Mortar. Mixture of sand, lime and water that aims to join pieces or bricks in masonry works.
Summary
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- 1 Origin
- 1 Use
- 2 Synonyms
- 3 Material in the architecture
- 2 sources
Origin
Mortar, casual discovery and empirical probing. The old mortar was neither cement nor concrete in the modern sense of these terms. It was a material composed of stone elements ( scree ) forming a mortar of a quality such that it could be used as filler or as a building material by itself. The floor could be pieces of any material available or selected for that purpose.
In ancient times, cement was not known and mortar was a substance widely used in the construction of large and majestic cities.
Utilization
For foundations heavy and solid stones were preferred, for light domes. The first mortars were made with clay or mud to fill the interstices between stone blocks.
The first step was to replace these materials with lime and sand that provided a better result. This knowledge came to Rome from Greece . The use of the pozzolana (“sand” of volcanic origin) present in central Italy allowed to obtain mortars of greater resistance than that achieved by the Greeks with river or common sea sand.
In the absence of all theoretical knowledge, progress was inevitably subject to empirical scores and good luck in the choice of material. Later, when the volcanic deposits of good quality and bad ones were already known, some Roman builders continued to use the bad ones for comfort and economy regardless of the final results.
Synonyms
mortar , cement, concrete , sand , gravel , gravel , cap , calcine , beton , pellada, amasijo , mixture , mazacote , argamasón .
Architecture material
The first and most obvious was its firm infiltration into the market of construction materials as a cheaper and often more effective substitute.
The mortar vaulting would not have progressed so quickly if it had not shown its validity in both aspects. The first mortar vaults were built on an internal layer of elongated and radially arranged scrubber that acted (as they believed) as the bricks of traditional vaults.
The buildings were formed in horizontal courses exactly the same as the walls from which they started, and were supported by the cohesive forces of the mortar to which it was incorporated.
