How to build a house: rising from the ashes

Guest post by architectural designer Sam Davey (@SNDavey; website). All illustrations © Sam Davey.

Shelter. It’s one of the most fundamental of needs but immediately after the Fall permanent habitation it is likely to be the last thing on your mind.  You may be one of those displaced by the crisis of civilisation, or reacting to more violent parts of the population, scavenging for food or simply looking for a source of uncontaminated water. In any case, in the immediate aftermath it is very likely that most nights not spent under the stars will be spent under a roof built before the collapse.

These buildings, though, will not last forever and the time will come when a post-apocalyptic community is going to need to know how to construct permanent shelter for itself. Here’s how to build a house.

How to build a house

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The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

The Waste Land

waste landThe epigraph introducing the whole book is a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

(although see the unfortunate typo that appeared in one of the early drafts of the book…)

The Waste Land is a very powerful poem, and is commonly quoted. For example, lines from Section IV have been borrowed for two book titles by one of my favourite authors, Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward; and the opening line of the poem, ‘April is the cruellest month’ has been adopted as a lyric by electronic music band Hot Chip. It is an absolute joy to hear the poem read aloud with the due rhythm and performance. I would, therefore, heartily recommend The Waste Land app released by the publishers Faber. It offers recordings of the poem read in its entirety by Eliot himself, as well as Ted Hughs and Viggo Mortensen (who of course plays the father in the film adaptation of The Road), alongside reproductions of Eliot’s edited manuscript and a filmed performance by Fiona Shaw.

The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Author photograph

Author_photo_smallOne of the things I tried hard to ensure whilst researching and writing the book was that I got first-hand experience in many of the processes and skills I talk about, and this includes the author photograph.

I wanted to take a selfie in the deepest sense you could ever take a selfie — by creating a photograph from scratch.

Chapter 11 of The Knowledge describes several aspects of more advanced chemistry, such as the astounding silver chemistry that enables you to capture light itself and so open the door to photography.  The mugshot (right) included on the inside flap of the hardback book jacket was created using a primitive single-lens camera and this rudimentary silver chemistry, resurrecting techniques that date right back to the 1850s and the earliest years of photography.

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The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Ruin

Ruin is a short film created by Oddball Animation. It is a chase sequence with a lone survivor racing through a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic cityscape. Click the still frame below to watch the film on the Oddball site.

Ruin

The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

The Long Now Foundation

LongNowFoundationThe Knowledge hardback has now been added to the library of The Long Now Foundation, a curated collection of books they call the ‘Manual for Civilization’. The Long Now Foundation is an organisation that fosters long-term thinking, particularly in the interests of preserving our cultural and scientific heritage and protecting civilisation. They are running several fascinating projects, including building the ‘10,000 year Clock‘ in a mountain-side in Texas and compiling the Rosetta Project, a digital library of human languages.

Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Foundation, magnanimously reports that one of the first inspirations for creating this ‘Manual for Civilization’ library was a conversation with me when I first started researching and writing The Knowledge, and I am truly honoured for my own effort to have been included in this compendium of practical knowledge.

I have also recommended a list of around 50 other titles for the Manual for Civilisation, tomes that I found crucial during my own research (and included in the book’s bibliography), and these join the guest submissions from, among others, Brian Eno, Jill Tarter and Kevin Kelly.

Read the article on the Long Now blog, including my list of books for their library.

 

The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Homemade electronics

Chapter 10 of the book focusses on communications technologies, leading up to how you could reinvent radio transmitters and receivers. This would of course require a certain degree of capability in handling electricity, and in particular in the construction of electronic devices. We look at the feats of ingenuity involved in the construction of POW or Foxhole radios with rudimentary means during the Second World War (see, for example, these references). This Make magazine article showcases an incredible range of electronic components that people have built from scratch at home –  everything from capacitors and diodes to headphones and even homemade cathode ray tubes (as used in old televisions).

The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

US competition

The US publishers of The Knowledge, Penguin Press, are running a twitter competition to celebrate the launch of the book. We are giving away five post-apocalyptic survival book packs, consisting of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch, along with James Rawles’ excellent prepper book How to Survive the End of the World as we Know it and Sam Sheridan’s personal exploration The Disaster Diaries.

PrizeBooks

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The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

Blacksmithing

Where possible, I tried to get some first-hand experience of the topics I was researching and writing about for The Knowledge. So for Chapter 6 and the discussion of crucial materials including metal, I went with a friend to spent the day in the Much Hadham village forge in Hertfordshire. We worked by the traditional blacksmith’s coke-fired open forge that has been preserved in the village, learning different techniques to work red-hot iron with hammer and anvil, and the principles of tempering and quenching steel.

Blacksmith

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The Knowledge Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.