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A new house being built down the street from me
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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What do you normally build houses with?
Here in Europe, we use mostly cinder blocks or bricks. I guess wood is more common in Northern Europe and Switzerland
In California we use wood because it flexes during earthquakes. There may be damage during a big one but at least the house is less likely to collapse on you.
In earthquakes in NZ the wooden houses flex for sure. What kills you is the brick chimney falling through the roof.
isnt brick an excellent insulator?
Pretty neat, I've never seen masonry like this before.
I'll point out that the webbing is likely strong, but considering the lack of ductility, this seems likely to fail during an earthquake. What're these called, I'd like to look into them more.
In Europe we use reinforced concrete for the same purpose. Don't know if it works but it's the way it's done.
Wait, are earthquakes common in Europe?!
Italy ils pretty shaky, Portugal too. Southern France is waiting for its own Big One.
For reference, nowhere in Western Europe is even close to the much of the west coast of the Americas in terms of seismic activity.
And also because there's no snow or serious rain. Took me years to get used to the flimsy houses here, they wouldn't last a year back in my country.
I don't know about that. I've lived in a typical "flimsy" American wooden house in an area that had a lot of crazy weather with extreme winds and even a couple of tropical storms. That house had absolutely no issue with those. These houses are a lot stronger than they look. They flex but don't break.
I live in the Pacific Northwest where it rains quite a bit. Wood houses are fine in the rain as long as the moisture barrier and roof have been installed correctly.
Canada also builds houses out of wood. There's pretty serious snow here and the houses work great.
I also live in one of the the windiest cities in Canada . The asphalt shingles have blown off houses frequently, but the houses themselves are solid.
I'm pretty sure those wooden houses in Canada are built differently from wooden houses in California. The ones I've seen are thin wooden struts covered with some drywall.
Edit: and just saying "flimsy" by comparison to the usual reinforced concrete structures back home. I now own a home in California and it's definitely solid.
So funnily enough, 2x4 exterior walls meet code for 3 stories, but where I am, it doesn’t meet the insulation requirements of minimum r-20, so it’s normally built with 2x6.
If we did that in the US west coast, they would crack and fall apart from tectonic plate shift. You need to build things to be flexible for earthquakes and general shift.
I live in a 100 year old farm house in California and every spring and fall we have to move the strike plate (thing the door latch nubbin goes into) on the front door up or down about 3/4 inch due to seasonal house shifting. The door stops closing and we know it's spring time!
Steel reinforcement is what keeps them up. At least it's supposed to.
The structure would still be damaged, although it may be “standing”.
It doesn’t work, it’s been tested plenty by people far smarter than either of us.
It would stick crack and crumble around the steel. It wouldn't work here, which is why it against building codes here.
That's a really poor argument to pass down to people.
Solutions exist to make buildings earthquake resilient and the USA created a good part of it.
Vibration dampeners, structure stress relievers, special mortars and concretes, specific structural geometry, etc.
There is no reason why the US should keep its attachment to wood construction. Tornado alley would vastly improve if house were to shift from match sticks and hope to brick and mortar with reinforced concrete foundations.
Tornado alley is a completely different part of the US than the West Coast, which is specifically what I was talking about. It's like 2000 miles away. Tornado alley doesn't have earthquakes, so this discussion doesn't even apply to that. Bust now that were talking about it, in tornado alley, houses at least do have a brick exterior around the wood.
I picked Tornado Alley because it's low hanging fruit; I'll get to that again.
USA has a fixation for wood construction, completely unreasonable and unjustifiable. There are several countries and regions in the world with sysmic activity that do not opt to build in wood.
Japan sits atop a zone of tectonic plate subduction. Hearthquakes are not unknown to them and they build with modern materials. Tokyo, with its extreme population density, is built to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes. Are the USA dumber than Japan?
Regarding Hurricane Alley, wrapping a woodframe with brick doesn't make the structure sturdier, just makes it heavier and more prone to break under stress, as the brick work won't have structural role.
A properly built modern brick or block structure has a super structure reinforced with rebar and concrete, which then receives the brick/block work to finish the building, with some walls being part of the superstructure of the building. This forms a monolithic construction that tends to be very stuborn and stays in place unless something blows it to pieces. Older buildings used other techniques, usually tied to the brickwork itself to create load bearing structures.
That's because Europe has had many more centuries worth of deforestation. The greatest resource the Americas had to offer to Europe was essentially unlimited lumber.
And we wasted a lot of our forests on superfluous things like war ships - see the Castillan plateau which is now a dry and barren land.
Why aren't they replanting?
Once you've destroyed an ecosystem, it takes a lot of effort to bring back. Often you can't just expect to plant the same type of trees as before and expect it to take.
There are ways to introduce things gradually, but it's not an on/off switch.
Plus there are entire keystone species of trees that blights drove to actual or morphological extinction. I don't know about European species, but the mountains of appalachia used to be covered in massive American Chestnut trees that were so big around at the trunk they were on par with west coast species. After the blight, you can still find groves of chestnut trees, but its like they're a different species - they live 7-9 years and die basically around the time they first mast. They never live long enough to really leave the sapling phase.
In Florida houses are also built from cinder blocks because wood is too weak against hurricanes.
Edit: interiors can be built from wood, but all exterior walls are made with cinder blocks.
So that people can remain secure like the third little pig!
Exteriors are wood too, hurricane straps. Basically metal connectors connect everything from ground across the roof to the ground again.
Interesting. Here in California, building brick structures is prohibited because of the risk during earthquakes.
We have plenty of brick houses here too, but they all are still built around wooden frames for the most part
something like this for example
Or this
That appears to be a military bunker of some sort
It does, doesn't it? That's before surfacing is done.
I was thinking more like a commercial building than a residential.
In Europe? Bricks and mortar
I understand a lot of homes in Europe are not well insulated, and weren't built with it in mind. Climate change is causing problems with this design deficit.
That is mainly specifically a UK problem. Most homes in Europe are pretty decently to excellently insulated.
It's not like it's a "wood house" though just the framing is softwood lumber. The foundation is reinforced poured concrete, there's steel support braces, the ties and hardware are likely zinc coated steel, roof is asphalt shingles or steel, wind bracing is lumber or steel rods depending on code, could even have exterior brick or vinyl siding.