Build a house for less than $5000

Re:Build a house for less than $5000 by kiwidrew on Monday February 13, 2012 @09:55AM (#3585763)

> Think about these massive Middle-Ages cathedrals done before we had Newton's Laws and modern notions of engineering. How did the architects do it? Well, they were hackers with a large budget. The architect usually had never built anything on this scale before and had no idea how their much-smaller-scale building experience would scale up. In particular, the fact that arches create sideways stresses which tend to bulge a large, open building outwards wasn't necessarily well-known by many of these architects.

That's a fascinating thought. I'd like to read more about this "hacking" aspect -- can you point me to any references / citations?

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Re:Build a house for less than $5000 by drostie on Monday February 13, 2012 @10:44AM (#3585967)

Unfortunately the links I have are not of professional research quality, and it might be better to email an academic who specializes in architecture from before calculations. I have a couple saved bookmarks from when I first heard about it several years ago. Here's an article in /The Caius Engineer/ vol. 17 nr. 1, a student publication from kids at the Gonville & Caius College of the University of Cambridge:

http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/engineering...

And here's a short book review about a book which might describe a dome that was hacked together on a budget:

http://www.reedsblog.com/?p=85

I was reintroduced to this by a recent BBC series on architecture, though, and I can't figure out which one it was! It could have been Climbing Great Buildings, which had some moments where they would sneak underneath these great cathedrals and see what little bits had been "swept under the rug". But it might have also been Churches: How to Read Them. (I vaguely think it's the first because I have memories of some reference to Durham Cathedral partially collapsing, but memories of this form are notoriously unreliable.)

Conclusion: we should develop ways so that we learn less by osmosis. When you learn by osmosis, it's very hard to track down actual sources for the crap you've learned, and you basically have to get lucky.

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