I'm perfectly fine with brick-and-mortar houses (and concrete sky-scrapers). Brick houses have less fuel for fires, better load-bearing properties (pros), although they take longer to construct.
Brick is just siding. What's the frame made out of?
You can use wood, you can use steel, you can use concrete with rebar. Those are your only real options.
In the US, you will frequently see 2-3 story houses framed with wood and with a brick siding. I'm in one right now. Anything higher than 3 stories will be done with steel or concrete.
Wood is cheaper than steel and lasts for hundreds of years if properly cared for, which is why it's preferred for smaller residential structures.
Same way as usual, except you use concrete or metal for beams, and e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-core_slab between the beams. For brick, archways e.g. catalan vaults, you can do pretty amazing things with brick archs: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html
> Even if it's a single story, how do you make a roof?
You can do them the same way, though a wood bent to support e.g. a tile roof tends to be more common (having just a wood bent is a far cry from a wood house).
For brick an mortar houses, the "frame" is also made of brick[1]. All the walls are load-bearing, so there is no actual frame + siding: just brickwork. You have a concrete foundation, then you lay your double-thick brick-walls (for all load-bearing sections - all of the outer walls that are expected to support roofing trusses). Internal walls can be a single-brick wide. The only place timber is used is for roofing.
Man, that is going to be a shock to my house that has all of the outside walls, and parts of the foundation, made from brick. Just because your house has a brick veneer doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
In my particular the case the floors and roof are made from wood. The floor joists rest on the brick walls.
Brick. It's bricks all the way down...
To be serious: most houses in India are made of bricks.
There are quite a few all stone building from the dark ages made entirely from stone. Nothing but stone. Not even mortar, I think. They look very similar to modern buildings. If you moved into one today, it wouldn't be a lot less comfortable than it was then.
Byzantine & later Turkish architecture used brick domes and arches as roofing in buildings that are still in good condition. If you stand on the roof, it feels more like a hill than a building.
Unreinforced masonry, by contrast, is a terrible choice for an earthquake zone. It's heavy, brittle, and has approximately zero tensile strength.
After digging some more, it seems like cost is another factor.
I suspect our backgrounds subconsciously color our opinions though: my childhood home (and 99% of homes I have ever visited) were brick and mortar, maybe that is why I am partial to it.
A rammed earth building becomes a pre-dug grave when there's an earthquake.
It's a strange US tradition. It's also regional. Until 2002, New York State prohibited most wood construction, and Chicago still restricts it severely. On the other hand, in earthquake country, unreinforced brick is prohibited.
(I live in a cinder-block house. It was built in 1950 by a commercial builder as his own residence, and he built the structure like a commercial building. It's very solidly built. This is quite unusual for Silicon Valley.)
Bricks are a problem in earthquake prone regions. Even brick cladding on wooden frames tends to fall off and hit people on the head.