Why the arbolite structure built during the Soviet era in my village did not stand for 10 years

I want to share a short history of one building. During the Soviet era, town-forming enterprises in the villages built not only their own infrastructure, but also social ones. One of these facilities in my village, where I was born and raised, was a large gym. Unfortunately, no photographs have survived. And if they do exist, they have remained with someone only in paper photo albums. I did not find it on the Internet. Inside, the gym looked like this:

From the inside it is clapboard-covered, from the same neighboring timber industry (the gym was built by the forces and means of the timber industry). There were also wooden floors. It was in the early 90s in one of the villages in the Abansky district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The walls were erected from large slabs of wood chips (arbolite), which were brought. Although, they could be cast on the spot. Raw materials (chips) - can be made from sawmill waste. Heated from the boiler room of the timber industry. From the outside, the gym looked less attractive and was roughly similar to this house, only painted:

But the gym existed for just a few years. At the end of the 90s, the timber industry ceased to exist and the structure remained essentially no-man's. The village administration did not take on the balance of the gym (there was even less money in the treasury than it is now). As always, the local residents took advantage of this - and everything that could be stolen and stripped: lining, slate, etc.

As a result, only walls remained, which were dilapidated and crumbled every year. And later the new owner of the forestry enterprise decided to demolish the building. They brought down the slabs and trampled them into the ground with a bulldozer. There would be concrete slabs - dismantling is not so easy to do. And, perhaps, a more capital structure found another application. They opened a workshop, made a box for equipment. Brick and concrete barns are still standing.

What is the conclusion from this whole story? The collapse and decline in the country have done their job. This is the root cause. Decline leads to ruin. As for the material: wood concrete is a good, warm material, but in an unfinished or open state it quickly collapses due to water ingress. Ice breaks the structure of the material. Arbolite here does not have good characteristics. The ability of a material to withstand internal deformations during temperature changes relative to zero degrees is called frost resistance.

If you are building from wood concrete, cover it with a facade as soon as possible. Now there are products with outdoor decorative tiles:

It acquires its heat-saving properties only with external and internal plastering. Without this, it will be like a sieve, blown out and get wet. An arbolite house cannot be left without a roof for several years. Not only the upper blocks will lose their strength, but the entire wall as well.

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Photos are taken from open sources, from Yandex. Pictures

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