No.125 — Read old posts here.
Reading Time: 5 minutes
We pour concrete like
we're building for a thousand years.
Then we demolish it in thirty,
for reasons that have
nothing to do with the walls.
Ask anyone in India
why they chose RCC for their house
and you'll hear some version of the same sentence.
"Permanent hai."
Permanent.
Pucca (Hindi for permanent).
Forever.
Mud is what you build when you can't afford forever.
Concrete is what you build when you can.
That's the story.
And almost nobody checks it.
When reinforced concrete arrived
at the start of the last century,
its engineers genuinely
believed they had solved time.
Some of them wrote about structures
that would last a thousand years.
The real number turned out to be
50 to 100 years.
Often less.
Deterioration can begin within ten years.
The reason is simple and slightly poetic.
Concrete is strong in compression,
weak in tension.
So we put steel inside it.
And steel rusts.
Moisture finds the hairline cracks.
The rebar becomes a slow battery.
Rust expands up to four times its original volume
and pushes the concrete off from the inside.
Engineers call it spalling.
The Pantheon in Rome is nearly 1,900 years old
and still standing.
It is made of cement.
With no steel in it.
We didn't make concrete permanent.
We made it strong,
and then we put an expiry date inside it.
But here's the part nobody talks about
Even 50 years is generous.
Because buildings almost never die of old age.
A study across nine American and four European cities
looked at nearly 15,000 demolished buildings.
Average age at demolition: 71 years.
Concrete and steel buildings: 67 years.
Brick: 110 years.
Timber frame: 91 years.
Read that again.
The "permanent" material had the shortest life of the three.
And the most damning finding:
most of those buildings were in
average or better condition
on the day they were knocked down.
They were not tired.
They were not unsafe.
Somebody simply decided to demolish them.
So what actually kills a building?
Not rain.
Not termites.
Not earthquakes.
A rule changes:
The FSI goes up.
You're now allowed one more floor.
The building is suddenly worth more dead than alive.
Down it comes.
People demolish their G+1 house
and give it to a builder to G+3 for more liquid money.
A family changes:
Your son marries.
You need two more rooms.
Your daughter moves to Canada.
The house that was designed for six now holds one.
A generation changes:
The children never come back.
The property gets sold.
The new owner has never met the house.
They get it bulldozed.
A code changes.
New seismic norms.
New fire norms.
New energy norms.
All arriving together.
Retrofitting costs more than rebuilding.
In Japan, this reached its logical end.
Houses there are demolished at
20 to 30 years on average.
Not because they fail,
but because a house is assumed to depreciate to zero.
Only the land holds value.
An entire country decided its homes were consumables.
Glenn Murcutt, who spent a lifetime on this,
built houses on stilts, in light steel and timber,
designed to be taken apart and carried away.
His phrase, borrowed from Aboriginal Australia:
Touch this earth lightly.
So should we just build disposable?
No.
A cob house that is abandoned
becomes a mound again.
Then soil.
And then a fertile ground for nature to grow.
An RCC house that is abandoned
becomes rubble that nobody can compost,
recycle cleanly, or afford to remove.
And natural buildings don't have to be short-lived
This is the fact that surprises people most.
Shibam, Yemen,
also called the Manhattan of the Desert,
has Mud-brick tower houses,
five to eleven storeys,
many over 500 years old.
They call it the Manhattan of the desert.
Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.
Made in Adobe.
Continuously inhabited for roughly 1,000 years.
Devon, England.
Cob cottages from the 1400s,
are still lived in,
are still mortgaged,
are still sold.
Kath-kuni houses in Himachal.
Dry-stacked stone and deodar timber with no cement.
Many are centuries old and have walked through
earthquakes that flattened
newer concrete beside them.
Bhungas of Kutch.
Circular mud homes,
about 200 years old.
In the 2001 Bhuj earthquake,
near the epicentre,
bhungas stood while rectangular buildings around them came down.
Arthur, Nebraska.
A church built of stacked straw bales in 1928,
two-foot-thick walls,
still standing,
on the National Register of Historic Places.
None of these needed cement.
What makes them last, then?
An old Devon saying about cob:
"All it wants is a good hat and a good pair of boots."
A good hat:
generous roof overhangs,
so rain never touches the wall.
A good pair of boots:
a raised stone or brick plinth,
so ground moisture never wicks up.
That's it.
That's the whole secret.
Mud does not fail because it is mud.
It fails because someone gave it a small roof and no plinth.
The second secret is less technical.
So how long should you build for?
Not forever.
Forever is a fantasy
that was advertised to us by the cement companies.
Rather, you build for a life you can actually picture.
Concrete promised us eternity
and quietly handed us sixty years and a pile of rubble.
Mud promises nothing,
and, given a good hat and good boots,
will outlive your grandchildren.
How long do you think your home should last?
And who did you imagine living in it?
Reply to this email and let us know.
Love and light,
Raghav and Ansh
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