It’s really just a fun thought experiment, i was wondering if molten lava (so already surfaced) could be a usable material for construction. Let’s say you have an active volcano nearby and you can harvest lava, could you use it to build walls or buildings? I mean make something durable.
It’s both a noob but kinda tricky question but google is not really helping out in this. My thought process was that if you could use lava (for construction) when it’s still molten (with a mould or something) and it hardens into a rock, would it be strong and lasting enough to be good enough for construction material? Or if it’s not good enough naturally, could there be an artifical way to “tune it up” and make it into a durable material? For example adding some kind of adhesive or some kind of catalist to start or speed up crystallization?
If it needs some artifical help, is there even a reasonable way to speed up crystallization (so not something like continuous pressure and heat like it would happen naturally underground)? So turning igneous rock into some kind of metamorphic rock with either mixing something to it or with some chemical process (or combined) maybe? I don’t know if this is even possible but if it works in theory, how much time would it take to transform? A few days, a few thousand years or tens of thousands of years?
Don’t take it too seriously, it’s really just a fun thought experiment from a non-geologyst, mostly just guessing, but i’m interested if there is a professional view on this :)