Why are ancient buildings still standing 1500+ years later, but some buildings built like 30 years ago are falling apart?
In: Other
A few reasons. As another person here mentioned, there’s survivorship bias. There are only a handful of ancient buildings still standing, while the vast majority of ancient buildings stopped existing during antiquity. Most of the ones still standing were maintained due to regular use (i.e. The Pantheon became a church) or were built in desolate areas that became abandoned by the people that lived there. In most cases buildings were taken apart to reuse material elsewhere or to simply build something else on the land.
Another aspect is the actual engineering that went into it – or, probably more accurately, the engineering that *didn’t* go into it. Ancient architects didn’t have the mathematical engineering tools that we have now – instead they used rules of thumb and ratios. So things built with those techniques tend to be very sturdy and nigh indestructible. The tradeoff was that these were outrageously expensive and labor intensive. Modern engineering has allowed for lighter, cheaper, and more flexible construction. Basically nowadays we get more bang for our buck.
There’s an old joke in engineering: “It’s easy to make an indestructible bridge. It’s really, really hard to make a bridge that is just barely standing.”
Latest Answers