In the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, according to the official historical science, many red brick buildings were built with the very same windows that haunted researchers of the real past, going underground. So to speak, basement windows in these houses are located below ground level - in pits or, as it turns out, are laid up to their part that rises above the ground level.
Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Lubyanskaya square.
What is it? Construction concept or the consequences of changing the level of this soil in cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas?
The premises, which seem to be like now, have become basements, which were intended to illuminate the above-described windows, for the most part have arched architecture. This arched, vaulted ceiling structure is the key to understanding that many buildings built in the second half of the 19th, early 20th centuries were either actually built earlier than they are dated, or built on the buried ruins of former city blocks.
Arched ceilings in standardized red brick.
Why did the basements turn out to be the largest in height ceilings of the lower floors of apartment buildings in pre-revolutionary Russia? And with beautiful vaulted ceilings?
Promotional video:
Photo of Moscow 19th century.
Recently, disputes about this have flared up with renewed vigor between supporters of the flood, which raised the level of soil in cities around the world in the mid-19th century and destroyed most of the red-brick buildings of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and supporters of the cultural layer, who reject the very possibility of such a global catastrophe.
Recently, in most of the cities of Russia, they finally began to change water and sewer pipes. It turned out that in the old centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow no one had changed these pipes since the end of the 19th century. How did they survive to this day?
Dismantling of old pipes.
In the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regions, which are only about half a century old, the pipes have already been changed several times. Not all, of course, but the key ones for sure!
Although those old pipes have been running for a long time, since the 60s-70s of the XX century. Most, so to speak, the basements of the old courtyards-wells in St. Petersburg were flooded. Hordes of bedbugs, fleas and mosquitoes bred in them. The latter constantly bit us, sleeping cadets of the Naval School on Line 12 of Vasilievsky Island. And we went down to the cellars under the buildings of the school to jump into the "self-propelled". But it was a dangerous business. It is not enough to be bitten by mosquitoes and fleas. It was possible to make a mistake with a fairway made of planks and fall into the water, which was deeper than your head.
Red brick cellars.
Until recently, I could not understand why basements, which are in wet ground, should be built of porous bricks, which, like a sponge, due to the "wetting effect", draws water along all the walls of the building even to its upper floors. From which not only the inner and outer walls got wet, on which the plaster then descended. The basement brick itself, which was constantly in the water, was losing strength.
It was from this that most of the houses of the old fund fell into disrepair, and not only in St. Petersburg. This turns out to be a headache for urban municipalities.
Emergency housing stock.
Apparently, out of the same considerations, it was decided to restore the famous Polytechnic Museum on Lubyanskaya Square in Moscow. Thanks to this repair, which opened the ground of the once underground walls of the museum, you and I received serious research material: here you will find both the continuation of the windows and the entrances, which for some reason turned out to be underground. Why is that?
Polytechnic Museum, Moscow, Lubyanskaya Square.
Some, of course, insist that this is exactly how they built it. I fully share this opinion. Yes, this is exactly how they built on the covered ruins, destroyed by the flood of the middle of the 19th century, red-brick buildings. Likewise, these red-brick buildings in the 18th and early 19th centuries were built on the same buried ruins of ancient buildings. They were made of a different material, limestone and artificial shaped blocks, stacked with little or no mortar. Or these ancient buildings were concrete. For example, this is a building that we discovered during a recent expedition near the Turkish city of Side.
Ruins of an antique * hospital * Side. Turkey.
Ruined and buried quarters of an ancient city that died at the end of the 17th century on the Mediterranean coast of the Asia Minor peninsula. This building was built using pure concrete technology. The so-called Roman concrete is a mixture of lime with volcanic ash or other pyroclastic rocks: for example, cement from volcanic Tuff: more about making Roman concrete in our film "Secrets of the Philosopher's Stone":
Such concrete had a fantastic strength over 500 kg / s / cm ². Such strength made it possible not to use any metal reinforcement and gravel in the structure. Only 30% of this concrete was poured into the molds from the removable formwork, everything else was clogged with rather large rubble stones. Only arches of windows and passages were laid out from shaped blocks of artificial or natural stone.
In my opinion, this is a very sturdy construction. Imagine she is over 350 years old. And for these 350 years it only stands destroyed and buried. In the descriptions, this is some kind of ancient hospital, although there is a whole field of ruins of similar hospitals. Where did historians get the idea that this was a hospital? And most importantly, the first floor, which seems to be the basement and the floor above it, have an arched structure of interstorey floors.
The first filled up floor.
Second floor above it, the same arched ceiling.
Arched floors are a feature of the ancient construction technology. At that time, they did not pour solid monolithic slabs and did not use ready-made slabs with reinforced concrete products, the so-called "voids".
Everything is serious, for centuries. If an ordinary house, then the ceilings are arched, if a temple or baths, then domed. And arched were ALL floors of antique buildings from the first to the last. These Turkish ruins gave an answer to the most important question for understanding the buried ruins in the Crimea and the Caucasus, in the Urals and Siberia: To what depth are old buildings buried in cities.
Here are the basements that we discovered during the expedition, which were clearly built according to the ancient construction technology by casting Roman concrete into molds from removable formwork. Now these are the basements of the "Solnechnaya Dolina" plant in the Crimea, their depth is already 18 meters.
Winery cellars * Solnechnaya Dolina *. Zander.
And here are the same basements in Taman under the house of my friend, they were previously used as warehouses for a dairy. The dairy was closed, the land was sold, and new residential buildings were built on it. Lucky for everyone, there was no need to dig and fill in the foundations. So the ancient ruins still serve well.
Antique basement Taman.
It turns out what is especially evident in the example of antique cellars in Taman. They were not basements. This is some kind, and apparently not even the first floor of an ordinary antique building.
As in Side, the half-filled first floor, which is clearly not even the first.
Now let's imagine: you and I came to the ancient ruins. Let's say we divided them among ourselves. I got this very house: what will I do with it? First, I will need to level the ground around, and it makes no sense to dig the half-filled floor. With the neighbors, I will not agree to carry out huge earthworks and clean up the soil that covered the city to the previous level. Someone will be for, and someone against. In general, there is no chance of reaching an agreement with everyone. And to clear only your own means to make a constant puddle around your house, where all the rainwater from the whole area will drain.
As a result, the soil will remain the same. I will level it around the house and lay half-filled windows. Maybe I will leave some in the pits, but they need to be drained underground or covered with a roof.
Of course, you will want to finish building a couple more floors on top. The design of the ancient ruins allows them to be strong and in excellent condition - without cracks. They will withstand a couple of three more stone floors.
If I am in the 18th century, what will I use to build these floors? Of course, made of brick - that red, it is the most affordable material. Dig the same clay and burn it. But here's the bad luck - I don't have concrete technologies. Until volcanic ash, which the basis of Roman concrete can no longer get to, and how to knead it? After the flood of the end of the 17th century, industry will develop only by the beginning of the 19th century, while we will develop in the 18th century. We have just arrived at the ruins: it means that we will repeat the antique arched structure - we will fold it from standardized red brick:
At the same time, we will cover the ugly concrete of an antique building with it, which remained after the flood without the marble decor that once covered the entire facade. At the same time, we will cover the ancient ruins with bricks from the inside or plaster them.
So they ripped off the technology, applying it in a new version of red brick. Only a lot of it was gone. We will make the next floors not arched, we will simply fold the walls along the perimeter, leaving a series of holes between the planned floors. Insert the boards there.
Here is a lighter interstorey overlap, and less bricks are gone. We will also make the roof from boards. If you and I were rich, instead of wood in the interstorey overlap, we used a cast iron metal structure. And the stairs would be installed from it. But then only kings could.
This is how the Winter Palace was built on the ancient ruins, using a cast-iron supporting metal structure. This is how a number of rich buildings of St. Petersburg were also built. Also rebuilt, or better to say, rebuilt anew on the ruins of an ancient city, destroyed in the flood of the 17th century. Rebuilding began only around the middle of the 18th century, when the water came down.
This is what my film "The Mystery of Ancient Petersburg is Finally Revealed":
And now we will plaster our house, paint it yellow, light green and pink. And on the facade we will install part of the decor and statues that we managed to dig up from the house being restored. These reconstituted marble statues are badly damaged. Therefore, I will spat them off and paint them white or some other color.
And we got five floors. The basement and first floor are antique ruins. But now you can't recognize them, we have faced them with red bricks. Our second floor is the same - arched and high as antique. From them we ripped it off, and the two floors above are lower and simpler. The overlap between them is made of boards. Brick walls only around the perimeter.
So the walls cannot be folded straight out of the ground - they will fall over, but on such a massive arched foundation, just right.
Only now the subsequent flood of the middle of the 19th century will raise the level of the ground in the city to about the second floor of our reconstructed house. So our second floor, copied from the antique floors, excluding the basement, will now itself turn out to be an arched basement made of red brick, in which the next ones, like us, will lay windows.
And on the surface of the new soil there will be mysterious walls without reinforcement, and only along the perimeter with a wooden floor between floors. And all the builders will wonder how they hold on and did not fall without reinforcement and concrete.
And if, nevertheless, the walls fall, like a wing of the Polytechnic Museum in the flood of the middle of the 19th century. At the end of this century, it will be rebuilt from the same red brick that was used to build the building on ancient ruins in the 18th century, and rebuilt to the walls of the main building that survived this flood.
And many years later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, just as we will wonder - what, behind such deep cellars? As much as 18 meters? They will argue and show some kind of maps, make mistakes in the level of elevation differences on the streets at different times.
Now imagine if you take and remove all the applied soil from the moment of the flood of the 18th century. Before us will appear an antiquated four-story building, but the whole seven-story one.
Two of the three underground floors will be antique. Just at that depth, 18 meters. In Crimea, we visited the cellars of the winery, which, apparently, were built as the above-ground floors of an antique building. But now we are at about the same depth as in the Polytechnic Museum.
It seems to me that this is exactly what happened. Perhaps, of course, there were some construction nuances that were not taken into account in this hypothesis. But in general, everything was approximately in my opinion. - what do you think about this?
Author: Oleg Pavlyuchenko
