The Amazing Ideas and Inventions From The Earliest People: Building to Last

The Amazing Ideas and Inventions from the Earliest People: Building to Last

By Mr Ghaz, September 5, 2010

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The Amazing Ideas and Inventions from the Earliest People: Building to Last

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Meanwhile, in Europe, buildings were becoming much more sophisticated. At the height of ancient Greek civilization, between 500 and 400 BC, the Greeks were using blocks of marble or limestone for their temples and public buildings. Some stones were cut so accurately that they fitted together perfectly, but the Greeks also used iron or bronze clamps to hold stones together. Columns were made by standing shaped pieces of stone on top of each other. The stones were lifted into position with pulleys and fixed together with iron rods or wooden pegs.

The Romans were skilled engineers and they had various methods of building. The simplest was to fix regular blocks of stone together with mortar or clamps.

But one of their most important contributions to architecture was the use of concrete. Many Roman buildings had concrete walls covered with stone or bricks. One advantage of this method was that concrete walls could be built by unskilled labor, leaving the stonemasons free to carry out the more skilled and decorative work.

Building in Curves

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Until Roman times, most buildings had straight walls supporting a flat or sloping roof. The roof could be supported by the walls themselves, as in the Mediterranean mud-brick houses. It could also be supported by wooden framework of vertical and horizontal poles, as in wattle and daub structures, or by stone columns as in Greek architecture. Whichever method was used, the shapes within the building were basically flat and rectangular. People had made simple doomed roofs long before the Romans, using a method called ‘corbelling’. When the builder reached the top of the wall, he laid a row of bricks or stones that jutted slightly into the inside of the building. The next row of stones overlapped a bit more and so on until the stones met in the middle to form a roof. In a rectangular building, the roof was a simple vault. In a square building, the roof was a simple dome.