I feel like you'd need to know a lot of engineering to be able to design the thing, and still be able to sleep at night knowing it won't collapse on you.
Also how does something like this work with county inspectors?
Think about these massive Middle-Ages cathedrals done before we had Newton's Laws and modern notions of engineering. How did the architects do it? Well, they were hackers with a large budget. The architect usually had never built anything on this scale before and had no idea how their much-smaller-scale building experience would scale up. In particular, the fact that arches create sideways stresses which tend to bulge a large, open building outwards wasn't necessarily well-known by many of these architects.
So what did they do? They just tried it and saw what worked. They hacked it together. If it doesn't start buckling and collapsing in the first month, it could probably last for a couple hundred years, maybe more if the ground doesn't shift in unexpected ways. The walls started bowing out? Then we'll build structures to buttress them back in. There's a dangerous sagging happening between these two columns? Well, place a third column in there!
Of course, wood offers a lot of questions as a building material, since it's got a lot of energy in a bioactive form which lots of critters and cellular lifeforms might enjoy eating, and therefore needs to be treated in ways that might tend to prevent these critters from using it as a food source. Keeping it not-wet is an important first step which isn't discussed very well in the article.
But for what it's worth, this was the way you built houses before we had engineering. You just went for it and spent a bunch of the year working on it, and it better be successful because you've got to have a place to sleep this winter.
> Think about these massive Middle-Ages cathedrals done before we had Newton's Laws and modern notions of engineering. How did the architects do it? Well, they were hackers with a large budget. The architect usually had never built anything on this scale before and had no idea how their much-smaller-scale building experience would scale up. In particular, the fact that arches create sideways stresses which tend to bulge a large, open building outwards wasn't necessarily well-known by many of these architects.
That's a fascinating thought. I'd like to read more about this "hacking" aspect -- can you point me to any references / citations?
Unfortunately the links I have are not of professional research quality, and it might be better to email an academic who specializes in architecture from before calculations. I have a couple saved bookmarks from when I first heard about it several years ago. Here's an article in /The Caius Engineer/ vol. 17 nr. 1, a student publication from kids at the Gonville & Caius College of the University of Cambridge:
I was reintroduced to this by a recent BBC series on architecture, though, and I can't figure out which one it was! It could have been Climbing Great Buildings, which had some moments where they would sneak underneath these great cathedrals and see what little bits had been "swept under the rug". But it might have also been Churches: How to Read Them. (I vaguely think it's the first because I have memories of some reference to Durham Cathedral partially collapsing, but memories of this form are notoriously unreliable.)
Conclusion: we should develop ways so that we learn less by osmosis. When you learn by osmosis, it's very hard to track down actual sources for the crap you've learned, and you basically have to get lucky.
> Think about these massive Middle-Ages cathedrals done before we had Newton's Laws and modern notions of engineering. How did the architects do it?
They didn't do it a lot of the time. It just seems that way because only the few cathedrals that happened to strike on a physical supportable design are still around. Ie, survivorship bias.
Based on the photographs, it does not appear to be engineered - roof supports do not appear to be of adequate depth to support live, dead, and snow loads. People can dance on that roof and under most building standards deflection is the controlling factor for structures this size.
IMO, it is highly improbably that adequate structural analysis was done on all those small twisted members because branches and stunted trunks contain so many knots and so much sapwood.
On the positive side, the approach is straight out of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, and any victims of the inadequate structural design will be due to Darwinian forces.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Castle - this guy lives out in the middle of nowhere in Colorado (where he doesn't have to worry much about inspection, although he has had people raise a bit of a fuss from time to time), but he's certainly not an engineer by any means and he's built an entire, stable castle that's supported hundreds of tourists every single day for years without any incident. It turns out that most humans have a pretty good intuition for what will stand and what won't.
Also, if you're ever in CO, it's worth the visit. Really.
Also how does something like this work with county inspectors?
My experience with county inspectors is they don't build anything.
They show up to inspect the work after it's done, certify it's to standards and call it a day.
If you're real lucky you'll get an inspector who is buddies with certain contractors in the area. Woe to the poor SOB who doesn't use them - you'll have a heckuva time getting that work signed off.
Yeah boy: how would we get anything done without county inspectors.
Also how does something like this work with county inspectors?