It baffles me that people studying the longevity of Roman concrete tends to attribute it merely to luck… Since when astonishing technology performance is found by luck? I think it is was more likely found with a lot of experiments and progressive improvements over centuries.
Today, if someone wanted a building or house built, and one person who knows a special formula and method gives a higher number than someone with rebar and concrete, they lose the contract.
I'd imagine in all industries, brilliance has been defeated by cheaper adequacy to some extent. I can think of a few examples offhand, all related to metal and tooling.
It's sadly been a race to the bottom, rather than sharing enlightening secrets.
Do you think that the common people of Rome, when given the choice between a house that'll last for 50 years, and a house that'll last for 2000 years but costs a multiple, would have chosen the latter? How many houses from ancient Rome are still standing today?
Taking this into consideration, do you still think that optimizing for the foreseeable future – as opposed to hundreds/thousands of years into the future – is a modern phenomenon? Do you think that the Romans, had they had ready access to today's technology (steel rebar, Portland cement, and the knowledge necessary to use it), would have built the Colosseum the way they did? Or did they build it that way out of necessity, because they lacked alternatives?
We literally he have proof written in stone. The wealthy men of olde were generational land-owners. They had dynasties and build generational assets. Their manshions and castles are still standing today unless they were destroyed by war. That was their wealth.
I have a friend who offers climate change risk assesments on infrastructure and industry. Once he told the investor his asset will be gone in 15 years, you know what he replied?
"Why do I care, i will sell it in 3 "
You couldn't do that kind of shit before. Today's wealth is held in invisible, imaginary assets, that you can flip and swap at the click of a button. This short-termism will be our undoing
No, we don't. Only a tiny fraction of ancient Rome's buildings are still standing ("standing" is relative, most of those are ruins). And they didn't overbuild them because of their virtuous character, but because they lacked more efficient construction techniques and materials.
> mansions, castles
Castles have been useless for hundreds of years now (except as tourist attractions), and a mansion that was built 300 years ago doesn't satisfy today's requirements (like built-in running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, insulation, accessibility). It seems that building something for eternity isn't actually a good use of our resources.
(Please note that I'm not defending the extreme short-sightedness demonstrated by that investor you quoted)
Survivor bias is calling. I can show you literally hundreds of old mansions and castles in my region that weren't destroyed but simply deteriorated over the centuries because their owners couldn't afford the upkeep anymore.
It's a myth that all old buildings were magically built to last for centuries. Most buildings simply decayed and only very few survived over the centuries and most of them due to constant rebuilding and maintenance.
Old houses built 200 years ago in France or England are still used, maintained and highly valued.
But more recent buildings have a lifespan that is shorter than a human, and are often ugly.
I think that Architecture is the most visible beacon of civilization, and I don't like what it tells us about ours.
This is a very one-sided view. The same argument can be used with other items as well, say shoes for example. Sure 200 years ago shoes were much more durable, but they were also so expensive that not everyone could afford them.
Same goes for housing. Sure, you can build beautiful long lasting houses today, but they'd be even less affordable than the modern "ugly boxes". Then there's changing requirements as well. I live in a 100+ year old house and while it's medium to smallish by today's standards, it used to be a twin house back when it was built...
In the original layout, rooms were tiny by today's standards not to mention insulation (or lack thereof), heating (wood and coal ovens in every room instead of central heating etc.), fire protection and plumbing.
It's much more expensive to modernise an old house and bring it up to code than it is to build a new one that's designed to meet all current requirements from the start.
I could just as well state that US McMansions are built for the poor because $100 million 25000ft² estates exist.
Yes, the super rich had big houses. But I'm not talking about the top 1% here. The average citizen throughout the centuries didn't reside in large houses or apartments. By your standards 99.x% of the people have been and still are poor.
I was told it was not entirely clear to us what key principles they were following to get the acoustics working so well and that a lot of their wisdom had been lost to us.
It was like 25 years ago, so I hope we've made progress in rediscovering some of these techniques. But still...
If you look around architectural preservation forums and publications you'll find lots of examples of people trying to preserve historic buildings and doing more harm than good by using modern materials. We forget why things rot, we forget why certain paint formulations are better than others, we forget why certain mortars are for certain bricks (that's a big one, lots of old buildings are rendered worthless by a tuck pointing job with modern concrete that breaks all of the bricks in the first couple of years), the list goes on and on.
Too many historical/protected buildings sit in disrepair and without being used because no one wants to pay for a "proper" restoration.
Why would they? Prices are insane and we live in a capitalist free market society. Even the government doesn't care.
The downvotes you're getting are illustrative the glass houses of the management of the tech biz, lol.
Also they had running water and toilets which in the 19th century was something unheard of.
Even a quick Google search for "theatre acoustics design" shows a lot of cool stuff.
Often, modern buildings are just lazily designed. Kind of like houses that forego hundreds/thousands of years of ventilation knowledge because you can just slap A/C everywhere.
We have a degree of material quality control (at an affordable price) that the Roman empire could really only dream of.
But still, I don’t think they merely stumbled upon a super durable concrete formula by accident.
Trial and errors and elbow grease can go a long way.
This is of course true, but the amount of buildings still standing is large, not small. And there are plenty more that were purposefully destroyed, or that collapsed during huge earthquakes.
It's not like we're fawning over one temple or palace. There are aqueducts, temples, houses, bridges, fortifications - so many.
Not to mention things like the Hagia Sophia, the largest church in the world for about 1500 years, built in 5 years.
Today it would take 25 and be 250% overbudget, and then require repairs because subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor fucked up somewhere. And then the IT system in charge of doors wouldn't work.
Things cost money. The hoover dam is made of concrete, is a hundred years old, and is doing just fine. For most concrete applications we are comparing the roman construction to, we use a balance of cost and utility. And here's the fun thing: when we need much better structural integrity, we don't even use concrete, we use other things.
So this question then becomes "the puritans had better horse carriages than we build now, why?" Well, it's not because we can't build a better horse carriage. It's because when we need to move a lot of heavy things, we use a truck.
There is no demand for expensive long-lasting concrete, except in rare cases like a big dam - where we do use long-lasting concrete.
And yes, Roman concrete was luck, not science. Because they have very little understanding of material sciences compared to what we know now. In fact, if I remember correctly they built a bunch of stuff out of sandstone, which burns, and burned down Jerusalem. But I may be misremembering something the tour guide said.
The fact is, without material sciences, you simply cannot run a bunch of experiments using trial and error to test things for over a century. Because while they improved over centuries, they could only test a couple of things to last those centuries (because you have to wait a hundred years for the results).
Lots of cultures tried concrete. One got it randomly right. There are people that go to a hundred palm readers, who all say random things. They find one that correctly predicts an event. Their takeaway is "that palm reader is real." That's called survivorship bias.
Old stuff is fun and mythical. They discovered some very basic facts about the universe. Extremely basic by modern standards. Their top scientists did what kids in 9th grade now know. Saying otherwise - that's just romanticizing the past.
The first hit on Google for that string disagrees with you so perhaps you did misremember:
"Sandstone is non-combustible and thus resistant to fire, making it a preferred option for building and construction. Due to its natural density, fire takes longer to burn through sandstone blocks, meaning any homes experiencing a fire will have added time."
https://gosfordquarries.com.au/news-media/is-sandstone-fire-...
Sandstone is SiO2, it's already oxidized and cannot burn.
As a rule of thumb, ceramics, ores, and rocks of non-organic origin are oxidized material, they can only melt into lava.
Also we build houses out of wood and papper, so by your logic we are even dumber.
>so by your logic we are even dumber I never said the romans were dumb, but the logic of putting dumb words in someone's mouth then sarcastically making fun of those (your) words, is quite dumb indeed.
by my logic, we are not dumber, and I already explained that. When we need things like fire retardants, we use many materials that are better than lime. It took burning jet fuel to bring down things we don't want to burn. We learned that lesson from the Chicago Fire. For residential homes, in communities with fire departments, it is not cost effective to have more than basic fire proofing.
It would indeed be dumb to build a fireproof single family home for double the cost, when the new owner is going to knock it down and build something else 50 years later. This is why we don't build skyscrapers out of wood though.
Of course we collectively have much better Science today, but at the individual level I don't think we are smarter in any way.
And we tend to underestimate the wisdom that is lost after each generation.
Why do you think the USA was able to send people on the moon in 1969 but is struggling to do it again now?
Sure they would if you gave them time. Eratosthennes didn't just go do it, he spent some (how much we don't know) thinking about the problem. Engineers today have all the math background needed - they are a little rusty but if you give them a few days they can reconstruct the needed math.
I know a lot of guys with engineering degrees who clearly could not do that even if they have had access to much more advanced math than Eratosthenes.
>but is struggling to do it again now because no one is struggling. we have a much lower budget now because there is no cold war race to the moon, and the problem now is not "get to the moon at all cost" but is "get to the moon under this specific costs." The reason it's been a long work in progress, is because it's not urgent, and we want it cheap. Different problem, different solution. It's not because we don't know how to use a wooden stick.