"use fewer bricks than a straight wall"*
*A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design.
Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
I suspect they are imitations of curved fruit walls popular in the 1600’s before greenhouses took off.
A wavy wall with a wave amplitude of X has the same toppling resistance as a straight wall with buttresses on both sides of length x/2.
Assuming this stackoverflow answer is correct[1], the sine wave has (slightly) less bricks.
Also, while brick is stronger in compression a buttress increases toppling resistance in both directions so you need to consider material properties not just the geometry.
Where did you get that number from, and how does it change as you vary the distance between buttresses?
Autocorrect strikes again.
Sections (640 acres)
The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall."
If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
Not necessarily. You might need a straight wall to be thicker or have more buttressing in that case as well. The requirements for each (waviness, thickness, buttressing) likely change to different degrees based on height, so wavy walls could become less ideal, or they could become more ideal.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-fa...
Serpentine or Crinkle-Crankle walls, apparently a Dutch innovation.
> Although it's actually longer than a linear wall, a serpentine wall economizes on materials because the wall can be made strong enough with just one brick thin. The alternate convex and concave curves in the wall provide stability and help to resist lateral forces. Furthermore, the slopes give a warmer microclimate than a flat wall. This was obviously important for the Dutch, who are almost 400 km north of Paris.
> Variants of the serpentine wall had recessed and protruding parts with more angular forms. Few of these seem to have been built outside the Netherlands, with the exception of those erected by the Dutch in the eastern parts of England (two thirds of them in Suffolk county). In their own country, the Dutch built fruit walls as high up north as Groningen (53°N).
This sort of wall is, I think, just an aesthetic way of marking a property line/get some privacy.
It's all about adapting to local materials. The same technique was used by early settlers in New England (think about the ending of The Shawshank Redemption) because they had to get the stones out of the ground in order to plow and harvest - rather than just make a pile, they used the stones to build walls separating fields.
If I have 100 acres (square), I need ~2.5 km of wall, at ~150,000 bricks for a 1m wall single brick-width wall (deter animals, mark property).
At the online prices I'm seeing ($0.65), that's ~$100,000. If I have to make it all double width, suddenly its $200,000. $100,000 delta is still pretty relevant for a modern small scale farmer.
In the days before wire, brick walls were a cheap longlasting enclosure method, especially if wood or stones weren't easily available.
the first paragraph explains it,
> these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
I put the following prompt in GPT4:
create a professional title and a click bait title for the following article
Then provided the article. This was the output:
Professional Title: "Crinkle Crankle Walls: The Aesthetics and Efficiency of Serpentine Wall Construction"
Click Bait Title: "You Won't Believe How These Weird, Wavy Walls Use Less Bricks Than Straight Ones!"
This is fun clickbait. Straight to the point, totally random quirky trivia, and most of the page is nice pictures. Love it.
This wall would work well at road field boundaries where a couple feet makes less practical difference than the large saving in materials.
"leading to greater strength than a straight wall of the same thickness of bricks without the need for buttresses."
I was trying to figure out how lengthwise it could have fewer bricks.
However, as the article indicates, the straight wall would not be as stable as the wavy wall. It needs buttresses to prevent toppling. That's the key advantage of the wavy design.
I read the title and thought "duh". Maybe others were intrigued and clicked, but for me, this is just obvious. I had lots of legos, and own more now as a grandpa than, er, uh, I should. I guess spatial reasoning about bricks just is second hand at this point.
What the article likely leaves out, is that the all of the "corner only" touch points are going to create a more "pourous" wall. And collection points for crap.