I’m not familiar with the “modern car” unit of weight.
“With an assumed average weight of 300 to 400 grams per book, the weight of around 15 modern cars is currently stored in Schröder’s detached house.”
350 grams x 70,000 books = 24,500 kg. About 54,000 lbs.
Can a ‘typical’ house bear that weight??
Depends on the size of the house and both the flooring and the foundation. Just before that the article mentions that a structural engineer was consulted and said it was fine, and you get a lot of mileage out of having most of the weight connected to the frame.
4.90 x the mass of an African bull elephant 2.04 x the mass of a London double decker bus 0.122 x the mass of a blue whale
http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/
Why the article didn’t express it in units of blue whale is beyond me.
When it comes to space, Shirly the volume of Olympic swimming pools would be more apt?
They also need to say which country's car it is. In France or Italy it'll be an efficient 900-1,000kg Renault or Fiat. In Germany a 1,800kg BMW. In the US, a Sherman tank, https://www.jalopnik.com/youre-not-wrong-american-trucks-and....
> Can a ‘typical’ house bear that weight??
Modern builds codes require living areas to support 30-40 pounds per square foot live load so while you wouldn't want to pack it all in a 1k sq ft second floor apartment, it's doable in a larger space.
If it's an old house that was overbuilt before building codes were optimized, chances are it can support it. It also matters a lot whether this is an upper story, or just a single floor detached house sitting on a concrete foundation.
A square foot is bigger than the area used by a person standing and people mostly weigh more than 40 pounds so that seems unlikely to be the design criteria for places people walk.
You're confusing the concept of concentrated load and the uniform load for a floor or room. See page 7 of the HUD guide [1], but local building codes may be stricter. Materials like floor boards must be able to support 250-300 lbs in the center between supports, but that's very different from a whole floor supporting 250 psf.
If you manage to squeeze 400 people weighing an average 150 lbs each into the average 400 sq ft apartment room, it will probably suffer structural damage unless it's a on a solid ground floor. That's one of the factors that goes into calculating the room and building "occupancy limit" signs you see in public places.
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/publications/pdf/res2000_2.pdf