Chapter 2 Chapter 2 Razing Our Homeland

"'If you want to knock down a barn,' a farmer once told me: 'Dig an eighteen-inch square hole in the roof. Then step back and stand aside.'" —Architect Chris Reid Amherst, Massachusetts The day humans disappeared, nature took over and immediately set about tearing down houses—or houses, to be more precise.Wipe them off the face of the earth.Not at all. If you are an owner of a home, even if you already know that you have owned it for only a short time, even if corrosion has hit it relentlessly, you just don't want to admit it and spend your savings to restore it.You're told how much your house will cost you, but no one is going to tell you what else you'll have to do to keep nature from taking over your house faster than the bank.

Even if you live in a postmodern architectural complex that is incompatible with the original form-here, heavy machinery completely destroys the natural scenery, easy-to-manage turf and neat saplings replace unruly wild vegetation, wetland swamps Filled in the name of "mosquito control" - even so, nature will not be defeated by people.No matter how you close yourself in a temperature-adjusted house and avoid wind, frost, rain and snow, mold spores that are invisible to the naked eye will always get into the room in some way, and suddenly burst out with great power: it is annoying to watch, no It was even worse to see, as they hid in the whitewashed walls, munching away at the drywall and eating away at the nails and floor joists.Or, your site could be home to termites, carpenter ants, cockroaches, wasps, and even smaller animals.

Worst of all, you might be bothered by water—although otherwise essential to life.It always wants to invade your life. After we're gone, nature takes its vengeance on our smug mechanical artifacts through the power of water.It started with wooden structures, which are the most commonly used residential materials in developed areas.The vengeance begins with the roof, perhaps asphalt or shingles, which are guaranteed to last twenty or thirty years—but no one can guarantee against erosion near the chimney, where the first leak always appears.The rainshield could not withstand the relentless wash of the rain, so the rain quietly seeped under the tiles.It flows through 4-foot-by-8-foot layers of decking—made of plywood or, if it's a new build, wood plywood.Plywood is made of several 3-4 inch boards glued together with resin.

New is not necessarily good.Windhier von Braun, the German scientist who developed the American aeronautical program, once told a story—the story of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. "In the seconds before liftoff, Glenn was strapped into the rocket that we built, and people put all their energy into that critical moment, and you know what he said to himself? 'Oh my God. !I'm sitting on a pile of shit like this!'” In your new house, you have been sitting in this environment.On the one hand, it makes sense: by using materials that are cheap and lightweight, we can use less of the world's resources.On the other hand, while medieval European architecture, Japanese architecture, and historic American walls still rely on massive wooden posts and beams, large trees capable of producing such large posts and beams are now highly prized and rare , we had no choice but to find another way, patching together small pieces of wood and waste materials, and gluing them together.

The wood plywood you've chosen for cost reasons contains a resin that's a water-repellent adhesive made from a compound of formaldehyde and phenol.It was also applied to the exposed edges of the boards, but that didn't help because the water seeped in around the nails.It didn't take long for them to rust and gradually loosen.This not only directly leads to water leakage inside the house, but also poses a great threat to the structure of the house.In addition to the roof, the wooden cover also keeps the brackets from loosening.These brackets are support beams joined by metal plates that prevent the roof from splaying.However, once the cover plate corrodes, the structural integrity is lost.

Because of the gravity of the earth, the tension on the bracket is constantly increasing.The 1/4-inch pegs holding the rusty metal hinges slipped out of the damp wood, which had grown a fuzzy green mold.Beneath the mold layer, thread-like organisms called hyphae are secreting enzymes that break down cellulose and lignin into fungal nutrients.The same changes are taking place in the floor of the interior.If you live in a cold climate, water pipes burst when the temperature drops, and rain pours in through gaps in windows caused by bird strikes and sagging walls.Even if the glass of the window is intact, rain and snow can still seep into the underside of the window sill without anyone noticing.The wood is still rotting and the brackets are starting to crumble.In the end, the walls tipped over and the roof collapsed.Within ten years, the barn with its eighteen-inch-square hole in the roof was gone.Your house might last fifty years, but it's only a hundred years at most.

When disaster begins to loom, squirrels, raccoons, and lizards come inside and camp in the clear water walls, and even woodpeckers bang outside.If they are initially held back by so-called indestructible wall panels—constructed of aluminum, vinyl, and possibly maintenance-free Portland cement fiber separators called "high-energy siding" — all they have to do is wait a century, and most of the artificial materials will break down on their own.The artificially injected pigments basically fell off, water inevitably seeped in from saw cuts and nail holes, bacteria devoured the plant fibers, and what remained were only inorganic elements.Peeling vinyl siding, long since faded, now extremely weak and scarred from plasticizer deterioration.The aluminum was in better shape, but the salt in the water was slowly eating away at its surface, leaving a pitted white skin.

The galvanized skin is exposed to the elements, but it has protected the steel pipes responsible for heating or cooling for decades.But under the combined action of water and air, zinc begins to oxidize.Once the galvanized skin fails, the thin steel plate loses its protection and cracks within a few years.The water-soluble gypsum in the gypsum plasterboard was lost before then, being absorbed by the earth.The chimney was where the trouble started.A century later, it still stands, but the bricks have long since flaked, cracking bit by bit; the same is true for the lime mortar, which is broken into powder by changes in temperature.

If you've ever had a swimming pool, it's now a planter filled with seeds of ornamental plants introduced by developers, or native vegetation that was once evicted - sitting around in the corner, waiting for someday A chance to take back the territory.If the house has a basement, it will also be filled with soil and plants.Brambles and wild vines are coiling around the steel exhaust ducts, rusting and rotting in less than a century.The white thermoplastic resin water pipes have turned yellow and thinned on the side exposed to the sun, and the chloride contained in them has been weathered into hydrochloric acid, which dissolves itself and also damages the surrounding polyethylene materials.Only the tiles in the bathroom have barely changed in appearance, as fired ceramics have a chemical composition somewhat similar to fossils, but it has crumbled into piles, mixed with dry grass and leaves.

After five hundred years, what will be left of things?It depends on which part of the world you live in.In a temperate climate, what had once been a suburb would be forest; except for a few mounds, it gradually began to resemble what it looked like before human development, or when expelled peasants first saw the land.Among the trees, lush undergrowth half-hids aluminum dishwasher components and stainless steel cookware, their plastic handles cracked but still strong.Over the next century, despite the absence of metallurgists to observe, the rate at which aluminum deforms and corrodes will eventually be revealed—a relatively new metal unknown to early humans because aluminum ore must be electrochemically refined to become Metal.

Chromium gives stainless steel its form-restoring properties, but the effect may persist for thousands of years, especially if pots, pans, and carbon-alloy flatware are buried underground without exposure to oxygen.In the distant future, some kind of intelligent creature dug them out, so the speed of their evolution was accelerated by the discovery of these ready-made tools.Not knowing how to replicate these tools frustrates them—though the sense of mystery and awe may awaken a religious consciousness within them. If you live in a desert, the plastics of modern life will corrode and peel off faster, because the polymer chains will be broken under the attack of the sun's ultraviolet rays.Woodwork lasts longer here because of the lack of water, but metal corrodes more quickly when it comes into contact with the salty desert soil.Looking at Roman ruins, we can speculate that thick cast iron objects will appear in the archaeological record in the future, so the fire hydrant standing among the cacti may one day be the only clue that humans have lived here. What a strange picture.The adobe and plaster walls will likely erode, but the wrought-iron balconies and window grilles that were once decorative may still be identifiable, albeit gauze-thin, as the corrosion, while engulfing the cast iron, is too much for what remains. The glass shards below. We've used the most durable substances we know of for building structures: granite blocks, for example.Its effects are still visible today, we admire, we are shocked, but we no longer use this material because quarrying, chiseling, transporting and cutting stone requires a lot of patience that we no longer have.From then on, I am afraid that there will be no second Antonio Gaudi-he started to build the Sagrada Familia atonement in Barcelona in 1880, and now no one will consider investing in a great-grandson who needs to be built for 250 years. It took my grandson to complete the project.Now, without thousands of slaves, wouldn't it be cheaper to use another Roman invention—cement? Today, a slurry of clay, sand, and calcium from ancient sea shells hardens into a man-made rock that is increasingly becoming the most economical choice for modern city dwellers.What will become of the concrete city that is home to half the population by then? Before we get to that point, I have to say something about the climate.If we disappear tomorrow, what we did before will have an impact on future generations. The gravity, chemistry and entropy of the earth will bring everything to a state of balance after hundreds of years, but this is not the same as the earth before human existence. Only slightly similar.Whereas the previous state of equilibrium depended on large amounts of carbon being squeezed beneath the Earth's crust, most of it has now been transferred to the atmosphere.The wooden structures of the houses would have been preserved, not corroded, like the timbers of the Spanish galleons, soaked in salt water by the rising sea. In a warmer world, deserts get drier, but rivers will likely reappear in areas once inhabited by humans—people were attracted to water in the first place.From Cairo to Phoenix, rivers have kept arid soils alive, and desert cities have sprung up here.Later, as the population grew, humans took control of those water mains, and then branched them out into tributaries for greater development in the future.But when humans disappeared, the tributaries disappeared with them.The dry and hot desert climate is intertwined with the humid and rainy mountain climate. The torrential floodwaters rush downstream and flood the reservoirs. The silt accumulated year by year covers the former impact plain and buries everything built there. .Fire hydrants, car tires, battered slabs of glass, and office buildings may survive, but they will be buried like coal beds. Nobody remembers them buried here, although the roots of cottonwoods, willows, and palms may occasionally find their presence.Only after eons, when the old mountains are leveled and new ones rise, only then, only when the young streams carve new canyons out of the sediment, will they reveal what was once there. Things that survive here for a while.