I see this a lot in the rural US with wooden fences but had no idea why it was done, but I guess its for the same reason (stability). Apparently they've done it since the 1600s.
Still, this seemed totally unecessary until I realized this mean they dont have to put any posts into the ground. No digging holes, which would be really nice when you're trying to fence up very large acreage.
Those fences are also popular in places where it is cold in the winter. No posts in the ground means no frost heave. A fence like that can sit unmaintained for decades before it starts to fall apart.
Not digging post holes would help, but the real time savings would be in not having to saw the logs to produce boards.
It only takes a couple minutes to split the log, and would be less tiring than trying to saw the number of boards you’d need for a fence. You can also use smaller logs you’d otherwise ignore or use for firewood due to low yield when sawing.
For that matter, you don’t have to worry about milling, joinery, or bringing enough nails to fasten boards. You can also use green wood without any worries. All you have to do is stack.
In a world without power tools, the split-rail fence really was an ingenious design. It effectively removed the skill requirement altogether, and let you spend your time on more urgent tasks.
I used to make fences in Wales, with it famously rocky ground. The fences we made were effectively straight lines which were bound at each terminal point by big posts dug into the ground and braced with side struts. Installing one of these posts could take a full day.
I'd much rather have a Battlefield Wall on my property in the US than a Ribbon Wall or Crinkle Crankle Wall. The latter two sound ridiculous. I really like "Serpentine Wall", but it sounds a little too technical for everyday conversation with nontechnical people
they should be able to. same physics applies, right? poles dont have to be as thick or as deep to resist the same torque, and if you could somehow make the pales curvy/corrugated, they could be thinner, too.
I think one should also consider the failure modes when, for example, a tree falls into the wall. For a straight wall, it is possible that a falling section will propagate the failure along the entire length of the wall. For a wavy wall, it is likely to fail in shear, limiting the damage to one section.
Corrugated cardboard just is a wavy wall, sandwiched in between two straight walls.
You can also observe corrugated steel and its use in construction, shipping containers, etc. Because these are steel and stronger than paper, the sandwich layers are not needed
If it wasn’t for fashion it would probably be the most popular building material for roofs. Make your roof out of that and at an angle and you probably never worry about leaks for decades.
It's all over the place in impoverished areas, often with a bunch of rocks or tires on top to weight it down. If you actually stay in such a structure though, it quickly becomes apparent how little it offers in the way of thermal or acoustic insulation. The sound in a heavy rainstorm can be deafening.
You can mitigate the issues with proper design, but at that point may as well use a real metal roof or a prebuilt.
Roof tiles are just that, but made of a material that stands water much better than than any metal. In any case, corrugated roofs made of asbestos where really popular until people realized they were not good for their health.
Another reason for some a wavy walls involves capturing more heat from sunlight over the course of a day, in this example for nearby plants:
> The Dutch, meanwhile, began to develop curved varieties that could capture more heat, increasing thermal gain (particularly useful for a cooler and more northern region). The curves also helped with structural integrity, requiring less thickness for support.
Soda cans also have a counterintuitive efficiency feature: concave bottoms. If a can with a flat bottom held the same amount of soda, it would be shorter and have less surface area, but its metal body would need to be thicker to withstand the same pressure. In the end, it'd require more aluminum.
Same with cans, corrugated sides, tops and bottoms are for strength and pressure resistance. Actually most corrugated anything is done so for strength.
The religious group that funds it has a questionable relationship to science including and despite "Science" being in its name. (It was started as a 19th Century anti-hospital group. We'd consider them "proto-anti-vax" in today's concerns and terminology.) They may be unbiased in reporting the news, generally, but there's still concerns about their relationship to reporting science given their name and the known beliefs of their church.
Same principle as concave bottoms on wine bottles (though the concern there is more about jostling and impact during transport than pressurized contents).
The 'space wasted' on an estate of many hundreds, if not, thousands of acres is minimal. Given that often the bricks used were made and fired on site, it definitely saved on resources and labour.
There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
> *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall."
If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
> so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
Not necessarily. You might need a straight wall to be thicker or have more buttressing in that case as well. The requirements for each (waviness, thickness, buttressing) likely change to different degrees based on height, so wavy walls could become less ideal, or they could become more ideal.
Indeed. Historically these walls have been used in orchards, where they are ideal. The wall serves an important function: it buffers heat. This can make all the difference, especially in late frosts, which are doom for the bloom. Of course, the added warmth can also mean you can grow varieties in a colder climate that you normally wouldn't be able to.
It depends how you define "wasted". If it were a flat wall, it'd give the interior more space by just pushing it out to the furthest point in the wavy wall. I guess you could say that whatever the magnitude of the wall is would be wasted.
this is an overly cynical take. headlines are brief by necessity. nobody would read that and think that a curved line from A to B is shorter than a straight line between the same points.
the first paragraph explains it,
> these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
No space is wasted, unless you need to squeeze in a rectangle thing (e.g. tennis court, driveway) into a tight lot. But boundary disputes in urban areas are already bad enough so trying to define a wavey boundary wont be fun! That said how much freaking character would this add to a back garden!
Yes, it's clickbait and nonsense. Obviously a straight wall would use fewer bricks. Your brick wall is going to be one brick thick either way, nobody is going to try to somehow make the straight wall as strong as the wavy wall. Most likely the straight wall is already way stronger than it needs to be.
If either design is too strong, then over could just use thinner bricks.
However, as the article indicates, the straight wall would not be as stable as the wavy wall. It needs buttresses to prevent toppling. That's the key advantage of the wavy design.
I read the title and thought "duh". Maybe others were intrigued and clicked, but for me, this is just obvious. I had lots of legos, and own more now as a grandpa than, er, uh, I should. I guess spatial reasoning about bricks just is second hand at this point.
What the article likely leaves out, is that the all of the "corner only" touch points are going to create a more "pourous" wall. And collection points for crap.
You can see from the photos in the article that the amount of waviness is not so large as to result in large angles between adjacent bricks -- the usual mortar between bricks connects them and doesn't even look like it's all that much larger a mortar join than for a straight wall.
Readit News
https://www.louispage.com/blog/bid/11160/worm-fence-what-is-...
Still, this seemed totally unecessary until I realized this mean they dont have to put any posts into the ground. No digging holes, which would be really nice when you're trying to fence up very large acreage.
It only takes a couple minutes to split the log, and would be less tiring than trying to saw the number of boards you’d need for a fence. You can also use smaller logs you’d otherwise ignore or use for firewood due to low yield when sawing.
For that matter, you don’t have to worry about milling, joinery, or bringing enough nails to fasten boards. You can also use green wood without any worries. All you have to do is stack.
In a world without power tools, the split-rail fence really was an ingenious design. It effectively removed the skill requirement altogether, and let you spend your time on more urgent tasks.
A Serpentine Wall sounds better than a Worm Fence or Snake Fence.
Crinkle Crankle Wall is a bit more fun than ZigZag Fence.
A Ribbon Wall seems like a nice thing to have on your property vs a Battlefield Fence.
Not a complicated subject, but somehow seeing it with straight lines made it completely obvious and intuitive vs the wavy wall.
That’s stability
You can also observe corrugated steel and its use in construction, shipping containers, etc. Because these are steel and stronger than paper, the sandwich layers are not needed
Undulations for rigidity are everywhere!
You can mitigate the issues with proper design, but at that point may as well use a real metal roof or a prebuilt.
> The Dutch, meanwhile, began to develop curved varieties that could capture more heat, increasing thermal gain (particularly useful for a cooler and more northern region). The curves also helped with structural integrity, requiring less thickness for support.
[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/fruit-walls-before-gr...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Science-Notebook/2015/0414...
^Probably not the best article for this, but it was easy to find and has a link to a chemical engineer's video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
Edit: Just realized this is the same video you referenced. All of his work is fantastic.
His 'drinking bird' video is used on the wikipedia page for the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird#Physical_and_che...
Even that is an understatement, I love those videos
https://www.riverkeeper.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bottl...
"The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can"
https://chbe.illinois.edu/news/stories/engineer-guy-ingeniou...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
Or, more likely, it's a similar principle also at place in the design.
Deleted Comment
https://www.google.com/search?q=uva+serpentine+walls&tbm=isc...
Crinkle Crankle Wall - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33155781 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)
Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359550 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Crinkle Crankle Wall - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21554986 - Nov 2019 (56 comments)
"use fewer bricks than a straight wall"*
*A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design.
Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
I suspect they are imitations of curved fruit walls popular in the 1600’s before greenhouses took off.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Sections (640 acres)
The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall."
If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
Not necessarily. You might need a straight wall to be thicker or have more buttressing in that case as well. The requirements for each (waviness, thickness, buttressing) likely change to different degrees based on height, so wavy walls could become less ideal, or they could become more ideal.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier
the first paragraph explains it,
> these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
I put the following prompt in GPT4:
create a professional title and a click bait title for the following article
Then provided the article. This was the output:
Professional Title: "Crinkle Crankle Walls: The Aesthetics and Efficiency of Serpentine Wall Construction"
Click Bait Title: "You Won't Believe How These Weird, Wavy Walls Use Less Bricks Than Straight Ones!"
This is fun clickbait. Straight to the point, totally random quirky trivia, and most of the page is nice pictures. Love it.
This wall would work well at road field boundaries where a couple feet makes less practical difference than the large saving in materials.
"leading to greater strength than a straight wall of the same thickness of bricks without the need for buttresses."
I was trying to figure out how lengthwise it could have fewer bricks.
However, as the article indicates, the straight wall would not be as stable as the wavy wall. It needs buttresses to prevent toppling. That's the key advantage of the wavy design.
I read the title and thought "duh". Maybe others were intrigued and clicked, but for me, this is just obvious. I had lots of legos, and own more now as a grandpa than, er, uh, I should. I guess spatial reasoning about bricks just is second hand at this point.
What the article likely leaves out, is that the all of the "corner only" touch points are going to create a more "pourous" wall. And collection points for crap.