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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

What about surviving fires without structural weakening? An average apartment building has to endure many fires over its lifetime.

(Maybe it's a nonproblem and you can replace the damaged wood easily, or the fires don't typically do permanent damage, i don't know.)

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Actually timber has a nice property of loosing strength gradually and slowly in case of fire, giving time for people to escape. Steel and concrete reinforced structures tend to collapse when a certain temperature is reached.

Steel and concrete buildings need a huge amount of time to get fires spread enough and hot enough to collapse, except in freak catastrophes like jet plane crashes.

It's a well known and not uncommon failure mode:

https://youtu.be/8XMTALBYRNA?t=40

https://youtu.be/LB9wwTmrMYA?t=15

Fireproofing steel beams has been practiced since the 1950s. (https://www.asbestos.com/products/fireproofing-fire-preventi...)

Yes, but my point was that after a "routine" fire the building might be declared weakened and require big overhauls or teardown, whereas a traditional apt building can stroll through many small/moderate fires. Because eg a 50 apartemnt building over 100 years is likely to experience many fires. This may impact investoe expected roi and/or insurance costs.

as a layman, i assume that our wood techniques are not yet at the level where you can use it for twin tower scale buildings, but this raises an interesting question for me anyway. if such a building had all its structural elements made of wood, would it be likely to suffer the same catastrophic weakening in the event of a 767 strike?

ever played jenga?

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