John Ochsendorf: The architectural rebel who champions ancient engineers | Hacker News Reader

John Ochsendorf: The architectural rebel who champions ancient engineers

nautil.us

56 pointsdnetesn13 comments

Is it forbidden in America to celebrate islamic architecture? Islamic stone architecture is far advanced over roman, greek or native architecture this guy seems to propagate.

See for example the old stone bridge of Mostar (Stari Most), which had to to be rebuilt after the war, and they could only do it by finding old turkish craftsmen who were still able to build such a bridge, without steel. Modern architects all failed.

It's mostly unknown in the popular consciousness. To the extent Americans know or connect to anything about old world history and places, it's basically western Europe, which includes the Romans and Greeks due to the Renaissance. (I think it's kind of a fossilized older English conception of the world, but there's lots of factors.) Plenty of exceptions, of course, where people also belong to another culture, in whole or in part, or have developed an interest elsewhere, but in general anything east of Germany or south of the Mediterranean is basically unknown. (It's not surprising; people know their own culture and maybe something about nearby or widespread ones. And nothing else is particularly nearby in the Americas.)

So if you're going to talk to lay people about ancient structures, you're going to talk Rome, or maybe some cathedrals, because otherwise you're not talking about the mechanics of ancient structures, you're talking about appreciation of otherwise unknown architecture, and that's not the same thing.

MIT, where Ochsendorf is a professor, has the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture [1] (Harvard has a sister program [2]).

Stari Most is also a well-known tourist destination. Its destruction occurred during a war the US was involved in and its destruction, rebuilding, and symbolism in the war were widely reported in US media. [3] Today, it's popular on mainstream sites like reddit. [4]

1. http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/generalinformation.htm

2. http://agakhan.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do

3. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+%22mostar%2...

4. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22mostar%22...

Great to hear that they have special programs for that. Americans could learn a great deal from them.

Regarding the Stari Most reconstruction effort I can recommend an excellent documentary by Jasmila Žbanić "Builders diary", and there are numerous more TV movies about the technical challenges there.

They don't mention concrete except to contrast with modern steel-and-concrete architecture, but in fact concrete was essential to Roman architecture.

Especially Roman vaults and domes were concrete. The Parthenon is still the largest concrete dome without steel reinforcing. My pet theory is that that concrete allowed the Romans to construct giant projects relatively quickly with large, mostly unskilled labor pools.

> My pet theory is that that concrete allowed the Romans to construct giant projects relatively quickly with large, mostly unskilled labor pools.

I wouldn't really call it a theory, that's really why they used it much of the time over other building materials. No need to have professional masons cutting stone or coordinate hauling massive blocks of stone great distances. Also, their concrete was able to be poured underwater, so made building harbors and bridges far easier.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2810.htm

I thought the Pantheon was built of stone. But you are be right, it's called "Roman concrete": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

About the article and videos, great that some architects value the old buildings. We have already enough of the Modernism/Bauhaus style full-concrete buildings. Tourists usually come to visit Rome, Vienna, Venice, ... because of the beautiful old buildings. They used (rusty) steel/iron-beams to hold together the Colosseum in Rome, the steel looks very out-of-place. The Pantheon is indeed one of most inspiring buildings and one of the oldest that is still almost completely intact.

I can't recall where, but it said something like a lot of recent technology was known at the time. Electricity for instance, but wasn't seen as interesting or useful relatively to the need and knowledge to make it so.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that steel tinker-toys are likely cheaper than big rock piles, even if the steel buildings aren't as safe and won't last a thousand years.

I often wonder that when I walk around the city: a lot of the new buildings look so shoddy in their construction - if you buy an apartment, it's probably not something that will get passed down to your kids' kids. In that case, do you own part of the land underneath the building, or... what?

If you own a condo or co-op and the building starts to degrade, the owners will vote (via an elected board) whether to make repairs to the building. If they vote to do that, in addition to the apartment, you own your unit's share of the repair bill, which gets passed to you as an assessment. So when you buy the apartment you're buying an obligation to pay for the building's repairs (assuming a majority of the other owners want to keep the building standing as well). If you disagree with everyone else and don't pay the assessment, the other owners (again via the condo board) can put a lien on your property and sell it to cover the amount you owe.

If it got really really bad there's probably a situation in which the owners of the building could vote to have it demolished and rebuilt.

The take away is that in addition to the apartment itself, you're actually buying shares in a legal entity and get certain rights and obligations as a result of that. It's that entity that owns the building and the land underneath. How exactly the entity is structured depends on whether it's setup as a condominium or cooperative.

As deet said. A practical example of pitfalls with high-rise condos is where there's a swimming pool inside the condo structure. Every time there is a crack, owners will get a $20,000 or more assessment each to fix it.

That's what i thought when he was talking about the Inca rope bridges: much of our modern construction requires so much maintenance that it seems to be closer to the annual replacement cycle of the woven bridges than to the near-eternity of stone arches.

But not steel and concrete is not only cheaper than cutting natural stone, they are also cheaper than the cheap alternative that dominated the millenia before (even when concrete was available in some periods): bricks, the main architectural workhorse from ancient Babylon to Rome to deep into the industrial age. Exposed brick has a quality of functional beauty that reinforced concrete can never achieve, because there all the function is hidden inside the concrete and the outer shape is completely disconnected from function, either completely plain or arbitrarily ornamented. Brick on the other hand has a visible functional structure, the arches never lie and ornaments (which are never entirely afunctional in architecture: they distract the eye from dirt, and dirt will be unavoidable over time) can easily be included using standard or special blocks and blend in perfectly with the "natural" details that are there for technical reasons.

Occasionally i dream up a future that would have swarms of bricklaying bots that would turn architectural drawings into houses cheaper than poured concrete. Never did any calculations though, so i don't know if the price advantage would even be possible with hyopthotical zero-cost robots.

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