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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is much like staff.[1] Staff is a kind of cheap artificial stone, made from gypsum, cement, dextrin, and glycerin, with some long plant fibers for tensile strength. It was used for temporary exhibition buildings for various fairs a century ago. The Palace of Fine Arts colonnade in San Francisco, built for a 1915 fair, was originally made from staff. By the 1960s, it was a ruin. The current version is a full rebuild from 1974 in more durable materials.

There are more promising bio-materials for construction.

Attempts have been made to make boards from bagasse, the leftover fiber from sugar cane processing. It works, more or less. The most useful application for bagasse is making clamshell containers and plates for fast food. It's cheap, biodegradable, and non-toxic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_(building_material)

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They're building tall buildings out of "wood" nowadays, but it's so processed, sliced up, layered and laminated, and pumped full of epoxies that it's really more down to aesthetics than any environmental benefit; that is, effort / energy investment is high to the point where it's probably cheaper to make steel, and they're not biodegradeable.

There’s still some environmental benefit; wood is so much lighter than concrete or metal as a rule, that you end up needing not only less material in general but also less material in the structure because the frame weighs less and needs less support, not to mention general carbon savings from transportation of heavy material.

It’s also a major time saver since unlike concrete it doesn’t need to set, and the products are basically manufactured panels that don’t need specialized workers to install.

That seems rather long-lasting for a temporary building. I wonder what other buildings should be temporary?

> That seems rather long-lasting for a temporary building.

By 1964, not much of the colonnade was still standing. This was all that was left.[1] What you see today is a full rebuild.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dramatic-Palace-of-Fi...

Sometimes I wonder if buildings really should last hundreds of years taking up that space. Similar to how laws last almost forever and lead to byzantine requirements and tricky interpretations.

Would be interesting if transient infrastructure and time-limited laws would lead to a more beneficial way of living.

Japanese buildings are designed to last about 50 years iirc, after which they're demolished. Temples are rebuilt every X years as well. The building materials, at least in those temples, are mostly natural (wood, mostly cleverly jointed so minimal metal required). IDK if they're still popular but the tatami mat is made out of rice straw, also fully biodegradeable (assuming the stitching isn't plastic).

Japan is not in the same era as what you're describing.

There are many modern buildings that are built the same way as other modern cities and designed to last.

They have very modern infrastructure, and while what you're describing does exist, but is by no means the norm nowadays.

AFAIK clever wood joinery is so niche nowadays that it’s really hard to find people who can still build like that.

The question then becomes how do you make a building degrade in a way that isn't dangerous to the occupants? When a building does degrade, it takes more energy to remove the debris and build a new structure. Can that be minimized as well? This isn't to say I'm against the idea, just thinking out loud

I was thinking less about potential energy usage / emissions, so that’s a good point. Probably solvable like the sibling comment about Japan.

I was philosophizing more about changing the way we enforce permanency of decisions taken by humans who lived before on everyone who comes after them.

No, just slums.

Thanks for contributing nothing of importance to the discussion on this thread.

If buildings could be more easily repurposed this wouldn't even really be a question that needs to be asked. Throughout most of human history larger buildings were repurposed instead of being destroyed, because there wasn't an illusion of limitless materials and labour. The proliferation of specialized buildings after the late 1800s because of that illusion rising, especially for commercial interests, is one half of a problem. The other being regulations written for those specialized buildings that provide little or no possibility of being repurposed.

For example old roadside motels from the '50s and '60s could easily be remade into dorm style apartments with micro kitchens supplemented by communal bathrooms, but laws, especially hygiene and fire codes, currently prevent that. Those motels are built of sturdier materials than many modern homes, and only need to be refitted with fire suppression systems and heat pumps to be cheap housing.

Making temporary housing is just creating a new problem rather than solving an existing one.

I really wasn’t focusing on the USA and its red-tape zoning and refurb laws. For example in the EU, lots of cities have 1-3 city halls at this point. The older ones are often repurposed into government offices or museums.

But what if they disappeared entirely and we built something new in its place? What if the entire block was completely transformed at some point?

Well, that happened with some European cities as a result of WW2.

I remember a celebration in the late 1980s for a retiring British architect/art historian, who reminisced about being an architecture student during the Blitz in London. While he and his pals sheltered underground during the bombing, they shared a (slightly shameful) excitement about the prospect of rebuilding London with "something new" after the war was over.

In contrast to some European cities, where the goal was to recreate as much of the pre-war architecture as possible, postwar London was, as I understand it, rebuilt with lots of new architecture. My impression is that most people think a lot of it was pretty terrible.

Interesting, thanks for that history!

I can empathize with modern attempts at buildings looking ugly and soulless. But I feel that’s part of the point of transience - the next generation can rebuild it in their style. It’s also the problem with how every city becomes overpacked and unlivable when things change, as nothing is future proof.

We shouldn’t continually impose our choices (architectural, zoning, location) on all subsequent generations.

A building is nothing more than a shell for the most part. It's all the parts that attach inside it that make it specialized. Those extraneous city halls could easily be repurposed, as their layouts share many of the aspects of business offices. Should that not work, they could be remade into commercial storefronts, or redesigned to hold electrical infrastructure by using the building as a facade, or any other number of things. For example in England many of the older pumping stations designed to keep the fens dry were repurposed as voltage stations for electricity, old rail sheds were repurposed to shelter busses, and horse stables were turned into loft-over-shop style homes. Reuse is always better than replace when it comes to something as expensive as architecture, especially architecture using lasting materials like stone.

As for building something new... What exactly would need to be new to justify the construction? Density in cities only continues to grow, but that density is solved by verticality rather than replacement. You build up and you build onto rather than build out and build over. If it's to replace architectural styles, that is something that has to be decided on an individual example, as there's things like a city's aesthetic identity, historical significance, and architectural cohesion to consider. Erasing Lancashire's infamous council houses would be decried for decades despite their homogeneity and and connections with poverty, but getting rid of the giant monobloc apartments in Sheffield likely wouldn't be opposed too much because Brutalism's never much been liked and there's plenty of examples.

Most of our infastructure would benefit environmentally if it was more permanent, not less. Roads in particular. Buildings seem to have side benefits from more permanent construction such as better insulation and disaster resistance.

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