At least he is forming concrete opinions
Ba Dum Tsss
Don’t tell him that.
honestly I love bricks and hate concrete blocks.
btw what’s the most (not necessarily among these two) sustainable building material, lemmings?
Stone. It’s natural, subject only to the slow erosion of time.
Caves. We should all live in caves.
unfortunately there aren’t that many caves out there and it’s hard to build new.
Yes, but most of us are going to die in climate change and water wars pretty soon.
Edit: im not saying it’s good I’m saying the silver lining is that there will be enough caves.
I’d bet wood is better since if you use it for construction and farm it you can theoretically use it as a carbon sink, and it’s renewable.
What’s the delta on mining and shaping stone vs lumber is the question
Well stone lasts forever barring someone turning big stones into little stones. So I think stone might still come out on top
Honestly, whatever makes the most sense with the materials in the local area. And then I don’t mean what you can get from the local hardware store, but literally, what the earth in the area provides. If you have lots of clay, then brick would be best. If you have lots of big stones, then stone construction it’ll be. If you’re deep in the woods, then a wooden building would serve you just right. Maybe a combination of materials and techniques if you have options in the area.
Bonus points if you can build in a way that passively optimises for managing things like moisture and temperature.
Cob and rammed earth are hard to beat if you’ve got the right environment for them
Adobe is the best of you live in the right environment for it
what?
This adobe, not the company
you definitely don’t want a subscription based building. oh wait
The mud bricks. They are BY FAR the cheapest to procure. No transportation fee because it’s right next to your house, and no materials fee because it’s free from the earth. It lasts decades with only minor patchwork repair needed. Anyone can do it and you can literally put up a house in a few days. It’s so good at insulation it hardly needs any AC or Heating. So your costs are absurdly low compared to any other building material. You can straight up put up a house for $10k
Okay I am a big fan of brutalist architecture. Guess I am in the minority… I feel the philosophy behind it is just being wildly misunderstood.
Can you share a little about the philosophy behind brutalism?
I think people often describe brutalism as cold, souless, dehumanizing, etc. But the principle behind is actually very humanitarian. They forgo grandiose decorations, embellishments, and instead choose to rather gain their form from function, and to maximize their functions so they can serve their inhabitants better. Many, many brutalist buildings were built as affordable, social housing during the post war era, when wealth inequality was perhaps the lowest in Europe.
And additionally, to me, because of how laid bare they are, they become an embodiment of transparency, and honesty that I wish our society can have more of.
(Don’t listen to me, there are many good articles/videos explaining brutalism way better than I could. Maybe this video on Habitat 67?)
Except a lot of the brutalist architecture in the UK looks like shit and the towers are shit, which is why they’re being knocked down. Those tower blocks are SUPPOSED to have shops and amenities inside them, but the British ones don’t, so they exist solely as shitholes nobody with a choice wants to live in.
It also doesn’t help that tower blocks very quickly became a dumping ground for local councils to throw unwanted tenants into, so troublemakers, those who can’t be housed anywhere else. The image of a tower block became one of high crime, social isolation and poor construction. Couple that with Grenfell Tower and you’ve got “Death trap” added to the list.
You are seeing on a glimpse of a huge, interconnected social issue that I don’t have the ability to competently articulate. Council housing obviously have a bad self-reinforcing image problem: no one wants to live in them, so only desperate people live there; because only desperate people live there, no one wants to live there. But that’s because the government fucked it up, it’s not an inherent attribute of social housing. UK had pretty good social housing post-war until Thatcher gutted it with things like Right to Buy.
If there is a solution to the worsening housing crisis, then social housing must be an integral part of that solution. So we must get building and normalize the image of social housing. I get quite mad looking at the current Labour government just sits doing nothing about it.
Grenfell Tower is its special kind of hell too. Sure the building itself wasn’t kept up to standard, but also the abhorrent response to the fire. The residents were told to STAY PUT IN THE BUILDING ffs.
So yeah, makes me feel bad that brutalist architecture gets bad reputation in the UK despite they themselves doing nothing wrong.
It’s not the social housing that’s the problem though, it’s specifically the tower blocks. Social housing by-and-large worked pretty well, with some pretty nice council housing being put up and people living in them without too much issue. The thing is, there’s a big difference between a socially isolated tower block and a council house in the suburbs, a lot of which was eaten away by Right-to-Buy because it turns out they were really nice houses so people wanted them. Almost nobody wants to buy a flat in a tower block.
The 'Stay Put thing for Grenfell Tower was actually good policy… When the tower was built. Each apartment acted essentially as its own fireproof box, so under the original design, staying put is actually the best policy to have, because you knew a fire was only ever going to exist in one of the boxes. It’s when those boxes are compromised that things become a problem, stuff like unauthorised knock-throughs and especially the flammable cladding (that was added later) on the outside of the building. It turned all those fireproof boxes into fireproof boxes except on one side, so when that cladding caught fire, it just set fire to all of the boxes.
The ‘Stay Put’ thing
wait, you have a problem with that point?? as you yourself already pointed out, the “fireproof box” thought was only true with the original design, after the renovation that’s simply not the case, saying fire would be contained is just plain wrong. what’s even the point of bringing that up. but let’s even just ignore that, there is a fire in the building, even if you think the fireproof should hold the fire, i don’t get why wouldn’t you evacuate the building just in case? what if you are wrong, can you take that risk when the consequence is so many people losing their lives?? and even if you thought initially that staying put was the correct thing for the residents to do, once you realize you don’t the fire under control, wouldn’t you start the evacuation as soon as possible? why was that policy in place for so long??
i mean i am absolutely not saying the firefighter should take majority of the blame. they did save many people’s live that day, and there’s just so much wrong with everything else, the housing system, fire regulation, there are too many things I can’t list most of them. but like, can’t you at least admit they were wrong on this one?
I don’t care enough to have an argument with you about it.
So. Form follows function.
But thanks for the summary!
see this would make sense if it wasn’t incredibly easy and cheap to make things look good, brutalism just ends up being needlessly ugly.
We built tons of cheap housing here in sweden in the 60’s, but it’s not all raw fucking concrete, we just put on some colours and veneers and made it look decent.
It’s just so BRUTAL. What more to saaay
Concrete is a major driver of CO2 emissions. Fuck concrete.
It’s a major driver because of how much it is used. It’s the building material, nothing else even really comes close. If we used bricks to the same degree, that would be the major driver.
There’s often no good alternative to concrete. There’s lots of newer less CO2 intensive cements and cement replacements out there though. Often comes at a cost on something else though.
Bricks would be much more efficient co2 wise, they don’t have the curing process that pollutes
They also put out a lot of CO2 and you’d have a hell of a lot of issues scaling the brick production to the same level. Not to mention all the othe associated issues that bricks have.
It’s just a poor replacement for concrete at the same scale. But that’s not to knock bricks specifically, since nothing really is a good replacement at that scale.
Best we could do is to not build as much or in such a big scale, but that has issues too.
You can bake bricks using clean energy but the chemical process for creating cement itself creates co2… Y’all down voting and never held a brick in yer lives
You can also cpature the CO2 and use it in chemical processes where it is needed. Bizarrely often they’re buying the CO2 for high price even though if capture methods were common we’d have loads of stock. And lower CO2 emission cement is already a thing that’s happening, but being able to scale brick production to meet even close to the scale of concret construction is nowhere near reality.
I like bricks as a facade element but it’s just not a good replacement for concrete on the whole. It will be much much easier to try and mitigate the issues concret has than to get bricks to the level of concrete construction globally.
Also I work in construction with both concrete and bricks and have been involved in mass production of both. But go off lol
An interesting document comparing both https://www.brick.org.uk/uploads/downloads/Clay-v-Concrete-Brick-A-Comparative-Guide-2022-v.3.f1675190626.pdf
>brick.org.uk
Reminds me of when in uni all these industry reps would come in and praise their material over everyone else’s with convincing arguments and next week someone from a competing industry would come in and do the same.
Did you read that link before posting?
In comparison with other construction materials (aluminium, steel, even brick), concrete is one of the least energy-intensive building materials.[2]
Except it isn’t just about the energy intensity, but specifically the CO2 emission from the concrete process itself.
From the link’s sources:
The issue isn’t concrete or cement inherently but how much of is used. And it’s used because it’s either the most cost-effective material or just the only one able to deliver the required specs.
Autist here, while brick houses are nice, I actually own a 100+yo one, they’re also not the most ideal material for anything bigger that a midrise.
Wanted to have better insulation for shits and giggles? We have a tool for that: putting proper insulation on the concrete.
Modern and brutalist architecture can have that effect on people. Fuck concrete, and fuck neo-imperialist colonial architecture.
Concrete is horrible for the environment and its fucked up global emissions of buildings and architecture. (Cement production alone constitutes 8% of global emissions, not considering its inefficiency in thermal lifecycles of a building and ultimate un-renewable waste). It is in fact not the best fit for every circumstance.
One shoe fits all architecture trends have effectively killed vernacular wisdom and climate conscious local innovation. Favoring “cheap” garbage that jacks up costs in other sectors, damages climate and ignores localized need, requiring complex, often power-hungry, solutions like extensive BAS to try and counterbalance their piss poor application.
(For those unaware modern buildings when all is said and done account for over 40% of global emissions. And the heating/cooling systems far outpace keeping the lights on in terms of energy consumption (something like 2/3 of the total buildings demands over time). Tackling that behemoth number is going to take a multifaceted approach but the importance of materials and place-specific design cannot be understated.)
- sincerely, someone whose installed one too many motors for automated blinds and slapdash bandaid HVAC solutions.
95% sure you’re the brother
I would happily smash concrete blocks in the early am- don’t threaten me with a good time!
Doesn’t concrete also absorb CO2?
Or was that cement
Shah also said that “cement carbonation requires very specific conditions” including humidity of between 40 and 80 per cent and open-air conditions.
“Submerged or buried concrete or concrete will not undergo carbonation,” he said, adding that “concrete carbonation happens at an extremely slow rate: an average of one to two millimetres per year.”
Shah added that he was “a bit frustrated with the IPCC using the word ‘sink’ because that gives the impression that it is beneficial.”
“Cement and concrete are not carbon sinks,” Shah said. “They are net sources [of CO2].”
Article: Cement and Concrete “are not carbon sinks” says Cambridge material scientist
Also: “Carbonation in concrete refers to the chemical reaction between carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and calcium hydroxide in the concrete. This reaction forms calcium carbonate and gradually reduces the pH of the concrete, which can lead to the corrosion of embedded steel reinforcement.”
So, not exactly a process you want to occur in your buildings or bridges. So if you’re hoping waiting around until it turns into limestone (if it’s not buried, submerged or sealed) it will probably mostly be demolished and long buried in a landfill somewhere potentially leaking toxins where it will never undergo the natural processes to absorb carbon anyway.
Beautiful in theory but impractical in mass scale execution. But certainly a good way to justify the continuation of a multibillion dollar industry. (This is not to say that there aren’t serious material scientists working on this problem, but a lot of it unfortunately is straight up greenwashing rather than advocating for reduction in initial footprint and investment in long-term sustainable alternatives.)
Thanks for the fact check!
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I love autism
The only good brick is a Lego brick.
okay, i would like to talk to oops brother. I say bricks are cool for houses but for buildings and bridges and etc, you need concrete
I’m guessing they don’t love tall modern buildings either
I wonder what they think about affordable concrete housing
Ask him… From a distance.
Well at some point you have to stop and ask yourself, are bricks really the answer to modern civil engineering problems?
Pretty sure they’d bite your ear off for saying such a thing
German flag
I would’ve been surprised if it had been different, lol.
People when autistic boys have mental shutdowns: haha it’s so quirky when he hyperfixates.
People when autistic girls have mental shutdowns: what a bitchy and emotional teenager. She’s not even autistic she just does it for attention.
Really? Because I just got whipped with a switch or a belt when I had my little boy autistic meltdowns.
Well yes. Thats how we do eqiality i guess. Like the way we’re closing the eating disorder gap!
“Mmmmm, yes, let’s turn a funny post about autistic hyperfixations into gender warfare. This will be a good use of everyone’s time.”
Dude this is about tye gendered double standard in mental illness.
It is a thing, and for autistic women it hurts that we don’t have funny stories about our trauma like this and it sucks.
The reaction to autistic men (here) is perfectly reasonable. We want that. Fuck off with your misogynist bullshit.
No. It’s about concrete.
Autistic boys sometimes get called quaint. Other times people call the police and they get shot.
Same for autistic girls! On the second part i mean.
The trick is to be violent enough that they cant infantilize you!
Cast concrete is best.
This is the way
