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Comment by NullPrefix | Hacker News Reader

>Most "brick" or "stone" you see in new construction is some prefab panel glued to something

Prefix that with "In the States".

What countries is brick still popular for primary construction? Japan is wood, China and much of Asia is majorly concrete. Europe?

Africa

All new builds in N. Ireland are still brick, and I'm presuming the same is true in Ireland and the rest of the UK as well.

Mexico.

For personal homes, I think brick is commonly in use in Austria, and other European countries. But the bricks used are quite different from the small bricks in this article. The modern bricks are much larger and largely hollow. These air chaimbers make them lighter and also offer better heat insulation. The bigger size makes them faster to lay.

E.g., something like this: https://www.ziegelwerk-wenzel.de/produkte/w09-425

Brick is by far the most common in the UK. Usually brick outer wall with an insulation gap and an aerated concrete block on the inner wall. Sometimes two concrete blocks if it's to be rendered (stucco?).

Oak wooden frame is sometimes (can be expensive) used but the wooden cladding approach is very rare. That said prefab panels which combine stud work insulation etc are sometimes used. Not particularly commonly but they are quite new. I'd have made pre-fab panels for my workshop but I ended up using brick as the fire rating made building control regulations easier to pass. It took me a long time to lay all the bricks though so I may have made the wrong decision!

Wood tends to rot in the UK, unless it's oak, which is almost - but not entirely - indestructible.

Brick is very popular because there's plenty of clay in the south and parts of the north, and it's relatively cheap and robust.

But it's usually used for smaller houses. There are some pre-WWII brick apartment blocks, but modern apartments tend to use the international standard concrete core and curtain wall approach.

Yep. My house, and all neighbors around live in brick houses. In my country people have this strange notion from Hollywood movies that if house isn't made from bricks, you can punch though the walls with a fist :) And we also know kid stories about tree piggies.

Even now folks in India (my home country) are always amused when they see an American house being built. They say "it looks like it was built from toothpicks" – and my answer is always "have you actually held a 2x4? Hardly a toothpick."

I'm not sure about the structural pros and cons of wood vs brick, but from what I've seen here in the mid-atlantic, brick is nowadays used more as a decorative outside layer, rather than a superior structure (for homes at least).

A few years ago, a kid on a dirt bike thought he was being chased by the police and cut through a subdivision. He hit something, wiped out and was thrown into the side of a $600k McMansion at 10-15 mph.

The construction was poor and the impact caused the glue holding outside on the house to fail... most of the side of the house fell off.

Houses in Indonesia mostly use bricks.

India

Most new houses in Brazil are made of red bricks.

Concrete block are more common for buildings but red bricks are still heavily used.

Historical buildings were usually made of solid red bricks. Then for some reason (maybe new areas being populated with lots of wood), they started using wood for houses.

I've never seen a new house made of wood around these areas.

India.

Its just bricks for everything.

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