Rules · Walls · Materials · Roofs
Set up forked stakes, weave twigs between them and daub the walls with mud; roof them with reeds and leaves, steep enough to shed the rain.
Vitruvius’s account of the origin of building begins with people who, having gathered round fire, imitated the nests of swallows: first shelters of boughs, then walls of upright forked stakes woven with twigs and plastered with mud, roofed with reeds and leaves. He adds that such houses were still built in his day in Gaul, Spain, Lusitania and Aquitaine, roofed with oak shingles or straw.
He was writing from hearsay two and a half thousand years after Durrington, but the excavated houses there fit his description: squares of about 5 m with rounded corners, floors of beaten chalk plaster round a central hearth, walls of stakes and wattle, and the marks of box-beds and a dresser along the walls, the same arrangement as the stone-built houses of Skara Brae in Orkney.
A beam is squeezed along its top and stretched along its bottom; stone resists squeezing well but stretching badly, so a stone lintel must be deep in proportion to its span and cannot be long. Doubling the span quadruples the stress from its own weight.
σ ≈ ¾ ρ g L² ⁄ d (self-weight) · + ≈ 0.43 ρ g L³ ⁄ d² (a wall above)
At Stonehenge each lintel is pegged to its uprights by a mortise-and-tenon joint and locked to its neighbours by tongue-and-groove joints, and each is curved to follow the circle: the joints of a timber frame reproduced in dressed sarsen.
In a megalithic chamber the room can be no wider than the largest slab the builders can raise over it; the upright stones are set to suit the capstone, not the other way round.
Build the circle of the living in timber, which decays, beside the settlement; build the circle of the ancestors in stone, which endures, apart from it; and join the two by avenues and the river.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The first houses: stakes, wattle and mud”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/vitruvius-first-houses. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.