Observations About Building

At one time the predominant building style in Europe was known as Romanesque. Major buildings had to have thick walls, with very limited window space, because the walls had to support the weight of the roof. The following image is part of Mont St. Michel, in Normandy. Image from Google Earth.

The idea of Gothic is to support the roof by means other than just the walls, so that the walls can have a lot of window space for stained glass windows. An example is the pillars in Gloucester Cathedral in the following image, taken from Google Street View, and also the pillasters built into the walls.

Some Gothic Cathedrals, such as Notre Dame in Paris in the following image from Google Earth, also have exterior buttresses to support the weight of the roof.

These methods of supporting the weight of the roof make possible the great stained glass windows, such as the West Window in Gloucester Cathedral shown in the following image from Google Street View. This would be impossible if the walls had to support the entire weight of the roof.

As brilliant as Gothic Cathedrals were, builders of the time were still not capable of building large domes. The Renaissance brought a rediscovery of the secret to building domes that the ancients had known. The Baroque Period was characterized by the large domes, such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London as shown in the following image from Google Earth. The city that really became known for Baroque era domes is Russia's St. Petersburg.

Cement, a mixture of clay and limestone, was invented in Roman times but then forgotten before being rediscovered in modern times. Maybe it's a good thing it was forgotten because these cathedrals might not have lasted for so many centuries if they had been made of cement, instead of stone.

The development of mass production of steel in the Nineteenth Century greatly affected building. If you see an older brick building with arches or lintels above the windows and doors, as seen in the following image from Google Street View, it probably means that the building does not have a steel frame to support most of the weight of the roof.

The Guaranty Building in Buffalo was an early pioneer in tall buildings supported by an internal steel frame. Image from Google Earth.

You may have noticed that, in older homes, there are usually walls dividing the basement into rooms, while in newer homes the entire basement may be one room. The reason is steel. The rafters that support floors are made of wood, usually cedar because it is more resistant than pine or spruce or fir. 

But the rafters are limited in length to about sixteen feet, which is not long enough to reach from one side of the basement to the other. So a solid wall is built across the basement as a load-bearing wall, to support the rafters. There will also usually be a load-bearing wall on the first floor, directly above this wall, to support the rafters in the ceiling.

That was before the mass-production of steel. As shown in the following image a steel beam, supported by pillars, can be placed across the basement to support the rafters, which are always perpendicular to the beam. This makes it possible for the entire basement to be one room, although there still must be a load-bearing wall above the steel beam.

The development of motorized transportation had a profound effect on building. The original Nineteenth Century housing stock in Cinderford tends to be built with locally quarried stone or lighter materials that can easily be moved by horse and cart. Image from Google Street View.

While newer homes tend to be built with brick, that can now be brought from distant brickworks by motorized transportation. Image from Google Street View.

Wood used in building is divided into hardwood and softwood. In temperate climates hardwood comes from deciduous trees, which are trees with leaves, and softwood comes from evergreen trees. Softwood that is used in building is referred to as lumber.

The advantage of hardwood is, as the name implies, durability. A hardwood floor can last over a century. But evergreens grow much faster and also much more in a straight line, which makes long boards possible. Notice that the individual boards in the following image of a hardwood floor are not very long because hardwood trees do not grow in as straight of a line. The knots in wood are where the branches would have been on the tree.

Sometimes you may see older buildings or homes all or partially made of stone blocks, as shown in the following two images from Google Street View. When the tunnels were dug, for things such as sewers, there were machines that drilled into the rock, and then cut the rock into blocks. The blocks were then useful for building.

If you have ever been to Niagara Falls the stone blocks that are used for railings on the Canadian side were cut in a similar way. These blocks are from when the tunnels were cut for the electric power plants that used to be near the falls. The following two images of these blocks are from Google Street View.

The traditional building materials of a place can reveal it's natural history. Loose pieces of stone, like those in the following wall in the image from Google Street View, indicates that glaciers, pulled toward the equator by the rotation of the earth, came through the area during the ice ages. If the stones are rounded it means that the place was underwater at one time, because the action of waves is the way that stones get rounded.

It is wonderful that the early people of Britain didn't get along with each other because now there are castles everywhere. The following three images from Google Street View are inside Cardiff Castle. This is more Romanesque architecture like we saw above. Since the Normans brought Romanesque architecture to Britain it is called Norman Architecture. They built castles everywhere but then they melted into the population.

One invention put castles out of business. That invention was gunpowder. Castles had been difficult to attack but now anyone could set up cannons and bombard the castle from a safe distance. Castles were replaced by forts, with their own cannon. The following image of Fort Niagara, from Google Street View, shows what it might look like to anyone aiming a cannon at the fort from a distance. The plan of the fort is much like a castle but it is low-lying and dispersed, not presenting a concentrated target to aim at. There are also berms of earth, which would absorb the impact of a cannonball.

I wonder if the castle mentality lives on in the design of towns. Cinderford, for example, was built after the Napoleonic Wars. Notice, in the following image from Google Street View, that the street signs are in places where they could easily be taken down. The houses have names, instead of numbers, and the street pattern is somewhat confusing. Could this be a passive tactic to make it more difficult for a foreign invader to find their way around, and to deny them anything to use for a reference point?

Buffalo has a few streets of red brick, which looks attractive. The following image from Google Street View shows the surface of Niagara Falls Boulevard, between Kenmore Avenue and Main Street. The bricks are set perpendicular to the direction of travel. This spreads the weight of the vehicle over the maximum number of bricks. But it also means the vehicle passes over the maximum amount of interface between bricks. This makes the ride rough and noisy.

In the Cobblestone District of downtown Buffalo the bricks are also set perpendicular to the direction of travel, and the ride is also rough and noisy. Image from Google Street View.

East Aurora, to the east of Buffalo, arranged the bricks of it's Main Street in this alternating pattern. This means that half the bricks are aligned in the direction of travel, as opposed to perpendicular to it. This means that the vehicle goes over less interface between bricks and the ride is quieter and smoother. Image from Google Street View.

The bricks on Third Street, in Niagara Falls NY, have also been set in this alternating pattern, and the ride is quieter and smoother. Image from Google Street View.

There is now what can only be called a housing crisis. There is just not enough affordable housing because it is not being built fast enough. People are going into too much debt and spending too much of their income on housing.

When people do buy a home they often end up buying more space than they really need. Houses tend to be built for families. If a couple, or a single person, wants to buy, rather than rent, and there are no condominiums available locally, they may end up spending a lot of money for a lot of space that they don't need.

I am a believer in the free market, but only up to a point. There are areas where capitalism doesn't belong, such as education, health care and, justice. The free market also doesn't handle housing with ideal efficiency. If the free market handled housing with optimum efficiency there would be no need for housing projects. 

Developers prefer to deal with wealthy people. This means that many people who are less-than-wealthy struggle to find housing that they can afford. When they find it they must spend a high portion of their income on it. This leaves them less money to spend on other things, which affects the economy as a whole.

An interesting question is whether governments should buy mortgages. On the one hand it gives the lender money to loan out so that more people can own their homes. The mortgages can then be bundled into securities and sold to investors.

But on the other hand such passing along of debt gives the lender less incentive to make sure that the borrower can actually afford to pay the mortgage. The attitude becomes "I'll get my commission for originating the mortgage, and by the time they default it will be somebody else's problem".

The economic crash of 2008 was caused by millions of homes being built in Florida and the southwest, and then being sold to people who really couldn't afford them. Meanwhile there are millions more homes, in the northeast and Midwest, that are near the end of their useful lifespans. Wouldn't it have made more sense to have replaced those homes instead? But we cannot expect private developers to undertake something like this themselves, it requires the government to step in.

What is needed is many more affordable homes, and smaller homes so that the buyer isn't struggling to pay for more of a house than they need. The following two images from Google Street View are of homes in South Africa. Instead of three more homes intended for upper middle class buyers we need ten more homes that people can actually afford.

Many countries would like to have the world's tallest building. But tall buildings are not as much of a bargain as they may seem. Aside from the difficulty of construction a building that is twice as tall must have twice as many elevator shafts in order to maintain the same level of elevator service. This means that an eighty story building would have less available floor space than two equivalent forty story buildings. 

Large buildings are more efficient, but only as long as they can be kept full of tenants. Large buildings are often the first to suffer when the economy takes a downturn. The race to have the tallest building in the world has an element of insecurity. The Scandinavian countries, which almost certainly have the highest standard of living in the world, don't have any skyscrapers. Anyway the following image from Google Earth is of Taipei 101, which was once the tallest building in the world.