> If you have ever tried to build something, even something small, you know how hard it is. It takes time. It takes tremendous effort. But tearing things down? That’s quick work.
>> Caution, it is easy to seriously underestimate how much work it is to build a house.
I used to work at a bike shop and thought it would be easy to build a bike from the ground up. Easy. Get a frame, fork set, and some other parts. Easy, right? I had no idea the amount of small parts one needs, including all the other minor stuff you have to buy like brake lines, headset, etc. Instead of a few week process, it became a few month process because I had to keep buying all these things I had forgotten about and didn't know I needed.
Now scale that up a house. I can't imagine the amount of things one could easily forget about on a project that scale and not realize until it was too late.
Sound like fun, and you shouldn't let age stop you from doing that. Instead you should adjust your dream to building a smaller post-and-beam house. It's not back breaking work if it's a small house; our inner cave men wants to work with timber for some reason.
> If I had an unlimited budget and was aiming for >1000 years I would pour the piles to bedrock with stainless rebar inside fly-ash concrete and top those pilings with plate connectors into which you could socket large wooden columns (perhaps 8x8) and build the structure with large wooden members connected with steel connectors and column caps, etc.
Are there any existing buildings constructed that way that have stood for >1000 years?
If not, my approach would be to copy an existing building that has stood for >1000 years in a region that has had several of the same kind of natural disasters that happen at the place I'm going to be building.
Wright was always pushing boundaries in construction technology and ended up using a lot of techniques and materials that weren't quite ready for production.
I'd bet that almost every design of his could be made today with no long-term maintenance issues whatsoever.
Time elapses. What makes sense today may not tomorrow. It's fine to adapt designs when the economics point that way. Also fine to leave things as they are when the economics point that way.
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