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Comment by bombela | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better

The difference is that they didn't have rebar. And so they built gravity stable structures. Heavy and costly as fuck.

A modern steel and concrete structure is much lighter and much cheaper to produce.

It does mean a nodern structure doesn't last as long but also the roman stuff we see is what survived the test of time, not what crumbled.

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> There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better

Roman concrete is special because it is much more self-healing than modern concrete, and thus more durable.

However, that comes at the cost of being much less strong, set much slower and require rare ingredients. Roman concrete also doesn’t play nice with steel reinforcement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

I think you are incorrect. Compared to modern concrete, roman concrete was more poorly cured at the time of pouring. So when it began to weather and crack, un-cured concrete would mix with water and cure. Thus it was somewhat self healing.

Modern concrete is more uniform in mix, and thus it doesn't leave uncured portions.

We have modern architecture crumbling already less than 100 years after it has been built. I know engineering is about tradeoffs but we should also acknowledge that, as a society, we are so much used to put direct economic cost as the main and sometimes only metric.

You would be very unhappy if you had to live in a house as built 100 years ago. Back then electric lights were rare. even if you had them the wiring wasn't up to running modern life. my house is only 50 years old and it shows signs of the major remodel 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things that a newer house would all do different that I sometimes miss.

I've lived in a 100 year old house and and in a brand new house, they both had issues. That also both had advantages too. Oddly the older house had a better designed kitchen. Our lives change over time and our housing has to adjust to that too.

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