Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhruval | Hacker News Reader

The very old buildings the article talks about have long continuity but aren’t actually that old.

Article doesn’t seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

Most construction businesses don’t have this recurring revenue model, tied to religious rebuilding.

No, that's only Ise Shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years using what's basically a blue/green deployment: build new exact copy next to active site, switch over, tear down the old one, repeat.

The reason there are few really old buildings in Japan is that earthquakes and WW2 destroyed almost all of them. That said, Kyoto and Nara do have numerous 300+ year old buildings like Todaiji, which also remains the world's largest wooden structure.

Not to mention various other wars and random fires, such as the Ōnin War 応仁の乱 in the 1400s, a civil war between many feudal lords, which destroyed much of Kyoto among other areas.

The world's oldest extant wooden structure is the Kondō (main hall) of the temple Hōryū-ji 法隆寺 in Ikaruga, in the Nara Prefecture of Japan. It was initially built in 607 but completely burned down due to lightning. It was rebuilt in 670, but again nearly burned down by accident in 1949 [1].

It's interesting to contemplate how across these timescales war, disasters, and accidents make it so difficult for structures to survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji

And fire. The thing with buildings made out of kindling is that they tend to burn down after a while whether that's intentional or simply because lightning happened to strike in the wrong place, or these days the man-made equivalent: electrical faults.

I'm no expert but I think this is Shintō tradition (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri...) rather than Buddhist. But, (Buddhist) temples are sometimes destroyed (war, natural disasters) and are rebuilt as a result (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji).

That is belief in constancy only of form. There is constancy of concept as well. Is your copy of `cat` different because it is composed of different electrons even if `diff` would report no difference? It is still an old program.

What is old? These companies have differing memberships, different corporate structures, and make different things. Yet we call them the same company.

Constancy need not be only of form. It can also be of concept.

> Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

I think this is more the exception than the rule, isn't it?

Is it? Chinese buildings are never old because China built in wood rather than stone. If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.

Wood is surprisingly long-lasting in reasonably dry environments as long as fire does not consume it.

Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we can count.

> If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.

I’m not sure how well that works when the ground keeps moving. Some places manage it to a degree, but the cultures that come to mind (Aztec) weren’t on land as shaky as Japan.

I'd reconsider that. The Aztec culture was spread over much of central and southern Mexico, a region known for having an abundance of tectonic and also even volcanic instability. Even the case of their capital is almost amusing in that it was built over sand and mud, on a lake, in the middle of a valley severely prone to very heavy earthquakes.

I saw a documentary about the forbidden city architecture, and despite the wood it’s really a great lasting one.

An interesting takeaway was that lightning strike fires have been a major "need to rebuild everything from scratch" trigger until very recently actually. I’m always amazed at how much time it took to come with things that are all in all rather trivial to build while bringing a major difference on the table.

The documentary also went through seismic tests, explaining how the architecture was so resilient to them, how the fact that all peaces are really just plugged in together and relatively easy to replace with a fresh new copy, even large steels and pillars. Truly amazing masterpiece.

Never old or were all the old buildings destroyed in the the Great Leap Forward?

Building pizza ovens to live in isn't always the brightest idea

Wood lasts as long as the roof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com