive renovations after obviously no money being put into the house for a good fifty years. And it works for me.
It's also "quirky" in a lot of ways including a basement that still tends to get wet and having one small bathroom and no way to easily add another one. I can imagine a lot of potential buyers saying "Love the location but the house has got to go." (The person I bought the house from actually bought the property for the land. He built a new much larger house on one of the two plots he subdivided from the original property.)
The world is varied, it's not just a copycat of the terrible design affecting US cities.
One example? I live in Venice, Italy. The city is 1,600 years old. Most houses and palazzos are at least 400 years old; a big chunk of them is at least 600-700 years old. No one is going to tear down these places. And no, rising sea levels will not destroy Venice (see the MOSE dam [0], which is working, despite the big corruption scandals).
Besides Venice, which I'd agree it's a rather unique place, many other places in the world consist of small/medium towns, not huge megalopolis where a small house will be tore down to make space for a skyscraper.
Finally: I'd love to build a house that will last 1,000 years. Even if my great-great-great-grandkids will not be around to see it.
> Finally: I'd love to build a house that will last 1,000 years. Even if my great-great-great-grandkids will not be around to see it.
I mean yeah, in the abstract I think anyone would agree. I would also love to be able to build a 1000 year house. But it costs a tremendous amount of money, and there are things higher on my priority list than the status of a structure 900 years after my death. Until you fork up the cash for it, my point stands.
There are Roman building still standing and many of those which no longer are are so because they were abandoned and/or 'recycled'. Buildings like for instance Notre Dame de Paris are 800+ years old.
Its easy to overlook the constant maintenance and repair these historical buildings get. Thick stone buildings are definitely sturdy, but I still maintain that modern technology makes it significantly easier to make a 1000 year building.
I for one adore walking around built up areas where the original builders thought further than that. There is beauty in solid houses. They carry history. An old part of town tells so many stories. They embed culture and provide some degree of continuity.
The initial cost is higher. But your grandchildren can sell it. Many generations can profit from an existing building. Floor plans can be adjusted to some degree and modern comforts added at any time.
A flimsy plywood house built to be replaced in 15 years is an expensive tent. It is nothing.
> The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it.
Isn't that merely a matter of establishing a foundation/trust fund arrangement with the explicit purpose of maintaining the building? Of course you need enough capital so that it can sustain itself indefinitely through low-risk investments, but that is just the nature of the game.
Or wood burning fireplace inserts that draw combustion air from outside and expel the fumes/combustion byproducts outside as well. Not ideal for local air quality, but essentially eliminates indoor pollution from them.
To that point -- last summer, my friends moved from a mountain town under constant threat of wildfire to a pleasant spot by a lake in the Midwest -- their new neighbor keeps a fire burning 24/7, so they still get to enjoy the terrible air quality all winter long.
Unless it does turn wood into a pure gas without a trace of sulfur, silica etc. it must emit such stuff. Or it comes with filters cleaning fine particles, nitric oxide etc. In the end it does emit CO2.
Bah. Freezing to death in an ice storm can also 'shorten your lifespan considerably'. There's damned good reason to want a simple, off grid means of heating your home if you lose power.
Most of the smoke goes up the chimney. You still open it to light, relight and sweep away the ash and in that time you're going to breathe in some smoke or dust particles which you ideally shouldn't
I was wondering that too. If I wanted to design a wood-burning apparatus that would be efficient and last 1000 years, I'd use a design that was more like a masonry stove (centrally located on the inside of the house). In any future (I think), a backup source of heat in a cold climate is a necessary redundancy? I would use the most efficient tech now for the burn chamber (rocket?), but also design the burn chamber in such a way to allow for it to be replaced with better tech in the future (perhaps the masonry stove outer structure and thermal bank would support itself - steel exoskeleton? - etc.).
Having built my own house, I can definitely say this article is for intellectual stimulation only, and won't result in the construction of an actual home. Not only will you never find contractors and subs that give a shit about this level of detail, but you will struggle explaining these things to permit approvers, county bureaucrats and other people who want to make your life hell because you know more than they do, have more money than them, and are doing something different. Fun article, great information, but won't result in an adobe as planned.
Hehe - you are very right! Never underestimate the ability of the "code enforcers" to stifle innovation.
However occasionally you do see examples of excellence managing to push through the bureaucracy - I would love to build a house like this someday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuYvDuOQ-5M
My guess is that you have less money than you think you do. I've worked on buildings that were coming in around $2500/sq foot and if the owner didn't like a knot in the board we'd pull it and try again.
My other guess is you don't know as much as you think you do and your probably not the building savant you think you are.
If you hire an engineer, county bureaucracy doesn't care. If they have to put their stamp on it, and they don't understand it, they care, because they are liable. If you know so much more then them, why didn't you put your stamp on it?
I've also built a lot of really odd structures and you do spend a lot of time making sure that everyone agrees that you are doing it in a safe and sane way. Not entirely unlike building consensus in a enterprise setting.
There are people that are pros at doing these things. And they know how to get things done. And I've worked with them to build all sorts of crazy stuff.
I stayed at a farm in South Tyrol, Italy this fall. (South Tyrol is actually in northern Italy, near the Austrian border.)
The oldest property record for the place dated it back to the year 1200. It's a large, normal looking house, and the walls are made out of irregular stone blocks mortared together.
For what it's worth, buildings like this aren't that uncommon in Italy.
Build with stone blocks. Even if it gets knocked over the blocks just need to be reassembled to be useful whether as a wall, a tower, a road, or another house.
I actually went on a course a couple of years ago to be trained in how to prepare and use traditional lime mortars - the course had us building a wall that was going to be knocked down and the stones re-used for the next class:
NB I did this because our house is an old Scottish farm building that was converted to a house ~12 years ago - I wanted to be able to do proper wall repairs and build garden walls in the same style.
Neat! I just added a very small section to an existing brick wall and I'm super frustrated with the result because the original wall had it's bricks in the weirdest lines and I had the choice of following them or trying to improve it. I tried the latter and ended up with something that was less bad than it could have been but it still isn't perfectly level at the top so I'll have to do some improvisation to make the connection to the ceiling.
If you see experienced bricklayers at work, the speed with which they go and the perfection of the result then that's always a good reminder that plenty of the 'trades' that IT people tend to look down on are actually highly skilled professions that can take the better part of a lifetime to master.
I doubt this house would make it to 50 years in places with a moderate climate. The lack of insulation makes it way too expensive to use as a dwelling or office (ignoring that you could not get a building permit in many places because it would not be able to meet energy efficiency guidelines). It is mentioned as a detail to be worked out but it is a critical detail. Around here not being able to be made energy efficient in a cost effective way is one of the main reasons old houses are torn down.
It will be torn down long before it has a chance to become historical.
> Adding interior insulation makes the house much more comfortable, but also changes the thermal dynamics, potentially causing freeze/thaw damage in the brick, and allowing moisture to accumulate between the brick and the insulation. This is one of the many details that would need to be worked out for the complete design of the home.
Yeah, this comment struck me as a more major detail to be worked out compared to the other many details listed. Most of the others had multiple options with different drawbacks and benefits but either would work. This seems like we still haven't reached a solution for the exterior walls.
Yup, that's when I stopped reading. It's clear the author has little practical, real world experience with building. In another comment I pointed out if he started watching Matt Risinger's YouTube channel he would see that things like his concern about bricks and moisture have been solved problems, with even better solutions that handle the issue better while decreasing construction time and cost.
Also is 1000 years really necessary for the vast majority of housing? There has to be a balance to these things and that seems like way overshooting for most needs.
Rather than shooting for something silly like 1000 years, how about focusing on building to climate of the area the home is in? I'm thinking of the picture from about 4 or five years ago of the major hurricane in Florida where an entire area is wiped out except for one house that looked practically untouched. The home owner spent about 20% more and got something that survived a major hurricane. 20% more is far more feasible and will get at least some people's attention - but what this person is advocating is a complete non starter for any kind of broad adoption. The costs are just too great.
Another example is all the above ground housing in tornado prone areas. We should be building partially buried houses with domed earthen roofs - no sharp edges sticking above the ground for wind to get under or drive debris into at high speed. Would be simple to implement - partial in ground houses have been a thing since the 70's and had their share of problems but as time and experience builds, we have techniques and new materials to make their construction pretty routine (and they can still be light and airy inside despite being partially underground). The real problem is people - a major culture change is required to drive acceptance of different home styles. Good luck with that. Maybe if the government stopped handing out disaster relief funds unless the funds required people to take steps like the above to prevent future disasters on the same scale - might be the only way to get people to think more of long term consequences.
The tales of the grasshopper and ant (and the cultural analogs) are thousands of years old for a reason. It's far easier, short term, to be a grasshopper :p
> partial in ground houses have been a thing since the 70's and had their share of problems
Yes, and if you build one, you’re almost certain to have these problems, while at the same time, tornado is almost certain to not actually hit your house.
> It's clear the author has little practical, real world experience with building.
Who gives a damn? Is anyone reading this and checking their $2 million bank account to start a build? It's a thought exercise and a fun one that has generated some cool ideas in my head and some good discussion.
It's one thing to comment on mistakes or corrections to be made, but it's frustrating to see someone go "this is silly and the author is stupid".
Stainless steel rebar is an often overlooked option. In theory, solid SS rebar should outlast the concrete, but it is a difficult thing to accurately study. In favorable conditions, regular rebar reinforced concrete starts to need major repairs after ~40 years due to corrosion.
The Progresso Pier in Mexico was build over 80 years ago with SS rebar, and reportedly has not needed any renovations. A pier built 20 years later using mild steel rebar has been almost completely destroyed by the ocean.
I wish more large infrastructure projects would use it. The up-front costs can be 2x higher, but the lifetime savings win out in many situations.
Roman concrete is not like modern concrete. The process in modern concrete does not stop and eventually makes it too brittle and falls apart, Roman concrete does not do this and can last a very long time.
TL;DW: whereas modern construction uses rebar as a way to keep concrete from fracturing under tensile stress, the Romans made their constructions enormous so that the weight of the structure itself would compress the material and keep it from failing from tensile stress. Their monuments weren't built huge just because it cool, but also because it was practical. But large concrete constructions are both expensive and take years and years to cure, and depending on your concrete chemistry the strongest mixtures can also be much more difficult to work with.
You start talking about rebar and other complexities when you want a shape that puts concrete in tension (where it's very weak), instead of compression.
Stainless steel needs oxygen[1], otherwise it will eventually corrode with pitting and "crevice corrosion"[2]. I wonder what the ingredients are in stainless rebar, and what the oxygen environment is like.
My understanding is that modern concrete would last as long as Roman concrete would, if we built the same types of designs that Romans used concrete for. The big difference is that we want to span gaps without using large unwieldy arches, so we need tensile strength, so we need to use steel reinforcing bar in our concrete, which is the eventual pathway to failure. (Well, that and heavy machinery like semi-tractor trailers, which the Romans also didn't have to design around)
The Romans did not have the quantity of cheap steel necessary for this, so they ensured only compressive loads on their concrete, so it lasted about as long as you'd expect a random rock subject to only compressive loads in a field to last.
> so it lasted about as long as you'd expect a random rock subject to only compressive loads in a field to last.
Roman Concrete is a bit more special than some 'random rock' thanks to the presence of "aluminous tobermorite" which makes the concrete much stronger and more chemically stable
Hey this is a little late, but now they are looking at non oxidizing basalt based rebar and mesh's as an alternative to steel. It's work a look. it's got a lot going for it.
Not all stone houses are castles or luxury residences. My family's house (northern Italy in the Alps) is at least 600 years old (there is a painting on the outside that has been dated to around 1420) but it is a working-class home. The interior has been repurposed many times over the centuries, but it is still there and inhabited.
The moment I saw the diagram text "Seismic moment connection with Fuses", I knew it was not meant to last 1000 year. The moment you introduce seismic fuses, you need active Repair post a large earthquake. This is like expecting to keep repairing every few years and claim Life.
My first though reading the title was, you need to build it with STONE. So was "Taj Mahal" and many other religious structure lasting LONG years.
Stone is heavy: can you design a stone structure to withstand an earthquake? In my magnitude 6.2 experience, stone structures without massive steel framing fail in an earthquake.
Italy was hit by a series of earthquakes in 2016, including a 6.6. Certainly there was a lot of damage, including in Rome, but most stone structures survived.
Damage from Earthquakes is usually localised - how close you are to the fault really really matters (until you get up to the mega-quakes that can affect much of a small country).
Christchurch was hit by a 6.2, but most of the damage occurred on the suburban south-Eastern half of the city, and the commercial buildings in the city centre which were more vulnerable. 10’s of kilometres away and no significant damage to buildings.
The magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake in 2016 had an epicentre 100km away from Christchurch, and there was no damage here in Christchurch.
Several of the earthquakes Italy has experienced were reasonably close to Rome. None have had the epicenter there to my knowledge, though.
It’s perhaps more interesting to ask what non-stone buildings have survived 1000 years. I don’t think there are any. So even if stone is more susceptible to earthquakes, it might still be the best choice for a building to last 1000 years.
I think you just need a lot more stone than people think. Ancient structures still standing had massive construction. 3-4 foot thick walls. If I recall correctly, the Roman coliseum has arches that are more like 6-8 feet thick.
But most structures standing for that long have also been maintained to some degree. Unmaintained millennium-old structures are generally referred to as ruins.
Nothing about this design seems intended for 1000 years. It needs wood fireplaces in case that’s the only way of heating the space, but yeah, in a world where we’ve reverted to this, they’ll be able to weld stainless steel and source replacement seismic fuses.
So many elements of this thing don’t make sense together. Clad the whole thing in a double layer of brick that isn’t actually going to bear load? Why? This is unlikely to last for 1000 years anyway. It probably won’t survive the first major earthquake and even if it does you’ll probably have to tear it apart to get to those seismic fuses.
In general structures do not remain standing unless they are maintained, so plan for that. Assume the cladding can and will be replaced. The person who needs to do work on this imaginary house certainly isn’t going to reclad in this nonsense at 4x the cost of the brick veneer it actually needs. Hell, just wrap the thing in hardiplank and it will probably be fine for the first 100 years.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 98.1 ms ] threadIf it were me I'd just build some monstrosity of a palace in somewhere that nobody wants such a thing and I'd build it out of stuff that's highly inefficient to repurpose, not steel beams. The best way to keep something around is to make its continued use better than any other option so that people take care of it and give it the capacity to withstand a couple generations of neglect without falling in on itself. A castle (metaphorical or literal) on some cheap land along the highway in North Dakota should suffice.
But yes.
After reading some of Stewart Brand's writing, I've learned to love ugly buildings.
That said the cost to make homes reconfigured/recycled easily is probably quite high and who knows if there will be people with knowledge to be able to perform that work in 400 years. Whereas a shelter can always be used by humans...
The key is that the structure is basically self standing with nothing but the outer walls, and if it's a tower, the center core instead.
Add a vertical chase way too to bottom for easy reconfiguring of cables and pipes and you can basically do anything you want until the structure fails.
Modern residential doesn't build like this because it would be expensive and probably pretty ugly. It's a lot cheaper to get your structure in bits and pieces by stacking walls on walls on the foundation then have just an outside structure and then have the floors and roof spanning outside to outside.
But it could easily be done with the materials we have.
Another major thing is the drop ceiling. It's designed to make access easy so that you can run cables and new plumbing anywhere you want.
It's ugly so you'd want to find a way to have a modular ceiling that isn't a drop ceiling, but maybe that works for you.
Last, for residential, you may butt up against height issues as to be modular like that you're want to have a couple feet extra between floors so you have room to move things around without opening things up.
If you build with trusses for floors instead of joists, you can get a lot of the same benefits as a drop ceiling without the ugliness. You can run plumbing/vents/whatever though the trusses without destroying the whole ceiling to get access. You might not need to cut into the ceiling at all depending on what you’re doing and what existing access you have (e.g. an unfinished utility space may allow access to supply new power cables).
Of course patching the ceiling is hardly a big concern if you’re talking about a structure surviving for 1000 years.
On the other hand, if you make the trusses large enough and give an /attic/crawl access you could go up there and do the thing without needing to renovate. Then all center walls are non structural and you can move them as you please.
Come to think of it, I might build a house like this.
You can also leave the mechanical on the outside and not cover it too. I guess there's a certain beauty to me in the robot parts but I don't think many would like that.
You can also get away with ugly ceilings more easily when they are higher. A drop ceiling 8 feet or less from the floor is an eyesore. At 12 feet up it’s a lot less noticeable. Of course if you have very high ceilings you can often just leave them uncovered and have a more industrial aesthetic. You have to be more intentional about routing all the utilities then.
An example he cites is MIT's Building 20[1]. It only stood for 50 years, but that's not too bad for a structure that was intended to be temporary. Some amazing stuff came out of that building.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
And (IIRC) in Japan they often don't last past one owner, since a new owner will typically want to build a new house for themselves on the lot. An old home actually lowers the value of a lot, since you have to factor the demolition cost into the price.
This has been brought up before on HN and I remember a comment mentioning that they thought it was due to the fact that earthquake proofing technology advances quickly in Japan so an old house might not be up to the most current standard. Curious if that's correct, and if not, why is this so common in Japan then.
What you see as a "more western home" is a more energy efficient outer shell. Which just happens to be fairly universal.
And more recently, considerations for SDGs (sustainability goals) with respect to materials used.
Longevity is not a priority, as homes are expected to depreciate in value over roughly 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but my personal opinion is that industrialization has made it possible to upgrade the technology of the home at a pace and a price that favors rebuilding.
As for machiya and kominka, local governments like Kyoto have tried to intervene to preserve the traditional homes. The "no build" lots do not allow a property owner to build on anything other than the load-bearing structure for the old home. As a result, you have many empty lots and coin parking lots around Kyoto where the old home was unsalvageable or where the owner could not afford a renovation. To be honest, only tourists/foreigners would want to stay in a machiya for the novelty of it. Although they were marvelously engineered for their time, they tend to be rough living compared to the extremely easy and cheap prefab homes. There is also the problem of craftspeople who can maintain these old homes dying out, which adds to the cost of keeping them.
I don't think it's possible to attribute any of this to a general "Japanese" attitude, though. On the one hand, one of the most important and longest-lasting spiritual sites in Japan is Ise Jingu, which is rebuilt from scratch every 20 years as a Shinto ritual of renewal. On the other hand, you have some of the oldest and largest wooden structures in the world still standing in Nara.
As usual, it's complicated.
He mentions how the building shape is just a rectangle, which makes it reasonable to repurpose for many uses (he mentions office & separate apartments). He takes care to allow for routing of utilities under and inside the building.
It's not quite as reconfigurable as I think you're getting at - optimized for being torn down, but it's much closer than a typical 100yr house would be.
> Designing a building for an extremely long lifespan is in some sense a bet on a certain kind of future - one where tomorrow’s physical infrastructure needs aren’t all that different from todays. And because physical infrastructure is hard to change once it’s in place, it’s also an attempt to bring that kind of future into existence. But if you think agglomeration effects should push cities to get larger and denser, or if you think we’re likely to see some cities shrinking as the nature of the economy changes, or if you think building technology is likely to change significantly, an extremely durable, an extremely long-lived house is perhaps less desirable.
Brand posits (a) human needs change faster than buildings age, and thus buildings must adapt to that change over the lifespan of the building
(b) there are two reasons a building lives to be more than 100 years old: either the building is historic / well loved enough that we live with a building's warts even though it doesn't meet our needs perfectly (a Parliament building, a church, a house that cannot be modified) OR it is so flexible or easy (cheap) to modify that it can suit many purposes. (A small commercial building that can hold a dentist office or a restaurant or a law office or a nail salon, a house with an extension, a warehouse that can be converted to a modest factory floor, etc)
Buildings that cannot be adapted are torn down and replaced.
The book is excellent, and beautiful, and I recommend a physical copy to everyone.
Today, everyone wants a kitchen that's integrated with the dining area. Cooking has been culturally elevated – people don't feel like they need to do it out of the way. But unfortunately, many of these older homes cannot be easily modified. Walls are often load-bearing instead of being reconfigurable.
Every time there are people gathering at someone's house, they tend to congregate in the kitchen as that's where the food action is all at. Give me one big open space with kitchen, dining space and a living room all in one. Open concept is highly desirable in modern housing.
It is actually an ongoing joke with my partner, who has lived an open-kitchen life until meeting me.
PS: would be interesting to correlate enclosed kitchen with cost and availability of home labourers (slaves, maids, cooks, etc)
...Leave me alone to cook an awesome meal in peace. I'm working in there not messing around.
That, and kitchens require so much maintenance to keep clean and presentable. I hate how my entire house feels dirty because it's visible from any public spot in the house that I didn't get around to cleaning a few pans the night before.
Oddly enough, the value of houses in Japan depreciate over time (like cars). It's kind of a cultural thing. People want to live in a new house of their own, so many houses are built in a pre-fab way, with the intent that they'll be torn down and recycled in 20-30 years.
Hmmmm. I think that doesn't count on ship of Theseus type grounds.
At one point the author even considered Inconel girders, but practical considerations on builder experience with exotic alloys made that a bridge too far.
Even so he is planning to have builders come in an brick up the entire frame before the rest of the house is built.
I did like that he realized one of the most important aspects of keeping a house around is to make people want to keep it around. Make sure it doesn't age poorly because then even if the structure is sound people will tear it down because "it is an eyesore".
Of course, designing widely beloved buildings is easier said than done.
This is some fun new meaning of the word "gladly"
> Our other option is slate. Slate roofs have extremely long lifespans and are extremely attractive. But, like copper, they’re more expensive upfront, and require more specialized skills to install (since they’re less common). A slate roof is also extremely heavy, putting more weight on our framing and increasing the risk of damage during an earthquake.
OP apparently doesn't know that slate roof have to be repaired all the time. Slates will age and break, especially if they're nailed (because the metal expands and cracks the slate).
I've spent 10 years with a slate roof, and it has to regularly be fully checked, and missing or breaking slates replaced (because they'll leak).
Screw slate, give me terracota tiles any day of the week. Lighter, way more flexible, and easier to replace when they invariably break.
This whole article to me reads: "I'm planning on an overpriced construction for my house and need a plausible excuse'. It's a status thing and a discussion piece, not a serious project. If you want to build for a millenium: copy the Romans. Done. And even then you're going to have to re-do all the trimmings every so many years because they'll all give out with use. Even staircases made out of solid stone will wear over such time spans.
And one or two slates per year is indeed manageable, assuming they are in an accessible spot. If you're unlucky they are not and then you have to get to the spot to apply your fix without breaking more slates, which can be quite a bit of work (remove slates to make a path to the spot, fix, then rehang all the others, and hopefully they were uniform).
I've had one storm bad enough in NL that we lost some rooftiles, which were fairly easily replaced. Since in the rest of the country people had lost whole roofs and other houses in the same street were in much worse shape and comparing with the few houses that had slate I'm pretty happy with my good old 'dakpannen', which are almost maintenance free (due to the angle of the roof).
The worst is thatched roofs. Those require pretty much bi-annual upkeep and tend to become rodent infested. They look pretty in the first 10 years, a bit garish in the second and depending on their state of maintenance horror shows in the last 10. I'll never live in a house with one of those, people like them for status but they tend to be people that can afford to pay others to do their work for them.
25 years ago, when I saw some roofers working to replace an old slate roof on a church outside Philadelphia with asphalt (I was horrified), I asked them why they were taking this (to me) horrible step, since my parents live and stay in homes in the UK with slate roofs that are between 300 and 500 years old.
The roofers laughed and said "yeah, that's probably welsh slate. The stuff here in PA is so much worse than that. Freeze-thaw will destroy it in 20-40 years"
So the observations you're making about slate are true but only for specific slate quarries. There are slate sources that can provide slate which could last for centuries.
The UK seems not to have much of an issue with moss & lichens causing problems with slate roofing (it grows but it isn't much of a problem).
I live in upstate NY, arguably a nastier climate, and it’s not atypical to see 19th century buildings with intact slate roofs.
This is an interesting one, lots of interesting buildings were torn down as old eyesores to be replaced with much more efficient modern buildings in the post-WW2 UK. Nowadays these are considered eyesores ripe for demolition and the buildings they replaced are valued, to the point post-War town planners are sometimes cursed to this very day. Taste changes often, I think the best chance of keeping a building around on these grounds are to make it an interesting or particularly elegant example of a style subjectively considered by most to be timeless.
I know it's purely subjective, but I really think the trend in architecture to do away with ornamentation was quite bad from a 'places real people have to live in' perspective, even if it's interesting from an artistic point of view.
Other green benefits -- electrify as much as reasonable, thermal regulate, insulate etc.
On the one hand I think this is a worthwhile experiment, on the other hand I can see why most houses are not built this way.
I would need evidence for this statement. There have been many great advances in technology over the years, to the point that I can see old insulation/wiring/plumbing to not be worth repairing and replacing. Not to mention if any of the previous stuff used harmful materials such as lead and asbestos.
I also think it is unreasonable to assume current lifestyles and needs will be satisfactory for future generations.
Maybe I am telling myself that - I'm not sure. My argument does resonate though.
New builds require the destruction of the old material, sourcing of new material, energy and time spent to put that together. And if you don't get a good build is all going to have to be rebuilt in the not too distant future whereas the house I have has lasted over 100 years and is still in great shape - I figure I can get another 100 with the proper maintenance/updating etc.
[1] https://www.buckinghamslate.com/roofing/
Instead of a steel frame, use insulated concrete forms, again using basalt rebar. This makes a concrete walled house. Use stainless steel trusses (or onsite galvanized steel) for the roof or build a concrete roof with similar construction methods as the insulated concrete forms.
The siding of the house should be concrete board or other non combustible material (brick or stone)..or both where it makes sense. But be careful on the mortar used..seal it at least if you expose any of it to the weather.
Make sure the eaves are at least two feet out and the eaves over doors more than that. This keeps water away from those areas and the house as a whole.
Make sure you have gutters...good ones.
Make sure your land around the house moves water around it - even in flash flood events.
Have real shutters for your windows.
Where it makes sense, especially those areas exposed to weather, do not use wood.
Instead of slate..use aluminum shingles.
Forget the fireplace...too many potential issues with fire, leaking, etc. They are hard to build for 20 years let alone 1000.
Use Fiberglass windows. The best ones will outlast any hardwood.
Edit: I should point out that the Edinburgh New Town is quite old, but not as old as the Old Town, obviously.
I would also expect outer shutters to insulate the window a little bit and thus limit the heat loss no?
Not any curtain I've ever encountered - people used to have net screens for privacy and curtains for warmth. But that's going back a bit (i.e. my youth).
It is still a decently common practice in a lot of European countries.
Other option would be to use rolling window shutters on the outside.
I also dislike how the author completely punted on insulation. I think that's a very important part of any new building. It's easy to insulate your proposed design.
I have a few questions regarding your suggestions:
> Instead of slate..use aluminum shingles
- Is this purely a question of price?
> Use Fiberglass windows. The best ones will outlast any hardwood.
- Wouldn't long term exposure of the fiberglass windows to the sun weaken the fiberglass (this effect seems to be called "Fiber Blooming")?
Finally, do you have any links to share regarding these topics for people wanting to build a house but without the technical background?
The higher quality fiberglass windows have resins and treatments that are pretty much impervious to UV light...so that has been a problem with fiberglass windows but not so much anymore. Another option are steel or aluminum windows. There are some very high quality windows made out of that material as well.
I do have links...will post them later.
https://vulcraft.com/Products/JoistGirders
https://www.neuvokascorp.com/
Cold roof Design: https://www.cor-a-vent.com/s-400.cfm
First layer https://www.homedepot.com/p/TECHSHIELD-LP-TechShield-Radiant...
Foam Layer: https://universalconstructionfoam.com/
Second Layer: https://www.homedepot.com/p/5-8-in-x-4-ft-x-8-ft-Zip-System-...
Outside walls, roof eaves, etc:
https://www.jameshardie.com/
Concrete:
https://cor-tuf.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-concre...
The hard part is, first and foremost, getting someone to pay for it. I'm not going to live 1000 years. My great grandkids likely won't even live to see the year 3022. Why would I spend orders of magnitude more for a house if a structure meant to last ~100 years serves my needs perfectly?
My friend just needed to redo the foundation on his house. He could have spent 10-100x what he needed to and installed a reinforced concrete foundation with deep steel pylons. But that would have been a waste of his money when wooden peirs works just as well for all his intents & purposes.
The second problem is making sure people want to maintain the structure for 1000 years, or at least not tear it down. I don't think this is as hard as the other comentors are saying, though. Just don't build the house in a city. The house will be torn down if it's in a city. The house has a good chance of staying a house if it's built out in the countryside on a decent plot of land. Nobody will ever want anything from that structure but to live in it, so it will be maintained.
I live in about a 200 year old house but it has been extensively reworked over its lifetime including by me. And given that it's on a nice piece of exurban property it's hardly a stretch to imagine someone in that time deciding a teardown just made more sense than all the upgrades that have taken place over that period. Just as one example it presumably didn't have indoor plumbing when the first part of the house was built.
My house was technically built in 1897 but was moved in the 1920s on to a new foundation and we basically knocked the entire thing down and rebuilt it a few years ago after we bought it. Now we're adding to it again. It shares some of the DNA of that house from 1897 but basically none of the parts anymore and is much nicer looking whilst keeping the old timey style.
My contractor for a couple of big renovations I did figured that the 4x4-ish posts on the first floor were probably original along with at least some of the subflooring (about half of which I redid because it was collapsing). We think there was a substantial addition (probably including a second floor) around 1900. That's when the demolished barn on the now adjacent property dated to.
The house I grew up in was similar. It dated to either the 1700s or possibly even late 1600s. But the original house was just two rooms (two stories) built into the side of a hill.
We're not going to change it much. We fix it when it breaks.
Most of North America (or at least, the bits I've visited) seems to be fixated with new buildings of sometimes questionable construction standards, and they tend to get replaced fairly regularly. One of my Canadian friends told me that "People prefer to live in new houses". Here, the opposite is much more common.
You may not get good design, you may get shoddy construction, true.
I think a lot of the bad press that goes on about new builds in the UK at least at the moment are due to "chicken coop Barrett Homes", i.e. a large developer building the largest number of houses possible with the cheapest construction method. There are horror stories in the tabloid press of people buying houses from ~2000 that are starting to have major structural problems, or have other major flaws. The rooms are meaner in size and there is a lot of resentment about developers making ~£300k profit on each property (and building ~200 of them at a go).
Obviously, there's a massive selection / survival bias here. Bad homes are more likely to be demolished. Good homes are more likely to survive.
But then, why did the code change in the first place? Some cynics will say "so that they can keep making money" but most of the times it is to synchronize with changes that have happened all around is, including the development of new materials, gained knowledge about the impact of natural factors (not only in earth quake regions), and - in our generation - increased expectations regarding energy consumption (insulation).
All the old houses that do not undergo renovation are way out of sync with modern considerations that manifest themselves in any current building code. So why not tear down a house after 100 years and build a new one from scratch? That process is, of course, quite a bit simpler for the more light-weight wooden houses in North America.
A lot of the construction snobism in Europe against American construction standards is unfounded. As far as residential homes are concerned, I don't believe that there are many advantages of brick constructions over wooden framing besides better soundproofing for most intents and purposes.
Of course, one important thing to consider in this discussion is the availability of land: in North America, outside of the big cities, there is still plenty of land available for building new building while Old Europe is already pretty tightly built up. A lot of the land is in private hands and often unlikely to be turned into lots. Plus, for North America with its car-centric developments, it's easier to find usable unoccupied land that will not force you into crazy long commutes. This is more difficult in some parts of Europe, where the ratio of people to square foot of land is much higher.
Is your friend Grady from Practical Engineering? His latest episode talks about foundations and replacing the old wooden piers holding up his house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8
Also reminds me of the classic phrase "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
The foundation actually seems to be a danger point. I don't know much about pylons/stilts for foundations, but it would seem a better plan because you can adjust those for the life of the structure, can't you? And the design called for a lifted first floor/crawlspace anyway.
And that would enable a basement.
American cities rebuild everything. There's at a minimum 500 year houses and buildings in most European bustling cities.
Which means, I guess, that the structure and its surrounding structures should be integrated and beautiful.
At some point those folks wanted a new house and presumably the cost of what they wanted to remodel was close enough to new that they built news.
The available space that you note can also facilitate just building a new house.
It's also "quirky" in a lot of ways including a basement that still tends to get wet and having one small bathroom and no way to easily add another one. I can imagine a lot of potential buyers saying "Love the location but the house has got to go." (The person I bought the house from actually bought the property for the land. He built a new much larger house on one of the two plots he subdivided from the original property.)
The world is varied, it's not just a copycat of the terrible design affecting US cities.
One example? I live in Venice, Italy. The city is 1,600 years old. Most houses and palazzos are at least 400 years old; a big chunk of them is at least 600-700 years old. No one is going to tear down these places. And no, rising sea levels will not destroy Venice (see the MOSE dam [0], which is working, despite the big corruption scandals).
Besides Venice, which I'd agree it's a rather unique place, many other places in the world consist of small/medium towns, not huge megalopolis where a small house will be tore down to make space for a skyscraper.
Finally: I'd love to build a house that will last 1,000 years. Even if my great-great-great-grandkids will not be around to see it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mose
I mean yeah, in the abstract I think anyone would agree. I would also love to be able to build a 1000 year house. But it costs a tremendous amount of money, and there are things higher on my priority list than the status of a structure 900 years after my death. Until you fork up the cash for it, my point stands.
There are Roman building still standing and many of those which no longer are are so because they were abandoned and/or 'recycled'. Buildings like for instance Notre Dame de Paris are 800+ years old.
A thick stone structure seems to do the job fine.
I for one adore walking around built up areas where the original builders thought further than that. There is beauty in solid houses. They carry history. An old part of town tells so many stories. They embed culture and provide some degree of continuity.
The initial cost is higher. But your grandchildren can sell it. Many generations can profit from an existing building. Floor plans can be adjusted to some degree and modern comforts added at any time.
A flimsy plywood house built to be replaced in 15 years is an expensive tent. It is nothing.
Isn't that merely a matter of establishing a foundation/trust fund arrangement with the explicit purpose of maintaining the building? Of course you need enough capital so that it can sustain itself indefinitely through low-risk investments, but that is just the nature of the game.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-American-houses-often-have-the-...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-bur...
Additionally, I think people who are outdoors still have to breathe air.
Mine's gone out...
Stainless or ceramic chimney liner slows that process down, but neither will last a 100 years let alone a 1000.
Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters added one to his house and talks about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T3nIk3S8Wc
However occasionally you do see examples of excellence managing to push through the bureaucracy - I would love to build a house like this someday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuYvDuOQ-5M
My guess is that you have less money than you think you do. I've worked on buildings that were coming in around $2500/sq foot and if the owner didn't like a knot in the board we'd pull it and try again.
My other guess is you don't know as much as you think you do and your probably not the building savant you think you are.
If you hire an engineer, county bureaucracy doesn't care. If they have to put their stamp on it, and they don't understand it, they care, because they are liable. If you know so much more then them, why didn't you put your stamp on it?
I've also built a lot of really odd structures and you do spend a lot of time making sure that everyone agrees that you are doing it in a safe and sane way. Not entirely unlike building consensus in a enterprise setting.
There are people that are pros at doing these things. And they know how to get things done. And I've worked with them to build all sorts of crazy stuff.
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_tb_2_f...
The oldest property record for the place dated it back to the year 1200. It's a large, normal looking house, and the walls are made out of irregular stone blocks mortared together.
For what it's worth, buildings like this aren't that uncommon in Italy.
https://www.scotlime.org/
NB I did this because our house is an old Scottish farm building that was converted to a house ~12 years ago - I wanted to be able to do proper wall repairs and build garden walls in the same style.
If you see experienced bricklayers at work, the speed with which they go and the perfection of the result then that's always a good reminder that plenty of the 'trades' that IT people tend to look down on are actually highly skilled professions that can take the better part of a lifetime to master.
Yeah, this comment struck me as a more major detail to be worked out compared to the other many details listed. Most of the others had multiple options with different drawbacks and benefits but either would work. This seems like we still haven't reached a solution for the exterior walls.
Also is 1000 years really necessary for the vast majority of housing? There has to be a balance to these things and that seems like way overshooting for most needs.
Rather than shooting for something silly like 1000 years, how about focusing on building to climate of the area the home is in? I'm thinking of the picture from about 4 or five years ago of the major hurricane in Florida where an entire area is wiped out except for one house that looked practically untouched. The home owner spent about 20% more and got something that survived a major hurricane. 20% more is far more feasible and will get at least some people's attention - but what this person is advocating is a complete non starter for any kind of broad adoption. The costs are just too great.
Another example is all the above ground housing in tornado prone areas. We should be building partially buried houses with domed earthen roofs - no sharp edges sticking above the ground for wind to get under or drive debris into at high speed. Would be simple to implement - partial in ground houses have been a thing since the 70's and had their share of problems but as time and experience builds, we have techniques and new materials to make their construction pretty routine (and they can still be light and airy inside despite being partially underground). The real problem is people - a major culture change is required to drive acceptance of different home styles. Good luck with that. Maybe if the government stopped handing out disaster relief funds unless the funds required people to take steps like the above to prevent future disasters on the same scale - might be the only way to get people to think more of long term consequences.
The tales of the grasshopper and ant (and the cultural analogs) are thousands of years old for a reason. It's far easier, short term, to be a grasshopper :p
Yes, and if you build one, you’re almost certain to have these problems, while at the same time, tornado is almost certain to not actually hit your house.
Who gives a damn? Is anyone reading this and checking their $2 million bank account to start a build? It's a thought exercise and a fun one that has generated some cool ideas in my head and some good discussion.
It's one thing to comment on mistakes or corrections to be made, but it's frustrating to see someone go "this is silly and the author is stupid".
The Progresso Pier in Mexico was build over 80 years ago with SS rebar, and reportedly has not needed any renovations. A pier built 20 years later using mild steel rebar has been almost completely destroyed by the ocean.
I wish more large infrastructure projects would use it. The up-front costs can be 2x higher, but the lifetime savings win out in many situations.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/10/progreso-pier-worlds-l...
We don't know. Existing structures that use "Roman Concrete[1]" are (roughly) 2000 years old and counting ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
Since it’s 2000 years old now.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/why-ancient-roman-concrete...
TL;DW: whereas modern construction uses rebar as a way to keep concrete from fracturing under tensile stress, the Romans made their constructions enormous so that the weight of the structure itself would compress the material and keep it from failing from tensile stress. Their monuments weren't built huge just because it cool, but also because it was practical. But large concrete constructions are both expensive and take years and years to cure, and depending on your concrete chemistry the strongest mixtures can also be much more difficult to work with.
You start talking about rebar and other complexities when you want a shape that puts concrete in tension (where it's very weak), instead of compression.
Basically - lots of domes and arches.
[1] https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/metals/is-stainless-steel-...
[2] https://www.cruisingworld.com/how/beware-stainless-steel-cor...
The Romans did not have the quantity of cheap steel necessary for this, so they ensured only compressive loads on their concrete, so it lasted about as long as you'd expect a random rock subject to only compressive loads in a field to last.
Roman Concrete is a bit more special than some 'random rock' thanks to the presence of "aluminous tobermorite" which makes the concrete much stronger and more chemically stable
https://interestingengineering.com/scientists-discover-why-r...
edit: spelling
http://earthwise.bgs.ac.uk/index.php/Building_stones_of_Edin...
Plus just 'don't knock it down'.
Stone is far more durable than the wood and plaster they use in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae
https://youtu.be/WuYvDuOQ-5M?t=375
Indeed if the author would just follow Matt Risinger's channel they would get quite a few far more practical ways to address their concerns.
Expert in a vacuum vs. experience in the field. Also a prime example of "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...
My first though reading the title was, you need to build it with STONE. So was "Taj Mahal" and many other religious structure lasting LONG years.
Christchurch was hit by a 6.2, but most of the damage occurred on the suburban south-Eastern half of the city, and the commercial buildings in the city centre which were more vulnerable. 10’s of kilometres away and no significant damage to buildings.
The magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake in 2016 had an epicentre 100km away from Christchurch, and there was no damage here in Christchurch.
Italy is ~1000km long.
It’s perhaps more interesting to ask what non-stone buildings have survived 1000 years. I don’t think there are any. So even if stone is more susceptible to earthquakes, it might still be the best choice for a building to last 1000 years.
But most structures standing for that long have also been maintained to some degree. Unmaintained millennium-old structures are generally referred to as ruins.
So many elements of this thing don’t make sense together. Clad the whole thing in a double layer of brick that isn’t actually going to bear load? Why? This is unlikely to last for 1000 years anyway. It probably won’t survive the first major earthquake and even if it does you’ll probably have to tear it apart to get to those seismic fuses.
In general structures do not remain standing unless they are maintained, so plan for that. Assume the cladding can and will be replaced. The person who needs to do work on this imaginary house certainly isn’t going to reclad in this nonsense at 4x the cost of the brick veneer it actually needs. Hell, just wrap the thing in hardiplank and it will probably be fine for the first 100 years.