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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

Here's the great thing about wood: every age is the wood age. We have always put the most advanced tool technology of the age toward working with wood, because wood has been eternally useful. And in turn, wood-based technology has advanced with the tools used to craft it. In a symbiotic relationship, those uses of wood advance the uses of other materials, too.

Almost every building today (most of them are small house-like structures) is made of wood, and it has been that way for recorded history. Wood shows up in many places where you would expect humans to have come up with a more advanced material today, too.

In that way, classifying a "wood age" is not all that useful.

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The electrical distribution grid where I live is mostly wood and pottery.

Probably every, or at least almost every, age is the wood age by bulk. But in terms of high-tech manufacturing, every age could probably be called the ceramic age. Pottery, glass, spaceship tiles, computer chips.

Metals get outsized attention I think because we use them to kill each other, so switching to a new metal is quite dramatic.

Uranium being a recent example

Metallurgy is a very specific form of ceramics. Glass too.

In Europe almost no building is made of wood, except for decorative floors.

There are many countries in Europe where most buildings are made of wood.

most buildings? any example of such a country?

Norway. At least most buildings where people live. That’s not exactly the same statement that most people live in wood buildings, since more people can live in a single concrete block. But I would venture that at least half the population lives in wooden buildings.

If you want a detached house (or a townhouse) in Norway it means wood.

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia etc. etc.

Not all but many of small houses are wood and 50% of the Swedish population lives in these houses[1], some of the bigger houses are wood as well. Construction relies heavily on wood. This was not my experience in many other countries, even when there was wood in the vicinity. I think the readily availability of spruce and pine is one reason. It would be interesting to know statistics from Denmark because in the south of Sweden wood is that used as much.

You can see this in the tradition of constructing fences as well, if there is a lot of wood people use lots of it. In the south near Denmark the tradition is to use as little as possible.

[1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...

That's actually part of the history of the new world. One of the primary uses of wood in Europe throughout the colonial period was boat-building. As such, one of the primary exports of early settlers and colonial corporations in the British colonies was timber, for boats. Eventually, it led to an indigenous boat-building industry, and from that, American mercantilism.

Depends where in Europe. I'd say in Northern Europe, especially in Scandinavia wood is more frequently used when building homes.

In other places the roof structure is often made of wood. And although technically it's not part of the building, concrete forms used for foundation/walls are mostly made of OSB/plywood.

You must have never lived outside of a city if that is your perception of buildings. Most of the buildings I have seen in the European countryside are made with a significant amount of wood. Even brick and stone buildings will often have a timber structure. Most buildings are not in cities, in general.

Scandanaivans use a particularly large amount of wood, even in their city centers and even for skyscrapers.

I guess it depends on the region. In Italy, the vast majority of buildings, both in the city and in the countryside, are in stone, bricks and concrete. In some mountainous region in the second half of the 19th century there was a mandated reconstruction of old buildings in bricks and stone to prevent fires.

In northern Europe the building style is entirely different and most houses still have a wooden frame.

I believe AAC is really popular in Europe too (which I suppose could just be considered another form of concrete, but it provides decent insulation, making it more suitable to colder climates).

> Most buildings are not in cities, in general.

Citation? It doesn't stand to reason given that most people live and work in cities, not in rural areas, especially in Europe [1].

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?location...

Most people live and work in cities, but most city buildings house far more than one person.

I'm including suburbs and towns in my definition of "cities", meaning urban settlements. I'd like to see some quantitative data either way.

I'd wager that even under that definition most city houses in Europe house more than one family. At least in continental Europe, I am not so sure about Britain. But most of Europe doesn't have extensive single family home suburbs in the way the US has.

Indeed: https://frich.no/wood-hotel-by-frich-s

Depends on when each country ran out of wood.

Good grief, which part of Europe are you from ... Concretia?

Even in the UK we describe our normal building habit as "sticks n bricks" and there are a lot of sticks. Under my feet, right now, there are wooden joists and a plywood subfloor. I live on a hill. Some ground floor (first floor) rooms have solid conc. sub floors but the other half has the usual (1930s) two foot cavity, involving brick piers on conc raft and wooden joists to slap the floor across.

We still have a large stock of wattle and daub cottages with thatched roof too.

Every other country in Europe I have ever visited has rather a lot of wooden buildings in it too. I lived in West Germany for some years, for example.

Sticks and bricks lends itself to an environment with plenty of mud and fewer trees. It is quite brittle so no earthquakes thank you. The UK's largest recent earthquake was basically a knee trembler.

That will be the shires then!

I have never heard the phrase 'sticks n bricks'. That is technical parlance. Nobody in the history of Eastenders has used that phrase.

It is true that there are wattle and daub houses but it is the one thatched roof cottage that you notice next to the busy A road, not the thousands of semis in the neighbouring estates.

In Glasgow there are large parts of the city where only some doors are made of wood. Everything else is concrete, steel, plastic and glass. These are 'closes' (apartments) which is different to the English 'close' (street). I am not sure wood would work for 'closes'.

London has a lot of wood, but so much of London might as well be from Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. Landlords do not spend money so those sash windows and wooden floors are there for an eternity. West Germany has far better housing stock with details such as windows that close.

Modern German buildings are mostly concrete blocks/CMUs with concrete subfloors and wood mostly used to carry the roof. But of course that's a somewhat recent development, sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Before that there was a lot of brick with wooden floors, and before that either stone with wooden subfloor or wooden frames filled with clay.

Of course this is somewhat region dependent, and wood is definitely making a comeback again

Few buildings in Europe are today solely made from wood, but nearly every building will be part wood. From the frame on which walls and floors are built up with other materials up to the roof where for most houses the very structure is made from wood, it's clear wood is one of the most essential building components. To be honest I struggle to think of any building I've ever seen that has no wood - except for semi-subterranean structures or those built out of natural structures I can't think of any.

In Spain I can tell you that wood is very rarely used except in a decorative fashion. My mom is an architect and will often look down on the fact that most North American single family homes, and even more complex buildings like five-over-ones, use wood structurally.

Why look down on structural uses of wood?

In England we definitely use wood in pretty much all houses. The roof trusses, the partition walls, the floorboards, beams to hold the ceiling/upstairs, fixtures (kitchen and bathroom fitted cabinets), doors etc.

I would guess the person you’re responding to doesn’t mean the hidden bits, as I’ve spent time in Spain and definitely come across wood in new buildings.

A potential reason for less obvious wood, Spain has less requirement for insulation than the UK and would benefit from slimmer walled, brick/concrete houses with no wooden partitions holding insulation for cooler temperatures during their peak heat.

That sounds like a recent development. Without reinforced concrete and steel there is no way to span walls without timber beams.

> That sounds like a recent development.

Reinforced concrete is almost two hundred years old by now [0]. How many people live in homes built over one hundred years ago? Not only have many of those old homes been replaced, but the population is much larger now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforced_concrete#History

> How many people live in homes built over one hundred years ago?

Many people in Europe's historical city centres.

the arch is almost 2500 years old now, and although you do normally use timber beams (or bamboo) to build one, they aren't part of the final structure

vaults, domes, and flying buttresses extend the arch principle to enclose large spaces. there are domes still standing made from unreinforced concrete that are 2000 years old

Indeed, my parents' UK 1785-ish built house is mostly stone, but it has 3 big salvaged wooden beams (salvaged from shipwrecked masts) running through the frame.

Almost every house in Europe (and elsewhere) has a wooden roof frame.

I have lived in multiple houses and flats in different parts of England, and all but one had wooden floors. I am pretty sure all but that had used in roofs and possibly some other places. The same is true for most houses I have been in.

By Europe you mean Legoland?

The structure of near every roof, apart from the skyscrapers, ist made of wood.

most buildings in america are concrete and/or brick, though the usa is an exception. in most of america, wood is used only for roofs and illegal slums, and even most slums are mostly brick

i don't know what the situation is on other continents but i've sure seen a lot of photos and videos of concrete and brick buildings

In dense US cities maybe. Most US homes are built with wood. ~90% of US home constructions are wood framed.

in the comment you are replying to, i specifically said that the usa is an exception to this general rule

Ah, I misread. I rarely come across america used to refer to the collective continents.

The collective continents are not America, but The Americas, given that it is collection or South America and North America with an isthmus connecting them. I believe Brazilian Portuguese and South American Spanish also use the plural to refer to the set of continents.

I was under the impression that the plural was common in English, but the singular was more common in Spanish. I could certainly be wrong though.

yeah, in spanish and portuguese, generally america is considered to be one continent, not two. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9rica begins, for example, "America is the second largest continent on Earth, after Asia."

basically there's a lot of cluelessness going around in this thread by people who've apparently never thought about things like where amerigo vespucci sailed to, what columbus is said to have discovered (by landing where), where the members of the organization of american states are located, where the pan-american highway goes, etc.

Many modern brick buildings, have a wood structure with steel brackets, and the brick is only facing, and is not what is holding up the roof. Older brick homes do have brick structural walls or pillars inside, but in recent decades those are usually re-enforced concrete blocks.

that is sometimes true in a few countries like the usa, but in most of america they have a reinforced concrete structure rather than a wood one. new structural brick is quite rare because brick is weak and expensive

Disregarding the houses, the most popular form of apartment building in the US right now is called a "5 over 1" which has a wood frame on top of a concrete first floor. The facades often aren't wood, but the buildings themselves are usually wood. Most "brick" houses in the US have a brick facade over a wooden house.

The few exceptions are in the densest cities in the US, like New York, where new construction is concrete and steel.

Canada, I am sure, is the same. Mexico and South America, not so sure. I have been around some places in Central America that have tons of wood construction, and so did the parts of Argentina and Brazil I have seen, but you may have better information. Many houses that you think are concrete or brick actually have a wood frame.

Even the concrete and steel houses often start with wood framing of some sort and end with wood as a structural part of any ceilings and roofs. Not to mention stairs, room structures/interior walls, ...

yes, as i said, the usa is an exception. canada is the same as the usa but has a very small number of buildings. argentina, brazil, perú, ecuador, and most of central america are almost entirely reinforced concrete frames filled in with cheap hollow brick and maybe decorated with wood paneling. very poor areas and luxury cabins are sometimes exceptions, and possibly that's where you went in central america

remember there's a billion people living in america. only a third of those are in the usa, and the people in the usa are much more urbanized, meaning less buildings per person. canada is another 4% of the total american population. so roughly three quarters of the buildings in america are outside the usa and canada

My impression is that concrete must be cheaper than wood, given that wood seems mostly used in high income countries and concrete is dominant in low income areas.

it's a somewhat complicated comparison to make, but i think basically the answer is yes

there's also a coincidental factor, though; wood is cheap where forests are abundant, and although having abundant natural resources such as arable land and wood doesn't guarantee wealth, exhausting your natural resources through deforestation and desertification virtually guarantees poverty.

as for 'cheaper', well, the numerator is dollars, but what's the denominator? i would say it's 'house', but neither concrete nor wood is sold by the house; cement and sand and gravel and rebar are sold by the kilo, and wood is sold by the square meter. so we need some way to make them comparable

one approach is to try to compute 'cost per strength', on the theory that a house's worth of materials is enough materials to be strong enough to work as a house. but there are two different kinds of strength involved here. floors and roofs must resist flexure without breaking, and materialswise, that mostly depends on the material's tensile strength. they also must resist impact loadings, which depends on tensile strength but also flexibility: a more flexible floor can elastically absorb a greater impact energy before reaching the same tensile strain, and a tougher material is one that has a higher elastic energy capacity in this sense. walls, on the other hand, mostly must resist compression from above, and typically this mostly depends on their ability to resist buckling, not their material compressive strength. resisting buckling depends on not strength but stiffness: the material of the buckling beam must not bend far enough that the beam's effective compressive stiffness starts to decrease, causing it to bend further

a lot of people confuse strength and stiffness; i recommend watching the first demo in dan gelbart's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxA20Q-Uss, although for most of us it took a lot more than that to get enlightened

reinforced concrete (either pretensioned or in compression) gets its stiffness from sand and gravel, which are cheap as dirt (most of the cost of sand is the truck that delivers it to your building site) and its tensile strength from steel. i think the answer is that steel is in fact very much cheaper than wood per unit of either tensile strength or toughness

on the other hand, people usually build concrete walls to be much, much stiffer than wood-framed walls, so it's common for a given area of wood-framed wall to cost less than the same area of concrete wall. to compensate for this, people very commonly build the floors and frame of a building with reinforced concrete, then fill in the walls with cheap hollow brick. this is i think cheaper than a similarly non-load-bearing wood-frame wall made out of 2×4s and drywall, but not by that much

on the gripping hand, galvanized steel studs are cheaper than wooden 2×4s, and they're starting to become popular for low-cost construction, covered with drywall or cementboard

There is a lot of wood in all houses even in North Concretia. Every house is filled with wood furniture.

The Devonian certainly wasnt a wood age

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