Advanced Earthen Construction Technologies

The Arch Test. Back in 2017, fresh off apprenticeship. It was before I really understood masonry at a deep level. Little did I know I could have had 100 people on that arch with me and it would still stand without a sweat. Masonry arches are pretty incredible. They’re immensely strong—or efficient, depending on how you look at it. They work entirely in compression. There is simply no need for steel to make arches work. I’ve stood on top of less than 3” of thin masonry tiles in a cathedral ceiling 50’ high, with 40 other people. I could poke my finger through various holes and reach the underside of the ceiling structure—and peer down to a certain death. And it was nearly 1000 years old. One of the keys is having enough “buttressing” on each side. Thickness on the ends to keep the arch from “pushing out”. If you don’t have that? It will fail quickly. This is why big arches near corners, with maybe 1 foot of a masonry column, look dumb. Because it doesn’t work as masonry, so you’ve never seen it in all of human history until today. You have to introduce steel to make that work. But it doesn’t look right, doesn’t match any of the patterns we’ve subconsciously learned to recognize. The bigger the arch? The bigger the buttressing it requires. This is one of the reasons old cathedrals had such thick walls. To carry the weight/forces of the vaulted ceiling down to the ground INSIDE the wall structure. If that force pushes outside the wall? You’re toast. It’s easy to recognize intuitively: if the ends move out, the arch collapses. But if you can prevent that? The arch is virtually indestructible.