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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

because we like real buildings :)

now seriously: i have seen some wood structure in northern Europe. but in general, using bricks creates sturdier, better isolated houses. that can resists for centuries, literally. they don't mold. they don't burn. so why not? it's just better from my point of view.

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Wood has advantages. For one, insulation is easier. A lot of the current best practices for insulating a brick building are basically to build a different kind of building, insulate it, and then add a cosmetic brick facade. But in a Mediterranean climate insulation is less of a concern and some thermal mass to even out the evening vs daytime temperature is enough. Sturdy is a matter of what you're trying to achieve - for example wood is superior in earthquake zones. But the real deciding factor is the cost of materials and labor - in much of Europe wood is more expensive and craftspeople are more familiar with other techniques. The converse is true for much of the USA. Wood is also just as long lived - hundreds of years if well maintained and kept dry (at least in regions where termites aren't endemic). The biggest problem with short lived American residential construction isn't the wood but instead the use of engineered materials and fixtures with finite lifespans. For example laminate flooring and older plastic water piping which is expected to last only a few decades before needing to be gutted and rebuilt.

And they don't evolve. They are hard to replace and are expensive. Most Houses need to last 30 or 50 years. European Houses last twice as long. Instead of modern houses there are so many old bad isolated houses with chimneys for firewood instead of heat pumps and solar roofs.

I think I disagree, from experience, old houses can be retrofitted quite successfully to the modern age, while wooden houses just seem to age much faster.

Plenty of hundred and more year old wooden houses where I live in Norway. It can be hard to tell though until you see someone take off the external planks to renew them and you seethe solid baulks of timber underneath.

My wooden house was built in 1953 with a concrete watertight cellar serving as the foundation. The wood doesn't start until more than half a metre above ground. I see no reason why it shouldn't last another fifty years or more.

> Most Houses need to last 30 or 50 years

Why? It seems absurd to me to only have a dwelling last for half a lifetime. This view seems to assume a disposable, consumerist logic, which seems at odds in my view both from reasonable use of energy and time and with a sustainable civilization.

>Why?

Your average house in the city is going to get bulldozed after 30-50yr because in that time things will change enough that someone is going to want to develop the site into something else.

Your average farm house is probably a 200yr structure.

Your average house in an European city is going to stand for 100 years or more.

I once made a friend who is a property developer very happy by pointing out that his new building (built with traditional materials) in Edinburgh's New Town might still be standing in a 1000 years whereas I'm lucky if anything I do lasts 10 years.

"Most Houses need to last 30 or 50 years"

I've never lived in anything that wasn't at least 50 years old and usually at least 200 years old - so that seems very odd to me. Mind you, I appreciate different countries and cultures etc.

Next you will be saying that roofs need to be replaced every 10 years! ;-)

> they don't mold

Having lived in a European house with 50cm thick stone walls that had a mold problem, I disagree with this statement.

Most of Europe outside of the Alps don't really have to worry about earthquakes either.

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