A thousand years from now it will be an uncompleted and abandoned project that looks like Stonehenge. People will theorize about why it was built and what it was for.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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This project started on the ~~1000th~~ 1200th anniversary of the city's founding. It's plausible to assume that it can survive another 1000 years.
Considering our current trends, I wouldn't be so sure...
I did say plausible, not necessarily likely
1200th anniversary
Will it though? "Oh, this is where they put spare concrete blocks. You can tell it wasn't for religious purposes or telling the seasons because it's so uninteresting."
The issue is that it will stay flat for a long time. If the second layer of blocks started earlier, it would be more obvious that its an art thing.
This is being built in the town of Wemding which celebrated its 1,200 year anniversary in 1993. The idea was to build something that would take 1,200 years to complete in order to emphasize how long the town has been in existence. People saying its stupid or going to be abandoned are forgetting the town itself has existed for longer.
While the town is that old I promise you that almost nothing looks like it was 1200 years ago. Maybe they can hold on that tradition 100 years but at some point the people won't bother. Need more space or don't see the point of it anymore
How about that concrete doesn't last that long?
Regardless, it just a pr piece for the town, so whatever.
*well not the concrete they're likely using, anyhow.
There are still Roman buildings made of concrete standing....
Roman concrete is very different from modern concrete. It was made with a few different ingredients that made salt water strengthen it, as opposed to weaken it, and lime class (among other things) helped it "self heal" cracks.
Roman concrete is why I put the * comment, but no one uses it anymore. Between it being a lost recipe for a while and it taking longer to "set" no one throwing up buildings or laying out roads cares that something lasts over 100 years anymore.
Doubt they will use the same concrete recipe used in highways.
They most likely already thought about and solved that particular problem.
We know the recipe for Roman concrete, and we have better concrete recipes. This absolutely can last longer than Roman concrete.
It's self healing because of the poorer mixing, undissolved quicklime (calcium oxide) would remain in the concrete, and water getting in cracks would dissolve it and produce calcium hydroxide, which then combines with carbon dioxide to form more limestone aggregate (calcium carbonate) to heal the cracks.
There's a survivor bias when it comes to really old buildings of course so it's likely we're only seeing a small portion of the surviving buildings from that era.
We could make concrete that lasts multiple times the amount of time as Roman concrete, but we usually don't because it's more expensive (and modern construction seems to be about minimizing costs as much as possible and not worrying about anything more than a few decades out)
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One is a town and the other thing is random concrete blocks. Yeah, they are equally useful
That's a nice thought but will the town actually still exist if the population doesn't? Humans have maybe 120 years left, there's zero chance of humans finishing this pyramid.
Although if a weird little art installation in a small German town is what gets capitalism to end, I'm all for it.
Not stupid, but I am curious if the type of concrete being used will last 1200 years.
Matt Parker has a video explaining how this art installation didn't actually do the math right, and the pyramid is one cube off.
In 1200 years it will end with missing one piece lmao
Yup, "off by 1" mistake. How does nobody noticed that during the planning phase? And it's the German no less, aren't they supposed to be super good at these kind of things?
You are not gonna believe this, but not all germans are the german stereotype.
Maybe that's the "art?"
Woah dude, spoilers!
Goddamend time travelers , ruining the future for us!
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What an uninspiring and uninteresting final product that effort will produce. Not worth the wait.
Except this is the problem with humanity. You can’t justify anything over 50 years which means we’re always inhibited into being a short sighted civilization. Sometimes it takes 100’s or 1000’s of years.
If this project is an example of long sighted achievement then it’s not going to motivate people to embrace long term efforts.
This is the first time anything in our civilization has ever tried to make something with 90%+ guaranteed success for this long so it is a giant accomplishment.
90% is optimistic. There's certainly going to be multiple major wars ahead, and climate change. Could you imagine people spending the little resources they have on the most uninteresting art work they could have designed, when they're struggling to feed themselves?
Come back in 40 years. It will be the Pyramid Condos, or a strip mall.
Not that, it's just ugly. The wait part is neat, but the final design is just, not fun to look at.
I think it's already interesting. You can already see the difference in age on the existing blocks, and the difference will only grow with each decade of the project. I think the contrast between the first and final blocks would make a striking sight and poignant point about how something we might consider permanent within a single lifetime, concrete, really really isn't.
The project also doesn't require that every block be concrete. The material can be whatever, and as such, future blocks, and then past blocks, may come to represent the major construction methods of their times.
As an art-installation that makes me contemplate the past, the future, and the passing of time, I'd consider it successful starting on the day the first block was put down.
Whether it becomes complete one day, or is abandoned somewhere along the way, the piece has, and will have, a lot to say about the relationship that humans have with time.
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Agreed. Given a budget of a few million I could hire a team to build something twice as impressive in a month or two.
Sounds like they just made the same mistake I did when I hired my contractor.
And they already fucked up(explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAdmpAZTH_M)
Could you please provide transcript of the video in case people don't want to visit YouTube?
Basically what they did was the following. Each concrete block represents 10 years. They get placed when another decade ends/starts(not to sure). So the problem is the following: when the 1200 years are over they have only placed 119 blocks so the building will be finished in 1210 years. Its the same as with a fence. If you have e.g. 10 Elements of a fence you need 11 posts. The ones who designed this building however didnt count the fence posts(the concrete blocks which mark the end of a decade) and I stead counted the "fence elements" causing the whole thing to be off by 10 years.
shit man if they're only 10 years late on a public works project they'll still be average
while that seems like a long time for Germany to build The Pyramids it's actually only 12 turns and the free granary in every city will really help in the early game
I think the issue is the time span between blocks. Had they done a 1200 block, once a year thing, it would "feel" like progress and something to participate in regularly, even if you will never see the majority of it. Geometrically with the same design to get 1200 blocks I came up with a base of 19 blocks, then every odd number, skipping 11 and 3.
Apparently Germany likes slow things https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt
Interesting.
You beat me to it. Clearly a trend here!
We'll wipe ourselves out before this can be completed.
Long before...
why
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