So, you don't believe roofs were invented until very recent times? The only building I've ever been in where roof collapse couldn't be fatal is my neighbor's chicken coop.
> Castles and cathedrals and city walls and the like don't fall down unless you intentionally ignore or obfuscate a ton of cracking a slumping and things moving, etc, etc.
Easily disproven. Here's one refutation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster
Seriously: your lack of knowledge about historical architecture is impressive.
A barn is a lot more forgiving than a tilt up Walmart. Castles don't pancake like the Surfside Condos (which gave a ton of warning BTW). I think it speaks volumes that your example is a rotted floor overloaded beyond it's capacity. This stuff isn't rocket science except in the rare cases when it is. Anyone trying to portray it as such is doing a disservice to society.
There are many failure modes other than gradually cracking and eventually failing. Even in that case, by the time you notice such cracking, the cost of repair - if it can be repaired - is dramatically higher, and has tons of effects.
BTW, Hammurabi was particularly dastardly in his building code specifications. You could, of course, be put to death if a building or wall collapsed and killed someone. But that was just table stakes. Even Ur-Nammu had that much figured out.
Hammurabi added on to the punishment by forcing you to rebuild the wall..
to the specifications of reputable builders..
at your own expense..
and then be put to death.
Don't even get me started on Asian "building codes" back in the day.
HN user Arainach is right, no one was guessing, or intuiting, while building in a lot of these empires. It was wayyy too risky. Pretty much everyone was following rules passed down by the builders for centuries. In some cases, millennia. Only an actual ruler would dare even consider deviating from the known good building forms.