As someone who has lived in the US and Europe, I have made similar jokes. That said I've come to realize there's many advantages to the US way and in some respects the house I grew up in was massively overbuild:
Advantages of timber frame:
* Safer in earthquake
* Easier to do remodeling tasks like changing layouts, plumbing, wiring
* Easier to DIY
* Cheaper
Most of the apparent disadvantages can be offset:
* I've never seen it happen, but you are right drywall is easily damaged. It's also easily replaced though.
* Noise and thermal insulation can be added
* Flammability is mitigated with firestops, fire resistant drywall and codes that require multiple points of egress. Larger wood buildings have sprinklers.
I concur with the other reply to your comment - Americans (I assume you're American) have a love affair with drywalling and timber framing that astounds me. It seems like it's a recipe for poor soundproofing and massive fire hazard.
From a bricks and concrete and steel perspective, wooden-framed houses with drywall interiors certainly have many advantages, for example far easier infrastructure maintenance - a lot of the piping and wiring remains openly accessible or is just in drywall. If you need to replace a leaky pipe in an european house, you're going to absolutely wreck the room. If you need to replace the wiring or want to pull new wires (e.g. network or CATV), well there is no pulling new wires. Only wrecking the rooms with a wall chaser. Remodeling seems way easier.
Well, some American states are extremely hot and dry by UK standards - meaning issues like rot and rust are less of a problem.
And Americans build a lot of detached single-storey houses [1], which mitigates some of the disadvantage of wood: Noisy neighbours? You've got a six-foot-plus air gap between your houses. Fire risk? Escape is trivial when every room has a ground floor window. Rain getting onto the wooden walls? Much reduced by a porch stretching around the entire building. Needs regular repainting? Easy when it's a single-storey building.
Wood is also substantially cheaper in the US than in the UK - so while it might not look like a cheap material from the prices at British wood stockists, Americans who call it a cheap way of building aren't paying those prices!
It's a kind of joke among Europeans. The American building material standards are pretty different.
It's not without a bit of truth. We do build homes much more cheaply and without the assumption that the home will last 200 years. It's a side effect of massive land resources and cheap material costs that Europe doesn't have. We're also a really new country in comparison, and much of our growth occurred during the rise of the automobile and massive roadworks construction, so building a cheap building fast out in the sticks is not only viable, it's attractive.
Long term this is folly, as it depends on cheap energy. But all that said, a properly constructed home from wood studs with plywood sheathing and gypboard internal walls isn't intrinsically shoddy. It's actually very strong and very light, and in large parts of the US, entirely appropriate. Modern engineered wood is amazing stuff.
Wood doesn't get any weaker with age. Assuming no water damage, 200 year old timber houses are just as durable now as when they were built. In fact 200 year old timber houses in America are more durable than anything you can build now because the quality of wood 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, is better than what you can get now, and the quality of wood 100 years ago in America is better than anything Europe has had for multiple hundreds of years!
Also drywall is a nice material for many reasons. Need a new wall? One day of work. Want to remove a wall? If there isn't a support beam, not an issue. American houses can be reconfigured as the needs of family and society change. My 1950s house has had walls removed and added throughout its life and owners, which is why it has an up to date flow despite what was a very constricted original floor plan.
Also dry wall is easy to fix and paint.
Water is an issue, yes. That part sucks.
Finally, in regards to natural disasters, wood construction can withstand earthquakes far better than stone construction!
Scandinavia uses timber frequently. People use what they have and a lot of Europe doesn't have ample timber supplies. North America does so it's used and it's a fine material with a lot of upsides. Modern timber framed homes are quite fire safe and have a few ways to slow the spread of fire down so it doesn't rage. But old ones are generally not for a variety of reasons.
I'd guess this has a lot to do with the availability of resources, too. Timber is much cheaper in the US, so it's not economical to build with sturdier materials. Even some of the larger apartment complexes I've lived in were wood-framed.
Huh, is this why the timber framing with clay brick or wattle and daub infill is so classically (old) European? Less wood needed, but unnecessary in the US with its plentiful trees?
I see a lot of sentiment against the post-WW2, american, timber-based style of construction on HN and I've never really understood it.
I view modern american residential construction as a model of efficiency. Why build a house out of brick or stone when timber is completely sufficient, and the latter is much, much cheaper to come by? It's not like timber just magically stops working one day - there are plenty of houses in older parts of the US that are 100+ years old. Any argument along the lines of "they don't build them like they used to" is likely ignoring survivorship bias among older homes.
And for the record, ceilings over 8FT are not a luxury item in the US. Any major home improvement store sells framing lumber and drywall in a variety of sizes over 8FT long:
Family recently bought a house in the US, and it is pretty. But it is mainly wood by the looks of it.
I do wonder how well that works (for y'know, not being fire hazard and not being terribly insulated, being able to whither bad weather conditions, ..).
I have not visited their new place yet so I can't comment on what it is like to live there. But houses in Europe just look more sturdy.
That is one thing that makes me think investing in housing in the US is a bad choice. The houses just don't seem like they are build to last. (Again I am judging it just by the looks and I could be completely wrong about it!)
On the West Coast nearly all residential buildings have a wood frame with plywood on the outside and drywall (gypsum sandwiched between two layers of paper) on the inside.
The decorative/weatherproof finish outside of the plywood is increasingly made with concrete products, which can be made to look like stucco, brick, or even wooden planks or shingles.
The advantages of this sort of construction are that it's inexpensive (wood, after all, grows on trees, which we have plenty of around here), fast (particularly when using nail guns), and doesn't require a great deal of experience or training at the laborer level. It also has good seismic performance and is easy to remodel.
The downsides are that the structure is vulnerable to fire, water, insects, and stray cannonballs.
But in most cases the short lifespan is a good fit for the rapidly changing geography and demographics we have in North America.
In Europe houses are typically seen as something you pass down for generations. That durability is hard to achieve with wood frames and drywall.
But the major driving force is probably wood prices. We have less forest, and those forests have been farmed for wood for centuries. Long straight hard timber takes way to long to grow to be used for anything but accent pieces. (Of course that's a bit of an oversimplification, countries with more forest like e.g. Sweden tend to build wooden houses in the countryside).
In industrial buildings you sometimes see something akin to American construction methods, but they usually use aluminum instead of wood
A lot of EU dwelling construction is built to be as energy efficient as possible. They use CMUs VS timber, and plaster their bricks instead of hanging drywall in large part because they can make it more energy efficient but also because Europe lacks ample timber supplies in many areas compared to North America. But energy is far more expensive in the EU than in North America so it's more important to save money there. Saving that, insulation in American homes is really good today and I believe R15 is the minimum allowed in new construction.
The drawbacks are European construction tends to be very bland and basic and small compared to homes in America. They also don't have HVAC (I think they'll regret this if the planet continues to heat) or forced air and tend to use radiant heating which is great, but requires high levels of insulation to be effective.
Saying that, you can have your timber framed home have thicker walls or have rockwool, etc put into the internal walls which will deaden noise like old plaster/lath walls.
I know, it just seems like preference is much stronger against them / there are fewer of them in NA. Maybe because if you build your houses with a timber frame you need an air gap not to heat the neighbours? Also I suppose the cost saving of constructing like that is a lot less than with brick or even breeze blocks.
Every thread that's ever about US housing construction, some Europeans chime in to talk about how strange it seems to them to build houses out of wood, rather than stone/brick/etc that, as you put it, will "last for a very long time".
Here's the thing, though: most Europeans seem to be suffering some pretty serious misconceptions.
First, Americans build out of wood because we have wood, lots of it. Europeans don't skip wood because brick or stone is superior -- it's because Europe is largely deforested. Europe doesn't have wood for people to use at the same scale.
Second, wooden houses last a plenty long time. "80-150+ years", as you put it, is entirely expected for a well-constructed wooden house. Neighborhoods that date from, say, 1850, e.g. in New England, have plenty of old wooden homes that people adore because of their character.
Third, wood construction has a ton of advantages. Not only is it less expensive to build, but it's tremendously more energy-efficient when filled with insulation. Brick and stone homes are absolute energy guzzlers both in hot summers and cold winters. And remember, e.g. in New York State you're dealing with 100°F (38°C) summers and -10°F (-23°C) winters. Insulation matters.
The idea that American homes are somehow lower quality or shorter-lasting because they're built out of wood is a myth through and through. To the contrary, they're built out of wood because that's the best construction for local climate and availability.
Houses have been timber framed in the UK since the sixties. There is nothing wrong with timber frame houses, Bergen gets much more rain than most places in the UK and is still mostly timber houses. I've lived in a timber framed house clad in horizontal planks for the last thirties years in Norway (the house was built in 1952) and it's fine. Modern Norwegian houses are often made of kits of parts but that generally makes them better not worse.
It might be that the UK has more than its fair share of cowboy builders. It is not the building technique that is at fault but the execution of it.
High quality timber framed houses are built in Europe and the US. Bricks have a much larger carbon footprint, are more expensive, do not insulate as well as a wooden frames with proper insulation. Brick walls also take longer to assemble. Timber framed houses can also be cladded or plastered on the outside.
I think it's not that people in Europe prefer sturdier stuff, I think it's that all the wood has already been cut down, so timber construction is not priced cheaply enough to offset its disadvantages vs. masonry.
> Something that won't rot away or creak in the wind.
Even in parts of the US that have a much harsher environment than any part of Europe -- extremely hot and humid weather conducive to wood rot, termite infestations, hurricanes and tornadoes -- people still build with wood because it's a lot cheaper. Sometimes I think it's strange, but it also makes sense, I suppose.
Advantages of timber frame:
* Safer in earthquake * Easier to do remodeling tasks like changing layouts, plumbing, wiring * Easier to DIY * Cheaper
Most of the apparent disadvantages can be offset:
* I've never seen it happen, but you are right drywall is easily damaged. It's also easily replaced though. * Noise and thermal insulation can be added * Flammability is mitigated with firestops, fire resistant drywall and codes that require multiple points of egress. Larger wood buildings have sprinklers.
At this point I mostly have aesthetic complaints.
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