A chemical process called carbonation, which helps seal cracks, could help explain why many ancient Roman structures are still standing today. Researchers hope that the insights will lead to better modern-day building materials
That’s cool and all, but the main reasons modern concrete structures don’t last are either:
They’re full of steel reinforcement (because it would be unacceptably expensive to build structures relying entirely on compression the way the Romans did) and the steel deteriorates, or
They become functionally obsolete regardless of the continuing stability of the structure.
There are precious few things we build these days, aside from deliberate monuments, that we even want to last 100+ years to begin with. Even huge things like the Hoover Dam aren’t meant to be permanent on that kind of timescale.
AFAIK another factor is that ancient structures were often way overbuilt by modern standards because it wasn’t possible to perform razor-sharp load calculations like we do today. So they added large safety margins, leading to many structures being way more massive (and robust) than they strictly had to be.
Well, we thought we didn’t want them to last, but right now in Europe renovating concrete building from the 30s is becoming a major preoccupation.
More importantly 20 years from now the massive amount of constructions from after WWII will start to turn 100, and I don’t think we can afford to build it all again.
More recent buildings have better reinforcement cover, but not the post war ones.
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That’s cool and all, but the main reasons modern concrete structures don’t last are either:
There are precious few things we build these days, aside from deliberate monuments, that we even want to last 100+ years to begin with. Even huge things like the Hoover Dam aren’t meant to be permanent on that kind of timescale.
AFAIK another factor is that ancient structures were often way overbuilt by modern standards because it wasn’t possible to perform razor-sharp load calculations like we do today. So they added large safety margins, leading to many structures being way more massive (and robust) than they strictly had to be.
Well, we thought we didn’t want them to last, but right now in Europe renovating concrete building from the 30s is becoming a major preoccupation. More importantly 20 years from now the massive amount of constructions from after WWII will start to turn 100, and I don’t think we can afford to build it all again.
More recent buildings have better reinforcement cover, but not the post war ones.
This is only some part of it, another is that we changed the environment in a way that lets these buildings detoriate faster, even the roman ones.