Are you one of the roofers, scaffolders, brickies or plasterers who regularly turns to s1jobs when you want to find new opportunities for your talents?
Then it goes without saying you’re bang up-to-speed on all the latest techniques behind the construction of schools, houses, hospitals and office developments.
But how much do you know about traditional methods, some of them thousands of years old, that form the basis of today’s modern construction industry?
Here are a few fun facts from the past that might surprise . . . and even inspire modern marvels.
Underwater cement
What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they discovered the formula for this more than 2000 years ago. It’s what allowed them to build the ports and bridges that formed the backbone of the Empire. Rock on, you Roman brickies!
Igloos
This traditional Inuit shelter gets stronger as it gets older. Heat from its inhabitants’ bodies melts the interior but when residents depart to go ice fishing, this thin layer of water freezes again to form a slick coating of ice that reinforces the structure. Super cool, plasterers!
Caves
Guadix in southern Spain is known as Troglodyte City because of the high number of residents who live in caves. These homes, hollowed out of the soft rock, are cool in summer and warm in winter – a perfect example of natural climate control and a holy grail for todays eco-focussed architects.
The Pantheon
Roofers will know this 2000-year-old building was a temple to Rome’s gods. But did you know it uses the well-tested method of arches for support but its astonishing dome, with its open aperture, was only made possible because of a clever choice of materials – travertine, which is very heavy, at the bottom then graduating through less-dense tufa and brick until light-as-a-feather pumice completes the top.
Notre Dame
How do you support a building when its walls threaten to cave outwards? That’s the dilemma that faced the architects and structural engineers completing one of the tallest buildings in Medieval Europe. The solution? Elegant flying buttresses support the cathedral externally. Even the statues at the base of columns and the gargoyles play a structural role. A proper monster mash!
Prefabs
Designed as a temporary answer to the housing crisis of the 1940s, the last of these wasn’t demolished until the 1990. Thankfully, for foremen and project managers, their legacy lives on in factory-built kit houses assembled on site.
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