Concrete has horrible greenhouse gas emissions issues that wooden construction doesn't.
The chemical reaction for the cement in concrete generates C02 in a 1:1 ratio with the amount of cement produced. Unless you're capturing it you release 1 ton of C02 for your 1 ton of cement. Steel for rebar is even worse, the ratio of C02 generated is greater than 1:1. None of this includes any of the energy you used to heat any of the ingredients either.
Even plastic is better, some of the Carbon & oxygen get sequestered in the plastic.
A process to completely sequester or not generate any C02 in the production of cement & concrete that was cheap & easy would be a Nobel prize winning innovation. If the whole world switched to that it would be more significant than switching all vehicles in the world to electric.
Is there any comparison available? I've seen concrete and masonry houses built, and while the concrete has a greater carbon footprint, there's little waste compared to wood houses with drywall: wood treatments and coatings, insulating foam, materials wrapped in disposable plastic sheets, etc. Modern wood houses are far from just wood.
I would rather live in a cheaply made wooden house than a cheaply made concrete one. The simple common way to build a wooden house is massively redundant. Concrete houses use post and slab, even in poor countries. So in Nairobi, they were having six building collapses per month.
Your source seems to contradict 'six buliding collapses per month':
"A six-story building collapsed Friday night in Nairobi, killing at least a dozen people. Several buildings in Kenya have collapsed in the past year. Why?"
Easy to work with is the main one. I can do almost everything myself with less time, less equipment, and less chance of injury.
Cheaper (where I am). Let’s WiFi signals through easier, so I need fewer access points.
I’ve worked with both, and the main advantage of concrete would be the sound insulation. But I feel like a quality wood + drywall + insulation installation can come close enough for residential purposes.
Wood is cheaper up to certain scale, less environmental impactful, and flexible in the face of dynamic load changes and construction.
For larger construction, pumped concrete is cheaper to build. It’s generally (but not always) more fireproof without special measures being taken.
You think that concrete is stronger because it looks solid and heavy. In many cases, concrete or other masonry buildings are actually clad buildings with wood or other framing. Also, generally speaking a small scale, poorly built concrete structure will be more solid than a poorly built wooden structure.
I live in an urban house in upstate NY, it’s a wood frame house built in 1925. It’s not a luxury or high-end construction, but there’s no structural reason that it won’t be standing in 2125. Keep a roof on it and control storm water and you’re good to go.
Well, some American states are extremely hot and dry by UK standards - meaning issues like rot and rust are less of a problem.
And Americans build a lot of detached single-storey houses [1], which mitigates some of the disadvantage of wood: Noisy neighbours? You've got a six-foot-plus air gap between your houses. Fire risk? Escape is trivial when every room has a ground floor window. Rain getting onto the wooden walls? Much reduced by a porch stretching around the entire building. Needs regular repainting? Easy when it's a single-storey building.
Wood is also substantially cheaper in the US than in the UK - so while it might not look like a cheap material from the prices at British wood stockists, Americans who call it a cheap way of building aren't paying those prices!
6 foot between detached single family homes only in the densest old city neighborhoods. The legal minimum in most places is now 10. These would be properties that many Americans describe as “right up my neighbors ass”. Your average home in the burbs is going to have 30+ feet between them, especially in the hot dry (read: developed post AC) areas of the US you’re talking about.
> Rain getting onto the wooden walls? Needs regular repainting?
Most “wooden” US homes do not have wood siding. Vinyl is extremely common, and most homes that predate vinyl have had vinyl installed because it eliminates the maintenance associated with painted wood. Mine is decorative masonry. (And I wish I had vinyl)
> Most “wooden” US homes do not have wood siding. Vinyl is extremely common, and most homes that predate vinyl have had vinyl installed because it eliminates the maintenance associated with painted wood. Mine is decorative masonry. (And I wish I had vinyl)
I thought all new homes in the past decade or so came with cement fiber siding like Hardibacker, Durock, or Wonderboard. I have not seen new construction with vinyl siding in a long time (west of Rockies).
Where do you live that vinyl is that common? Where I live almost every house has hardiplank or cedar siding.
Personally I don’t like vinyl siding because it looks cheap and it melts (this seriously happened to a friend of mine - the sun reflected off the windows of his neighbors house and melted his siding.)
This is an interesting post. You wrote: <<Wood is also substantially cheaper in the US than in the UK>>. This is surprising, as it should be easy to import wood from the Nordics or Russia. Maybe the transport costs are to blame?
The UK has wattle and daub wood frame houses that are 500 years old, too. The hatred for wood frame houses in the UK and Ireland is a strange thing, especially considering the pyrite scandal a few years back, the mica one now, and the hideous carbon footprint of concrete.
There are a few people fighting this, https://gracedesign.ie/ makes stunning beautiful house frames, and I'm having my own house built in wood right now. By coincidence, so are the people in the field next to me. But there's decades of prejudice to overcome.
Door and window frames are the only wooden element in most houses. You can instantly see if they have never been replaced, and after 70 - 80 years they look quite old. Now imagine the whole house looking like that.
I live in a 100 year old wooden house. Its got some character due to modifications and its era (1920's). But its been well maintained and there is no apparent reason it wouldn't survive another 100 years.
My last house was built in 1964 and the wood would be considered extravagant by today's standards. It was no fancy house, either, just a garden variety ranch. But it had decent (as I said, not fancy) oak hardwood throughout. Actual 2x4s that weigh 2x as much as fir studs today. Old-growth cedar siding. It was built in an era where it was no big deal to use good wood for everything.
The codes are moving back to 2x4 walls. Since the 1970s 2x6 started becoming common, but that reversed when someone realized you can put 2 inches of foam outside the 2x4, have the same wall thickness (meaning common doors/windows fit), and there is no break in the wall insulation. The wood itself in a board is not great insulation, so the foam around the whole house even while it seems to offer the same r value offers more. (you can also get foam with r values much better than wood, I'm not aware of code requiring that, but some builders offer it as an upgrade).
Note that this foam is foil faced meaning it insulates against radiation energy as well as conduction or convection.
That must be regional. I live in the PNW, and it's pretty temperate here (the last few days notwithstanding...). House construction is still 100% 2x6 for exterior (and interior load-supporting) walls. Most houses are not being built with foam on the outside. I've heard of that happening where it's legitimately cold, though.
I'm sure it is regional. Close climates need more insulation than warmer ones. I've seen variations of this in El Paso (only 1 in foam) for high end housing where the cooling advantages can be sold.
I doubt interior load supporting walls are 2x6. Often there are internal 2x6 walls, but that is to allow extra space for plumbing - 2x4 is plenty strong enough for load bearing in most houses, but toilet drains/vents don't really fit.
This works for bigger studs too! The options presented for the house I'm building now are 70x200mm (about a 3"x8") stud with 200mm interior insulation and 100mm exterior. That's for a very well insulated wall, though.
It doesn't, the 2x6 "fad" went on long enough that you can buy doors and windows sized to that standard. You can use any thickness of wall you want, but if it isn't same thickness as a 2x4 or 2x6 you will have to put forth extra effort to make your doors and windows fit. Use a standard dimension wall and you can buy those to fit.
Not a big deal for a qualified carpenter, but enough extra labor that you will pay extra for it in addition to materials.
This is clearly regional. I'm in the US where we don't measure in MM. Different parts of the world will have different standard sizes. you might be able to import a US standard door if you wanted to use 88.9mm widths for some reason (there is more than enough tolerance to round that to 90mm), but it would be extra effort on your part. The hard part about importing it often codes are designed to limit this, so even if the US door is better it might not meet some standard that shouldn't even required. (this goes both ways, US standards often require things just to limit imports as well)
My current home is a dirt cheap one built during the explosion in housing post world war II. It's wood on top of poured concrete slabs for a foundation (yes, ok, some concrete - maybe something else could have been used? brick?). It has no structural issues. (it has issues due to stupid design decisions from stamping out homes at that time, but none related to the wood).
It is now 60 years old. I imagine it will be standing for a long time to come.
My mom lives in a 110 year old house in one of the wettest regions of the United States. The walls are a bit thin by current standards, just 2x4 even though it's two stories with a basement, but it's holding up fine. Rot has never been a problem. She just keeps up on the routine maintenance -- painting about every 10 years, roof shingles every 25 years. It would still be fine 100 years from now, I expect, though I'm certain that when she passes someone will buy the house, gut it, modernize the wiring, plumbing, and insulation, and then rebuild the interior to look as original as possible. Very popular around this area.
Old houses are amazing if you need to live in them without modern heating and cooling. They're built to work about as well as possible, under those circumstances.
They suck if you want to retrofit them to have modern heating and cooling. The high ceilings, giant windows on all sides, large open attics (vital for temp control without AC!), and generally poor sealing (=great if you need them to survive temp and humidity changes throughout the year, and not turn into a giant mold farm like a modern house would) all work against you.
I looked at a house in Boston that was built in the 1700s, and it had the opposite problem. Ceilings were like 6.5 feet, felt claustrophobic.
Where I live now, ceiling heights are going back up. 10 years ago it was common to have 9 foot ceilings on the first floor, 8 foot on the second. Now it's common to have 9 foot on the second floor as well. And there are a not-insignificant number of houses being built with 10 foot ceilings.
In an air conditioned house, I do not see the purpose of 9ft and 10ft ceilings other than vanity. It just results in more cost to condition air that is above your head.
I would rather spend less on my utility bills, and conserve the energy.
I don't feel too strongly about it, though on balance I like the open feel to 9 foot ceilings. It seems to be standardized on most new houses these days, so unless I have another house built I don't expect to be able to make a choice.
I live near one of a state's first cities in the Midwest. Many of the original buildings, brick and wood alike, are still standing. Those are between 140 and 180 years old.
Many (brick and wood alike) were destroyed by fires and floods.
All in all, the lifespan of wooden structures is more than adequate, and significantly cheaper.
There are whole neighborhoods of 120+ year old wooden houses in the US. If they're cared for they look great. If they're not, they look like shit but are still standing and basically fine as long as water's been kept out (no long-term roof leaks). They're largely made of WTF-good timber by modern standards, but worse construction in other ways (balloon framing is common, for instance, and fire protection is otherwise poor as well).
Further, they're designed to exist without modern heating and cooling, and many still don't have those (or they don't work very well). Yet they stand, and often still have perfectly-aligned original wooden trim work, despite being subject to swings in internal temperature and humidity that'd ruin a modern house in a hurry (modern ones are too air-tight to survive that, aren't built with any care to wood grain direction, and use much lower-quality timber throughout, including for trim, though they may benefit from extensive use of dimensionally-stable plywood).
I live in one of those neighborhoods and the thing that kills our houses (aside from leaking roofs) is poor foundations. I've literally never heard of one of these houses falling over because of a structural issue with the actual timber it's built from. It's either that the wood has rotten because of roofing issues or (more likely) the rubble stone foundations fell apart
edit: and even if some of the wood has rotten you can almost always just replace or sister up that piece and be absolutely fine.
What's interesting to me is you have Europeans marveling at houses built of flimsy wood instead of strong brick and concrete. Yet except for occasional water and termite damage what's failing in these houses is the concrete and brick foundations. Not the wood framing.
Hell, concrete foundations fail badly enough to need repairs pretty commonly within the first few years on new houses, and I don't just mean normal settling. Doing concrete right takes a lot of waiting and is highly dependent on the weather, which usually means even more waiting (for enough days in a row of the right weather). Builders (understandably) hate anything with that kind of potential to throw off a schedule—unpredictability can increase the total time construction takes by much, much longer than the individual delays themselves—so some of them cut corners. They also don't like to let the ground sit as long between excavation and pouring as they should, because time is money.
I wouldn't want a concrete house in the US without inspections so strict that the inspectors basically dictate when & how concrete may be poured, and/or laws explicitly breaking corporate liability protections for failure of concrete within some long time span, or otherwise ensuring that builders care very much that their structures last several decades without needing repair. I suspect they'd be crazy-expensive as a result.
Some people like the old style of architecture, which is possible but very expensive to reproduce with modern techniques (custom masonry, built in carpentry, that kind of thing)
my house is well over a hundred years old and was built out of wood, it's been well taken care of (still has the original roof, even!), why exactly would I want to rebuild a perfectly good building? These buildings have been standing a long time, they aren't exactly going anywhere
My home is 100 years old and probably one of the younger houses in the area. Many homes have been renovated in part of over time. Things like adding electricity, changing the electrical to be modern, adding additions, converting rooms and adding modern plumbing, changing siding and roofing, HVAC installed, etc. So over time, the home is modernized but the original frame (the "good bones") are still there.
And let me tell you, those old frames are unbelievable if they've been taken care of. If you do a renovation and open it up the wood is thick with tight, straight grain. A lot of these homes were built with old growth timber that was abundant at that time and unavailable today. The natural aging of the wood has dried out moisture and resins and makes for stronger lumber, albeit lumber that is more brittle which isn't a concern for how it is being used.
There's a good chance the wood was quarter sawn as well and if you have the original floorboards there's a good chance they were quarter sawn back then too. This, again, makes for better construction as the wood won't warp as much.
That's an over-generalization which is very often wrong. Massive timber (including things like CLT or Brettstapel) are very fire resistant and very safe in a fire. The outer layers tend to char while the rest of the structure is preserved.
To say more: if a large timber beam is exposed to fire and comes out charred, you can often just scrape off the charred part, but for a steel or concrete beam the damage may be fundamental (introducing cracks or permanently changing the size or material properties) requiring the part to be replaced.
You don't want to live in a multi-family wooden house - the noise from above you will drive you wild. With a concrete house you don't hear your neighbors.
I’ve lived in multi family wood homes in the US without issue. It can be an issue with the cheapest construction, but sound insulation can mitigate or solve those problems.
Since moving to Boston I have only lived in multi-family wooden houses, and this just isn't true, at least with modern-ish insulation. I can occasionally hear my upstairs neighbor's dog when she gets excited, and precisely nothing else.
Hm. The only multi-family building I've ever lived in was an apartment complex and it was steel and concrete. I don't think they are typically built out of wood even here, although I've read about some experiments with wooden office buildings as more environmentally friendly. I guess if I was really curious I could look and see if they'd added extra sound damping to deal with that.
In any case, the typical American wooden home is not going to have a family above you. :)
That specific type of construction started in 2009 after the building code was changed to allow it. They are known as a “1+4” or “1+5”, with the first floor being concrete and then 4 or 5 wood floors above. Very economical, and hence why almost all new multi unit construction has been that style for the past decade.
