Durability of brick buildings as exemplified
by the traditional village of Dangjia in China
![»3 Plan of Dangjia [4]](https://www.zi-online.info/imgs/101475387_d7830ec7d8.jpg)
The paper demonstrates the excellent durability and service lifetime of constructions built with bricks and roof tiles in traditional dwellings of the central Shaanxi plain in China, taking the village of Dangjia as an example. It briefly introduces the historical development and the layout of the village, the climatic conditions, and the structural characteristics of the courtyard dwellings “Siheyuan”. It describes the bricks and roof tiles used as well as the various brick carvings. It explains briefly the technological principle of reducing firing and gives examples of the recycling of old bricks and roof tiles.
1 Introduction
In the building material market, there is fierce competition between the various building materials: plain concrete, concrete blocks, autoclaved aerated concrete, bricks, wood, steel, glass, etc. Some years ago, competition used to be based on the technical properties, costs and availabilities, etc. of the materials. Recently, environmental issues have become important. Different materials claim that they are better because less grey, i.e. embodied energy is needed for production. This can be true in some cases, however, the operation lifetime of the building has to be taken into...
