How Medieval Masons Built Foundations That Last 800 Years (Modern Engineers Hate This)

Comments · 302

• KC

  @KCO-n9z · 9 months ago

  Using limestone and lime mortar will eventually make a single monolithic object.

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• AM

  @amuthi1 · 9 months ago (edited)

  The first picture of a German Castle in this video shows "Burg Hohenzollern" built in 1850 on the ruins of older castles.

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• LU

  @luxdevoid · 9 months ago (edited)

  I wrote my thesis on medieval military architecture (castles). The primary reason castle walls extended underground to bedrock was to discourage enemy tunneling during a siege, not so the walls wouldn't subside. Castles were state-of-the-art technology that were routinely torn down and re-designed when strategic or tactical requirements changed. Image a thousand years in the future, some idiot digs up an Abrams tank and decides we had incredible abilities to build vehicles that were tornado-proof.

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• MI

  @michaelhansen2818 · 9 months ago

  One thing you missed is with Roman concrete, they didn't just use any water, they specifically used sea water, this is because the salt in the sea water would create a chemical reaction with the lime and the volcanic ash.

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• MI

  @MichaelDeeringMHC · 9 months ago

  I was taught in engineering school that the objective of design was to minimize cost while satisfying all requirements including strength and longevity. If you designed a bridge or a building that was twice as strong as it needed to be, you were wasting money. Every contract included specifications that listed strengths and longevity. If you got a job to build a bridge that was guaranteed to last fifty years, and you made it to last a hundred, you wasted money. I asked my boss, why not build the bridge to be as strong as possible and to last as long as possible? I was told, this bridge will be replaced in fifty years because we don't know what the requirements will be in fifty years. Maybe they will need more lanes. Maybe it will need to be taller or longer or carry different weight vehicles. If we over build it, we are wasting the customers money. We can't know the future, so we build the bridges to be just  barely strong enough to hold themselves up and to last just barely as long as the contract calls for. Engineered obsolescence isn't just for cars and dishwashers. It's for everything. And let me tell you, Ford has the best engineers in the world. My Kia has 380 thousand miles on it and still runs like new. Those Kia engineers are shit compared to Ford. It's easy to overbuild something, just use better material, better design for longevity. It's hard as hell to make something just good enough that fails when it is supposed to.

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• DA

  @davidlean8674 · 9 months ago

  A key piece that this video overlooks is. Few people had the 30 to 300 years of patience to wait for their medieval masons to build them a new home (castle). Unless you were a king or a lord, you didn't have the budget for all that work. Thus, building techniques that created a home in 6 months, lasted for 40 years. Was sufficient to raise a family & retire.

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• SL

  @Slowmolasses · 9 months ago (edited)

  From what I&apos;ve seen, the stone walls of very old houses and castles in Western Europe, are built with stone blocks that can stand up stabilised without mortar. The joints are filled almost &quot;pointing&quot; style with hot line mortar, thus enabling the walls to stand up without any mortar to begin with.<br>Foundations for heavy stone buildings were dug deep enough to allow the laying of a few courses of large blocks well laid on compacted soil and sand.<br>If there is stone under the surface, the practice was to carve a foundation from the natural rock.

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• MI

  @mickowens101 · 9 months ago

  Not built to last centuries. Built to withstand attacks, standing proud today due to poor attacks in past

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• AY

  @AydaWalsh · 5 months ago

  Love your videos!!! Thank you!!!

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• HA

  @HappyQuailsLC · 9 months ago (edited)

  I also think that cost and the ability to demolish concrete to facilitate its future removal necessitates forgoing of available concrete strengthening methods such as using added fibres, &nbsp;which could itself, add a great deal of strength in conjunction with the use of the better type of rust resistant coated rebar.

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• NE

  @NeilRusling-1889 · 9 months ago

  Lime mortar is also evil stuff to work with and incredibly dangerous and difficult to use. The stuff takes weeks to set even if you do a 4-1-1 mix with one part cement, which means you have to build super slow or by the tenth course you are squeezing out the gobbo on the first course, plus using it between September and May is a non starter, it is summer only. We can build you a stone and lime mortar 4 bedroom house, but it will take three years if we get good weather, maybe five or six years if we get more summers like the past few where it just chucks it down constantly, and cost you 5 million smackers. Also lets not forget getting to actual bedrock in many areas of the East from Yorkshire on down would mean you could be digging out 10-20 yards deep, maybe more in places. So much of the country is poorly compacted sands and clay that once you start to dry them out compress unevenly causing huge cracks, and god forbid you get a draught like this year because your house might just fall down. I am turning down work after the amount of damage caused this summer to walls and foundations because England was never designed to be a desert. Turns out building stuff is a smidge complicated...who knew.<br>Great vid, have a nice day.

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• ME

  @MeawItoh · 3 months ago

  Thank you for sharing 🙏<br>I’m interested in Rame Earth too .