Crinkle Crankle Wall | Hacker News Reader

Crinkle Crankle Wall

en.wikipedia.org

214 pointsvyuh56 comments

While this type of wall mainly exists in England and the Netherlands, it is amusing how the English Wikipedia's main arguments are about saving bricks and possible military advantages, while the Dutch Wikipedia tell these walls are meant to protect fruit from weather conditions. The fruit would typically be planted at the south side. One of the ideas is that the bricks both protect against wind and keep giving some warmth after the sun has disappeared.

You should update the English Wikipedia with that!

Does the shape of the wall affect either of these uses? Otherwise, wouldn't it be off-topic to start listing general facts about walls for agriculture?

for the saving bricks, yes, since it's more robust than a straight line single-brick wall, and cheaper than a multi-brick one.

I imagine for heating, it's that the trees get exposed to more irradiation by sitting in the focus of the curve rather than in front of a line.

Based on this comment, I think the idea is that if you plant trees within the bend of a wall, they are shielded and heated from more than 180 degrees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21564553

You only get this benefit for tree right along the wall, which is not much agricultural area. Seems like a strained justification.

Fruit trees were commonly grown against purpose built walls. For flat walls trees would be trained to keep their branches in a plane.

Thanks. You're talking about espalier?

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

I could only find a single picture of something like this on a curved wall.

https://images.app.goo.gl/AXPFnXgE47K1vm5U7

If the tree is going to be pinned to the wall (as opposed to being free-standing and surrounded by the wall), I don't really understand how making it curved helps with absorbing heat or shielding from weather.

Slightly tangential, but having lived mostly in bare concrete jungles, there's something so aesthetically pleasing about green things growing on a backdrop of bricks or wood.

A soothing harmony of nature and artifice. :)

During that little ice age mentioned elsewhere in these comments, that area right along the wall was your agricultural area so they came up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier

https://archive.is/20120908073039/http://www.parksandgardens..., referenced from the English Wikipedia page says:

”crinkle-crankle wall

A wall with serpentine curves for growing fruit”

So, at least one English source agrees with the Dutch description.

Found pictures of this kind of wall in UVA too! Pretty neat.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/pictures/serpentine/

> while the Dutch Wikipedia tell these walls are meant to protect fruit from weather conditions

Might also have a historic quirk to it.

"The fruit wall appears around the start of the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of exceptional cold in Europe that lasted from about 1550 to 1850."

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-fa...

It's also funny that the words crinkle and crankle derive from Old English and are obvious cognate of Dutch _kronkel_. But the Dutch engineers didn't call it a kronkelmuur?

Funny-named type of wall? This reminds me of the ha-ha wall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-ha

I like this. My neighbor is a billionaire and I think I'll replace my fence with one of these so I can see his property better. It's very nice!

Wouldn't he just add a fence right at his property line if it bothered him at all?

The dutch wikipedia page mentions their use to protect fruit trees from the wind and add sun reflection. You run the wall east-west and place the fruit trees in southern bends of the wall.

For those who wish to see it on Google Maps... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.3095596,1.5174271,3a,75y,2...

Compare to the ”crinkle crankle” layer of corrugated fiberboard which has similar properties (higher rigidity per mass)

I believe the oldest exterior wall of the St. Louis Zoo (on the north side, along where the 1904 World's Fair bird cage was relocated) was modeled after this style. I think it's more than one brick thick, though, so it probably wasn't done that way to save on brick, just to echo the style.

That was my first thought too. You can see it on google maps here: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6369944,-90.2886515,3a,75y,2...

I don't think it's physically possible to make a wall like this that's more than one brick thick (without using an absurd amount of mortar).

I wonder if in modern times, now that labor is so much more expensive than bricks, it would still be economical. Building a brick wall costs (here in Western Europe) around e40/m2 in labor, and e25 in material for a cheap brick. So building this crinkle crankle style would only have to add about 50% in building time. I think building this is much slower than that though - I don't even know how I'd go about it, other than with a laser level, which would be really inconvenient (compared to using a string like is normally done). Then again, it would be inconvenient and frustrating, but would it be slow ?

You're likely right, it's probably not very economical nowadays. Especially given the wider range of materials than be used to build a wall or fence.

Aestethics still apply though and it looks nice.

Pet peeve: Why isn't anyone building brick houses anymore?

I actually know the answer to this, as I used to live with an architect. This information may apply more specifically to Canada than other places.

1. It's not very good at insulating relative to other materials.

2. It's more labor intensive than other materials.

I have always suspect brick is superior for sound insulation, perhaps not weather though?

Wood is better for weather as it is flexible to allow expanding and shrinking. When you have such a hard material, such as brick, in a climate that changes from extreme hot & cold the bricks will crack and break due to stress from expanding and shrinking.

I suspect because cinder block or ICF is just so much more economical and you can make it look like anything you want (brick will always be brick). Plenty of wood framed but that’s purely cost.

In Central Europe, houses are still commonly built from brick at a structural level. (This includes multi-storey apartment blocks, commonly with some sections implemented as cantilevered reinforced concrete - the block I live in is such an example.) It's rare to encounter a building here where bricks also form the facade however.

Which aspect does your question relate to? The rest of your post is about aesthetics, so if a brick facade is what you're after, they are still very common in the UK, although much of that is old housing stock.

My parents built their house with a brick facade in the 1980s with then-state-of-the-art insulation. (in Central Europe) There is a layer of (large) structural bricks (similar to [1]), followed by various elements of insulation, followed by smaller face bricks to form the visible exterior. (something like [2]) I suspect this was and is somewhat more expensive than simply plastering over the outermost insulation layer. The double shell makes re-insulating with more modern materials prohibitively impractical. (Although the thermal properties of the house in question have held up pretty well.)

On old houses, any visible bricks would have been structural, with effectively no insulation. So I'd imagine that's why it's no longer common.

[1] https://www.wienerberger.at/bauen-mit-ziegeln/wandloesungen/...

[2] https://www.corobrik.co.za/assets/products/facebrick/58/1600...

They are in the UK. It is very common to have a decorative weatherproof facade of brick, with a cavity (often filled with insulation) between the bricks and an inside skin of insulating block, or more often now, a prefab timber frame.

They are. In my area of southern Ontario, I estimate that >80% of houses have a brick facade. Note that nearly all houses here are stick-framed. It's very common for visitors to comment on this, because it seems very specific to this part of the country.

I don't know of any structural brick houses here though.

Brick facades cost more up front, but they require zero maintenance and are very durable.

In those times, most would be happy a wall looked straight, and vertical enough to not fall. Also, a circular wooden object (a spool, wagon wheels, ...) could help to maintain the forms. The Dutch Wikipedia mentions many variants formed from straight segments. Probably the labor cost would have been about the same, and workers happier because of the variation involved.

Reminds me a bit of Andy Goldsworthy's "Storm King Wall" (one of his few permanent art works.) Not that he was doing it to save stones, or protect fruit trees. That shape is just a common part of his art:

https://stormking.org/artist/andy-goldsworthy/

Eladio Dieste made some very interesting brick buildings using similar techniques in the 20th C: https://www.archdaily.com/890362/the-intricate-undulating-br...

https://morphocode.com/eladio-dieste-reverence-to-the-laws-o...

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

If only crinkle-crankle software were equally justifiable...

If we take the meaning of a "crinkle crankle structure" to be something like an "economically self-supporting structure", then it's justifiable by definition. The question then becomes: What, in the realm of software engineering, fits this description?

Lisp, perhaps?

Dependency injection

If crinkle-crankle walls protect fruit, then I suppose the analogous software might run on some Apple device that's unnecessarily expensive, technically lagging, and probably beautiful. Hard to justify economically, but still attractive.

I grew up in Suffolk, where I knew of several examples, and I never realised that they were a particularly Suffolk-specific thing: according to the article, twice as many in the county as the rest of the UK. I would be interested to know why.

TFA mentions that Dutch engineers brought over to reclaim bits of Suffolk from the sea introduced the walls.