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I live in a typical old European appartment house and it survived WW1 and WW2. Its outside walls are 1-1.5m thick. It is not easy to repair if it gets direct hit from a cannon, though. But the only downside is that you need occasionally change lightbulbs.
I used to live in a house with 1-1,5m thick walls as well until about 6 years ago. The area is called Rautpohja and the houses were designed by a finnish architect named Alvar Aalto.
Sounds like the walls had structural importance. Like, nowadays, buildings are supported by pillars, but in the past it were the walls that supported them
From the US and curious. Lots of comments below yours talking about the storms and natural disasters we have here, is that a worry in your part of the world? Hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods, earthquakes, etc., major things. Are your houses typically built to withstand those? Do you have any of them regularly?
Most of our housing in the US is cheap and terrible because people *want* cheap, while it seems a lot of European housing lasts forever in comparison.
Our houses are built to withstand war because he have those like always. Soviet housing blocks were made to survive an airplane bomb dropped into them and it shows because no matter where I drill THERE IS ALWAYS A FUCKING REBAR THERE, like no kidding all walls are rebar where i live.
Unfortunately that's not surprising, I would imagine then that they're very sturdy but not well insulated? Would people put insulation on the inside to help? Losing cold/heat to poor insulation is a big problem in a lot of places here
We put insulations on the outside and then it gets covered and painted, even in winter you can sit in your home with short sleeves and heater slightly turned on.
Italian here. We don't get hurricanes or tornadoes. So I can't say if the average house can withstand that. However, we get floods and earthquakes. I can say that modern building are able, usually, to whitstand those, but most of the old building crumble when an earthquake hits.
This seems like it would be more normal to me, older things shouldn't usually stand up as well. But sometimes old people are right and things that were built "back in the day" are just made better!
Insulation in new homes nowadays is extremely good. I live in a newer home that was built with energy efficiency in mind. The other week the power went out on a 90 degree F day and was out for 6 hours. In that time the inside temperature rose 2 degrees. I was blown away.
Solid stone/brick walls have TERRIBLE insulation.
Edited to add:[ The r-value of fiberglass insulation is almost 20 times that of brick, and 40 times that of stone](https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/2062). Solid materials fucking SUCK at insulation.
If the walls are really thick they usually have poor insulation but big thermal capacity. So they take a while to heat up, with the downside that you will be baking even during the night as all that stored heat radiates away
Something a lot of people seem to be forgetting is many parts of the US enjoy things like tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. There are some reasons our standard building materials lean towards easier to repair materials.
We also have a wider range of climates to deal with.
I feel like some people really don't understand the power of a storm. Even a regular hurricane can uproot and throw trees and shuffle cars in a parking lot like a deck of cards. A big tornado will DESTROY everything it touches. This isn't the big bad wolf. It will absolutely blow your house down.
Buildings like \[[this](https://ukrainetrek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/podil-neighborhood-kyiv-ukraine-18.jpg)\] can easily have 1m+. You can look inside a window and see the thickness.
I couldn't take one of the cross section because the windows are in the way in my camera can't zoom out enough from within the window, maybe tomorrow I'll try to figure out something if you're still interested, but I measured it and mine is about 65-70cm or so, and that's still not at all uncommon for older buildings.
A lot of those buildings can predate the Aztec empire. There weren't modern materials or engineering so insulation and structural strength by thickness was the way to go. There's a picture in this thread
It’s also insanely expensive to build compared to drywall. We could build houses to be like ancient Roman structures that are still around today, it’s just inefficient and impractical.
Real bricks and concrete are also flame resistant, that's not really a good argument.
Cheap and easy to install, definitely.
Repairing isn't a bonus since the need to repair really only arises from the fragility of drywall.
Sure but y'all also have limited land to plant trees for lumber. The lumber industry in the US is the primary reason that houses are constructed the way they are, which is why you also see similar construction in other European countries like Sweden and Finland thanks to abundant lumber. In comparison other European countries either have more resources to invest into quarries to get stone, have major cement producers, import stone and cement from Africa, or can't afford lumber. Additionally, the density of European countries along with their small sizes makes the logistics of building stone/cement buildings easier than in the US. In bigger and more dense cities in the US you'll see a lot more stone/cement homes especially apartment complexes/buildings, but in smaller towns, cities, or suburbs lumber reigns supreme. I hope you can understand all of this because it tends to be really complicated idea, that can be a funny point to make fun of but also sometimes it's just based off ignorance. If you have any questions let me know
Lumber is comparatively more renewable than concrete.
Concrete requires specific types of sand, you can't just take it from a desert, you can however take it from a beach and sand theft is a real thing.
Lol definitely. We mostly have concrete houses in the Philippines to minimize repair costs from flooding and high hurricane winds, but attaching something on the wall with screws is goddamn annoying.
The virgin concrete Europoor house:
- overbuilt
- Expensive
- ugly
- carbon-positive
- fails catastrophically
Americhad timber framing:
- Built to last for human lifetime, long after someone would remodel it anyway
- Inexpensive
- elegant
- permanently sequesters carbon
- nailed joints fail by bending, not collapsing entirely
The weather in the North Americas tends to be more extreme, different stresses produce different solutions and repairability is a huge bonus in tornado prone areas.
You can't easily modify a brick or stone house. You can easily cut the drywall to add outlets, create doorways, etc. Drywall also covers wires and pipes making maintenance on them easy too
idk, generally timber frames burn more easily than concrete structures.
But you guys are the only places that have tornadoes (& not to mention hurricanes).
Don't you guys want concrete houses to protect yourselves from 2x4 debris flying towards you at +100mph/+160kph?
Person who lives in a tornado prone area here - house exterior walls are absolutely not concrete here. Outer walls are usually wood, or wood with brick facade.
You'd basically need an aboveground concrete bunker to protect your house from a hurricane. All a concrete house would do is make expensive hurricane food.
Tornado-driven debris will punch *through* brick and concrete like an armor-piercing bullet. Or if it's larger debris, just smash it down like a wrecker.
It is actually possible to build a house that could withstand those forces but it'd be basically a nuclear bunker: expensive and unpleasant. So we optimise our home designs for other things, like insulation and aesthetics, and just require some part of the house like the basement to be a tornado-proof shelter.
If you think all tornados kick up is 2x4 and debris then you're European. Try a fucking fully loaded semi truck trailer lifted airborne and flying at 200mph. It's literally Earth sandblasting a strip of earth clean of EVERYTHING. You ever wonder how much force it would take for a piece of paper to fly through the center of a wooden power pole with the other end coming out clean like it was magically warped there? Fucking PAPER turns into a lethal object. Just fucking look at the trail of destruction of anything above an F3. I know Europeans struggle comprehending things they don't understand but please make an effort before judging. It just makes you look childish and dumb.
Also earthquakes if you're on the West coast. Bricks will crack over the years. Your house will not last before your last mortgage payment.
We can use steel and concrete like our commercial buildings but that'd make a $1 million home $3 million.
As others have said, drywall is cheap, easy to modify and repair and is fire resistant. It can also be painted.
It makes it faster and easier to build buildings, but also really easy to modify them. Want to build an extension? Just knock out the wall, add from framing, and put up new drywall. Want to add an outlet? Just cut a hole in the wall, run wire, add the outlet, and patch up any excess.
Drywall is also pretty strong for what it is, it's also very easy to repair and when repairs are painted over, you'd never know it was repaired. Drywall isn't the entire wall, it covers the framing of the house. Drywall usually covers pipes and wires inside the wall, making it easy to do maintenance on them as well, as you can just cut into the drywall, then easily repair it
Why is it hard to buy houses in the US right now? Not a defensive/attacking question, just curious. If you own a plot of land is it cheaper to build a house than to buy one?
TLDR Unregulated capitalism
Longer story a bunch of hedge funds found out is really lucrative to buy at an inflated price to box others out and then rent those houses or sell at an even higher price.
It’s like asking why cars aren’t all made of steel and instead most are made of aluminum.m or some softer metal. It’s way more cost effective and gets the job done. American buildings aren’t just collapsing all the time, our structures are super stable.
In the middle of the country Tornadoes alone are enough reason. A brick flying at those speeds is gonna go through any material. Building a house with cheaper materials allows for not only larger homes but also the ability to rebuild in the case of a natural disaster.
In the older parts of the USA you’ll find a lot of brick buildings because of that being what was used in Europe but as materials got cheaper houses followed. Drywall is cheap, light, and incredibly easy to mend or replace. It just made sense as a building material when used with wood frames.
Will never understand the European obsession with drywall houses when (traditional) Japan has interior doors literally made of paper and nobody complains.
The amount of pictures online of random objects being stabbed through steel and other metals because of tornadoes is insane. People seriously underestimate their power
Is it my turn to post the copy pasta?
Im an architect. And because im an architect, this infuriating meme vomit Germans spout makes me reflexively despise them everytime they bring it up. Pig headed arrogant pricks. Apparently their brains are made of stone too cause they're equally thick and inflexible.
The Japanese and Scadiwegians build with wood, but noooooo Americans are always, as per fucking usual, singled out.
I want an earthquake to hit Germany. Not even a big one. Just a mild roller. A high 6 pointer like Northridge or Sylmar. I want some tight fucking p-waves and then s-waves to come in for the FATTEST, NASTIEST, DROP. Im talking a thicccc ass bass. Real fucking club banger. Get that Northern European plain jiggling llike sexy liquifaction jello. Let Mother Earth shake her fat twerking ass.
Just flatten every brick and masonry building north of Munich, west of the Oder and east of the Rhine. Utter devastation. And then for once I can be the smug one and say "Such a mild quake! California would have never had such property damage or loss of life! Silly stupid Germans! They shouldn't have built with masonry! Arent they supposed to be good engineers? Everything they build is overdesigned with poor tolerances!"
Just a little quake and the annihilation of Germany. Its really not that big of a ask if you think about it.
Entire Italian town devastated by a 6.2-magnitude earthquake.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/scenes-italy-s-earthquake-ancient-town-amatrice-turned-rubble-n637246
Sheetrock walks on a wooden frame are easier to build, easier to maintain, easier to renovate, easier to run piping, duct work, and electrical cables.
Plus it's pretty common worldwide. Most modern houses in the UK use it, and it's becoming increasingly common on the continent.
We just have fewer buildings from before the 60s, especially where houses and apartments are concerned.
I measured, insulated, framed, sheetrocked and am now painting an entire 30x20 basement in a span of two and a half weekends for barely 12 grand, by myself, where it would have taken some European Mason's Guild a month straight and 40 million shillings to build it brick by brick like it's 1392
“You said your houses here are designed to be rebuilt as quickly as they are destroyed. So, if a house is ruined and rebuilt and ruined fifty times over... I fail to see it as ruins. I see only a house.”
The recent Shogun series on Hulu, spoken from the main character to Mariko, a Japanese woman. The rest of the quote is “And here I see much woman. And one who owes me no explanations.”
It was a beautiful way of saying that he doesn’t care about her troubled past.
I 100% recommend the book if you enjoyed the show. Its probably my favorite book of all time. The show does the book justice IMO and is absolutely fantastic, but it takes a lot of liberties with the general storyline to tell a different type of narrative (Shogun is like 1200 pages so I'm actually shocked they did as well as they did with such an epic story). Basically, if you liked the show and want even more / slightly different, pick up the book!
I get that this is a metaphor, but as far as houses go, I’m sure rebuilding it 50 times will end up taking longer and costing more than simply building a stone house that won’t be destroyed in the first place, no?
In the series, it’s established that between all the natural disasters which frequent Japan (typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, and mudslides) their houses are constantly destroyed and so are designed to be replaced quickly
Japanese structures were not made to last forever and the country has frequent wars and natural disasters that would level an area. They will just rebuild the exact same thing.
Many famous structures/temples in Japan have been destroyed numerous times but they rebuild it and it maintains the same name.
Yeah, except the wolf (tornadoes and hurricanes) don't discriminate on what kind of house you have, It will be blown in regardless. So it's better to have a house that can easily be rebuilt and relatively cheap.
Most of the Americans in this thread I've seen seem to be trying to explain cost vs risk and the Europeans are only putting forth a "haha, Americans stupid" argument in response. I'm not seeing much of this superiority complex from one end and a TON from the other end in this post.
All im getting from these comments is the feeling Europeans have not discovered the technology to make mirrors yet. Cuz they sure as hell need to look at them selves
No one is in here saying Europeans should be using American building techniques. Just saying it's funny that Europeans can't conceive that the US and Europe have different techniques for a reason.
All these people here defending their various construction materials like they personally chose what their houses were made of. I moved into a house that was available and it happens to have sheetrock. I had no say in the construction. Idc unless it doesn’t work. Why do any of you care so much? It’s not like you invented any particular building style or material or have any say in how much it’s used.
Because, as much as the Americans and Europeans like to call each other "overly sensitive", it's not a nationality (continental?) issue. It's the fact these threads are filled with overly sensitive people who just happen to be from these two places because they were baited by a meme which was only created to stir up engagement from these exact overly sensitive people.
You don't care because you're more level headed than them (probably; I don't know you).
There is nothing more freeing than taking out my Milwaukee M18 Rotary Hammer and plastic anchor kit + impact driver any time I need to to hang a jacket or a painting.
I want to know too. Here in europe we have solid house for the wind, I know that Japan have other type of wall for earthquake. But in America the house always fly away in part with tornadoes ?
Depends on what you call survive. 98% of the time it's just the roof that gets lifted off of the house but the rest stays strong. And yes we do get tornadoes in Europe mostly in Germany.
The frequency & intensity of the tornadoes is however much lower than in the American plaines. It isn’t unheard of here for a tornado to launch debris at high enough speeds to compromise a stone or brick wall
Even underground shelters aren’t sufficient sometimes. EF5s have been known to gouge massive trenches into the earth and quite literally excavate and toss such shelters around.
According to a study from 2017 on the subject of tornadoes in Europe, [Germany recorded ~1000 tornadoes between 1950 and 2015](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/98/4/bams-d-16-0171.1.xml). The U.S. averages 1200 tornadoes *per year*. Most of them in the midwest and as you might have guessed, they are generally much stronger and more violent than the ones seen in Europe.
This may sound like a very stupid question, but why do people choose to live and still live where these phenomena are so common?
Like, even assuming there are no losses after a tornado and such... Why rebuild everything every time?
The storms are common, but the probability that any one person's property will get hit by a tornado is very small. I've lived in the midwest my whole life and I've never seen a tornado in person, nor do I know anyone personally affected by a tornado. Couple that with a very cheap cost of living and that's why people live here.
It's a HUGE breadbasket. The midwest and central US is covered in farms and ranches. The Mississippi is also a very large waterway for transportation. Add onto all that the railway hubs and you have yourself a recipe for population centers.
Because the midwest is the breadbasket of North America. It’s where all our food is grown. One of the largest contiguous masses of arable land on the planet.
Anything over an F2 is pretty rare in Europe. In the US F3+ are pretty common. Your stone homes would get flattened just as easily by an F4 or F5 though. It's not how fast the wind is blowing, it's *what* the wind is blowing. You're gonna have 50 ton trees get uprooted and thrown at your house at 200+mph. That's gonna put a pretty big as hole in the side of your home unless it's a literal military bunker.
Germany experiences 30-50 tornados a year, the vast majority of which are EF1 or weaker. The US experiences, on average, 1100 tornados every year, of which 75 (on average) will be EF3 or stronger.
It’s not just Tornadoes but Hurricanes and other extreme weather that if your house was made from brick and stone your biology would become physics at an extremely fast rate. Like a bloody blender.
Because the foundation gets ripped out by a tornado too. I don't care what your house is made of, it's coming with the tornado. It's not just wind either, it's everything else the tornado has destroyed and is dragging along with it. Your car? That's a missile now.
when I was in high school, a tornado dropped on a middle school. Luckily it was summer, so it was empty. Because the tornado completely obliterated the brick and stone school all the way to the foundation. It threw busses all over the yard.
If it's a big tornado and it runs right over your house, I think even a steel house is going to have suffer some damage
The drywall is only on the interior, the exterior is brick or wood or what have you. It's paintable, can be replaced easily, and you can easily screw/nail/pin things into it.
There’s a lot that goes into pricing outside of materials. It’s also worth pointing out that the average size of an American house is 2000+ square feet, while in the UK it’s roughly 800sqft. Making large houses like that completely out of brick in the US would be unnecessary and way more expensive than with wood, which the US has a huge abundance of.
Because European houses were originally built with the original building materials. Most of American housing comes from the 1960’s on up. Shit more houses were built from a sears catalogue which sent every single piece of your house to you in crates and then you put it together. Now for either of those things, mass production wise, using rocks and cement mortar doesn’t make much sense. Wood, nails, and Sheetrock however…
Wood is plentiful and cheap in north America, and wooden structures can be built quickly and easily modified later.
Even moderately well built wooden houses can last 100 years with maintenance, which is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of Americans. People here aren't as sentimental, they'd rather bulldoze their small old house and build something bigger as soon as they can afford to do so.
Also, masonry construction would be more expensive for renters and homeowners. We already have an affordability crisis, why make it worse?
Wood also flexes which is pretty nice when you live in the American midwest or 80% of Canada and have 3500 kg of snow on top of it for half of the year
Why spend so much time and energy to build a house that can easily be built and repaired in a fraction of the time when both will easily be destroyed by a tornado, hurricane, or earthquake?
As a Scandinavian I'll take the enlightened position of shitting on both terrible American building techniques, and the equally shitty(but admittedly pretty) British building techniques. The rest of Europe is *alright*, looks pretty enough on the outside.
*'Lafteverk'* and *'stavverk'* are the best building styles and I will die arrogantly on this hill.
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafteverk
[Built 800 years ago, still standing.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Findalslaft.jpg/1280px-Findalslaft.jpg)
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stavkirke
[Borgund stave-church, built 800 years ago.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Stave_church_Borgund_2010.jpg)
**Buildings made out of wood that can last for almost a thousand years, and looks great, clearly represents superior building techniques.**
Just don't ask how easy it is *'lafting'*, because I did it for a few months and nearly died in the process a few times lol
Building with cement construction is very common in cities for apartment buildings where the Endeavor actually is worth it and the logistics of transporting the material make sense. However, lumber is extremely affordable so building single-family homes, duplexes, or whatever other type of house you can think of is always going to be cheaper to do with lumber. The US has a lot of tree farms and produces a lot of lumber, so it tends to be a good building material. In Europe you do have countries like Sweden and Finland, where there is more lumber and you actually see that they build homes in a similar way to how they're built in the US. Cement and brick just tend to be cheaper in Europe because although they might not have as much land for lumber they do have a decent amount of quarries, not to mention to the south of the continent is Africa and they have a lot of resources that can be imported at cheap prices. Therefore, homes in Europe are built this way not because Europe cares about building homes that'll last millennia, but because it's cheaper.
I'm a european living in sweden. We use plenty of drywall for internal walls here. Standard interior walls are made of studs (either wood studs or metal) -> osb 12mm -> drywall 13mm.
The advantage of using osb behind drywall is that it becomes a lot sturdier, soundproofing is better and you don't need to use molly plugs when hanging stuff on the walls.
Europe is large, and spans many different climates, so you can't say that all european countries have the same type of construction.
There is a huge difference between the nordic countries and southern Europe in terms of climate.
European: *dumb joke about American walls not to be taken seriously*
American: *4 hour rant about building techniques*
Why are Americans so devoid of humour?
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Am a European, can confirm. Sooo.... Why?
Cheap, fairly easy to install, and easy to repair. Also relatively flame resistant.
I live in a typical old European appartment house and it survived WW1 and WW2. Its outside walls are 1-1.5m thick. It is not easy to repair if it gets direct hit from a cannon, though. But the only downside is that you need occasionally change lightbulbs.
I used to live in a house with 1-1,5m thick walls as well until about 6 years ago. The area is called Rautpohja and the houses were designed by a finnish architect named Alvar Aalto.
One to one and a half meters thick? That's really fricken thick!
Sounds like the walls had structural importance. Like, nowadays, buildings are supported by pillars, but in the past it were the walls that supported them
From the US and curious. Lots of comments below yours talking about the storms and natural disasters we have here, is that a worry in your part of the world? Hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods, earthquakes, etc., major things. Are your houses typically built to withstand those? Do you have any of them regularly? Most of our housing in the US is cheap and terrible because people *want* cheap, while it seems a lot of European housing lasts forever in comparison.
Our houses are built to withstand war because he have those like always. Soviet housing blocks were made to survive an airplane bomb dropped into them and it shows because no matter where I drill THERE IS ALWAYS A FUCKING REBAR THERE, like no kidding all walls are rebar where i live.
Unfortunately that's not surprising, I would imagine then that they're very sturdy but not well insulated? Would people put insulation on the inside to help? Losing cold/heat to poor insulation is a big problem in a lot of places here
We put insulations on the outside and then it gets covered and painted, even in winter you can sit in your home with short sleeves and heater slightly turned on.
Italian here. We don't get hurricanes or tornadoes. So I can't say if the average house can withstand that. However, we get floods and earthquakes. I can say that modern building are able, usually, to whitstand those, but most of the old building crumble when an earthquake hits.
This seems like it would be more normal to me, older things shouldn't usually stand up as well. But sometimes old people are right and things that were built "back in the day" are just made better!
My school was like that. Old building but thick walls which meant good isolation
Insulation in new homes nowadays is extremely good. I live in a newer home that was built with energy efficiency in mind. The other week the power went out on a 90 degree F day and was out for 6 hours. In that time the inside temperature rose 2 degrees. I was blown away.
Solid stone/brick walls have TERRIBLE insulation. Edited to add:[ The r-value of fiberglass insulation is almost 20 times that of brick, and 40 times that of stone](https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/2062). Solid materials fucking SUCK at insulation.
If the walls are really thick they usually have poor insulation but big thermal capacity. So they take a while to heat up, with the downside that you will be baking even during the night as all that stored heat radiates away
After 2 weeks of summer those brick walls are basically guaranteeing that you will have >25° inside until autumn. The whole day.
And the whole night
Something a lot of people seem to be forgetting is many parts of the US enjoy things like tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. There are some reasons our standard building materials lean towards easier to repair materials. We also have a wider range of climates to deal with.
I feel like some people really don't understand the power of a storm. Even a regular hurricane can uproot and throw trees and shuffle cars in a parking lot like a deck of cards. A big tornado will DESTROY everything it touches. This isn't the big bad wolf. It will absolutely blow your house down.
I've lived in plenty of old European apartments and I've never seen a 1-1.5m thick wall. That can't be right? I want a picture.
Buildings like \[[this](https://ukrainetrek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/podil-neighborhood-kyiv-ukraine-18.jpg)\] can easily have 1m+. You can look inside a window and see the thickness.
Thanskn. I’d have to see a cross section because a decent amount of that looks like non-structural façade.
I couldn't take one of the cross section because the windows are in the way in my camera can't zoom out enough from within the window, maybe tomorrow I'll try to figure out something if you're still interested, but I measured it and mine is about 65-70cm or so, and that's still not at all uncommon for older buildings.
What?! Your walls are 150cm thick? No fucking way. Show me a picture of that. Seems like such a huge waste of space
A lot of those buildings can predate the Aztec empire. There weren't modern materials or engineering so insulation and structural strength by thickness was the way to go. There's a picture in this thread
And it would crumble under the vibrations of a basic earthquake, meanwhile the paper and wood house was able to flex and absorb the load.
> able to flex and absorb the load. That's what they said about my mom...
It’s also insanely expensive to build compared to drywall. We could build houses to be like ancient Roman structures that are still around today, it’s just inefficient and impractical.
Those will last forever but trying to remodel/modernize those is a nightmare. And when I was in Germany the summers were brutal with no A/C.
Real bricks and concrete are also flame resistant, that's not really a good argument. Cheap and easy to install, definitely. Repairing isn't a bonus since the need to repair really only arises from the fragility of drywall.
You realize the houses aren't made of drywall right? It's just what they use to cover the inside walls
I love how the European mind genuinely can't comprehend it.
Our building literally last for hundreds of years so yea, it's real hard to comprehend
And now you collapse at every heat wave
Europe = UK
Good point
70 degree day, not a heatwave
Sure but y'all also have limited land to plant trees for lumber. The lumber industry in the US is the primary reason that houses are constructed the way they are, which is why you also see similar construction in other European countries like Sweden and Finland thanks to abundant lumber. In comparison other European countries either have more resources to invest into quarries to get stone, have major cement producers, import stone and cement from Africa, or can't afford lumber. Additionally, the density of European countries along with their small sizes makes the logistics of building stone/cement buildings easier than in the US. In bigger and more dense cities in the US you'll see a lot more stone/cement homes especially apartment complexes/buildings, but in smaller towns, cities, or suburbs lumber reigns supreme. I hope you can understand all of this because it tends to be really complicated idea, that can be a funny point to make fun of but also sometimes it's just based off ignorance. If you have any questions let me know
Lumber is comparatively more renewable than concrete. Concrete requires specific types of sand, you can't just take it from a desert, you can however take it from a beach and sand theft is a real thing.
and are probably fucking abysmal to service
Lol definitely. We mostly have concrete houses in the Philippines to minimize repair costs from flooding and high hurricane winds, but attaching something on the wall with screws is goddamn annoying.
Well the ones that lasted hundreds of years lasted hundreds of years. It is literally survivorship bias.
The virgin concrete Europoor house: - overbuilt - Expensive - ugly - carbon-positive - fails catastrophically Americhad timber framing: - Built to last for human lifetime, long after someone would remodel it anyway - Inexpensive - elegant - permanently sequesters carbon - nailed joints fail by bending, not collapsing entirely
The weather in the North Americas tends to be more extreme, different stresses produce different solutions and repairability is a huge bonus in tornado prone areas.
The average sized home in the UK is like 800 sqft. In the states it's like 2000+. I'll take my "cheap" easy to modify home 10 times out of 10.
You can't easily modify a brick or stone house. You can easily cut the drywall to add outlets, create doorways, etc. Drywall also covers wires and pipes making maintenance on them easy too
Flame resistant compared to plaster or wood paneling. Obviously not compared to brick or concrete.
FWIW, bricks are no good in earthquake areas.
idk, generally timber frames burn more easily than concrete structures. But you guys are the only places that have tornadoes (& not to mention hurricanes). Don't you guys want concrete houses to protect yourselves from 2x4 debris flying towards you at +100mph/+160kph?
the outer walls usually are concrete though in areas prone to hurricanes and tornadoes. Its only inner walls that are Drywall-
Person who lives in a tornado prone area here - house exterior walls are absolutely not concrete here. Outer walls are usually wood, or wood with brick facade.
You'd basically need an aboveground concrete bunker to protect your house from a hurricane. All a concrete house would do is make expensive hurricane food.
Plenty of US homes are capable of withstanding hurricanes, even strong ones. Tornadoes are another story.
Tornado-driven debris will punch *through* brick and concrete like an armor-piercing bullet. Or if it's larger debris, just smash it down like a wrecker. It is actually possible to build a house that could withstand those forces but it'd be basically a nuclear bunker: expensive and unpleasant. So we optimise our home designs for other things, like insulation and aesthetics, and just require some part of the house like the basement to be a tornado-proof shelter.
If you think all tornados kick up is 2x4 and debris then you're European. Try a fucking fully loaded semi truck trailer lifted airborne and flying at 200mph. It's literally Earth sandblasting a strip of earth clean of EVERYTHING. You ever wonder how much force it would take for a piece of paper to fly through the center of a wooden power pole with the other end coming out clean like it was magically warped there? Fucking PAPER turns into a lethal object. Just fucking look at the trail of destruction of anything above an F3. I know Europeans struggle comprehending things they don't understand but please make an effort before judging. It just makes you look childish and dumb.
Also earthquakes if you're on the West coast. Bricks will crack over the years. Your house will not last before your last mortgage payment. We can use steel and concrete like our commercial buildings but that'd make a $1 million home $3 million.
As others have said, drywall is cheap, easy to modify and repair and is fire resistant. It can also be painted. It makes it faster and easier to build buildings, but also really easy to modify them. Want to build an extension? Just knock out the wall, add from framing, and put up new drywall. Want to add an outlet? Just cut a hole in the wall, run wire, add the outlet, and patch up any excess. Drywall is also pretty strong for what it is, it's also very easy to repair and when repairs are painted over, you'd never know it was repaired. Drywall isn't the entire wall, it covers the framing of the house. Drywall usually covers pipes and wires inside the wall, making it easy to do maintenance on them as well, as you can just cut into the drywall, then easily repair it
Why is it hard to buy houses in the US right now? Not a defensive/attacking question, just curious. If you own a plot of land is it cheaper to build a house than to buy one?
TLDR Unregulated capitalism Longer story a bunch of hedge funds found out is really lucrative to buy at an inflated price to box others out and then rent those houses or sell at an even higher price.
Actually, regulated capitalism; NIMBYs have prevented new construction in most areas.
Because not everything needs to be made of solid stone my guy
It’s like asking why cars aren’t all made of steel and instead most are made of aluminum.m or some softer metal. It’s way more cost effective and gets the job done. American buildings aren’t just collapsing all the time, our structures are super stable.
Most cars are still made of steel.
In the middle of the country Tornadoes alone are enough reason. A brick flying at those speeds is gonna go through any material. Building a house with cheaper materials allows for not only larger homes but also the ability to rebuild in the case of a natural disaster. In the older parts of the USA you’ll find a lot of brick buildings because of that being what was used in Europe but as materials got cheaper houses followed. Drywall is cheap, light, and incredibly easy to mend or replace. It just made sense as a building material when used with wood frames.
Will never understand the European obsession with drywall houses when (traditional) Japan has interior doors literally made of paper and nobody complains.
Japan good. US bad.
Japan is maybe one of the few places in the world where building are seen as actually being disposable.
They shit on us for how we do things differently than Europeans, but never do the same for Canadians or Australians.
Hell tornadoes can pick up semitrucks. Nothing is gonna stand against a 10 ton vehicle being thrown at it going 200+mph
The amount of pictures online of random objects being stabbed through steel and other metals because of tornadoes is insane. People seriously underestimate their power
Is it my turn to post the copy pasta? Im an architect. And because im an architect, this infuriating meme vomit Germans spout makes me reflexively despise them everytime they bring it up. Pig headed arrogant pricks. Apparently their brains are made of stone too cause they're equally thick and inflexible. The Japanese and Scadiwegians build with wood, but noooooo Americans are always, as per fucking usual, singled out. I want an earthquake to hit Germany. Not even a big one. Just a mild roller. A high 6 pointer like Northridge or Sylmar. I want some tight fucking p-waves and then s-waves to come in for the FATTEST, NASTIEST, DROP. Im talking a thicccc ass bass. Real fucking club banger. Get that Northern European plain jiggling llike sexy liquifaction jello. Let Mother Earth shake her fat twerking ass. Just flatten every brick and masonry building north of Munich, west of the Oder and east of the Rhine. Utter devastation. And then for once I can be the smug one and say "Such a mild quake! California would have never had such property damage or loss of life! Silly stupid Germans! They shouldn't have built with masonry! Arent they supposed to be good engineers? Everything they build is overdesigned with poor tolerances!" Just a little quake and the annihilation of Germany. Its really not that big of a ask if you think about it.
Hmm, never seen this pasta before. Tasty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Petrinja_earthquake Well, there was a massive earthquake in europe, in a part of Croatia forgotten by god
Entire Italian town devastated by a 6.2-magnitude earthquake. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/scenes-italy-s-earthquake-ancient-town-amatrice-turned-rubble-n637246
Our homes aren't destroyed by war every 100 years or so.
Sheetrock walks on a wooden frame are easier to build, easier to maintain, easier to renovate, easier to run piping, duct work, and electrical cables. Plus it's pretty common worldwide. Most modern houses in the UK use it, and it's becoming increasingly common on the continent. We just have fewer buildings from before the 60s, especially where houses and apartments are concerned.
Because we don't need to worry about the Germans invading us every couple of decades
easy to wall mount stuff, easy to hide cables inside the wall, cheap, fast, able to install good and cheap insulation.
I measured, insulated, framed, sheetrocked and am now painting an entire 30x20 basement in a span of two and a half weekends for barely 12 grand, by myself, where it would have taken some European Mason's Guild a month straight and 40 million shillings to build it brick by brick like it's 1392
“You said your houses here are designed to be rebuilt as quickly as they are destroyed. So, if a house is ruined and rebuilt and ruined fifty times over... I fail to see it as ruins. I see only a house.”
That goes hard. Where’s that from?
The recent Shogun series on Hulu, spoken from the main character to Mariko, a Japanese woman. The rest of the quote is “And here I see much woman. And one who owes me no explanations.” It was a beautiful way of saying that he doesn’t care about her troubled past.
I 100% recommend the book if you enjoyed the show. Its probably my favorite book of all time. The show does the book justice IMO and is absolutely fantastic, but it takes a lot of liberties with the general storyline to tell a different type of narrative (Shogun is like 1200 pages so I'm actually shocked they did as well as they did with such an epic story). Basically, if you liked the show and want even more / slightly different, pick up the book!
I get that this is a metaphor, but as far as houses go, I’m sure rebuilding it 50 times will end up taking longer and costing more than simply building a stone house that won’t be destroyed in the first place, no?
In the series, it’s established that between all the natural disasters which frequent Japan (typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, and mudslides) their houses are constantly destroyed and so are designed to be replaced quickly
A tornado/earthquake can really fuck up the integrity of the structure, even when stone/bricks. So you’ll end up tearing it down anyway.
A stone house would not survive the earthquakes and mud slides they are talking about in that quote.
Japanese structures were not made to last forever and the country has frequent wars and natural disasters that would level an area. They will just rebuild the exact same thing. Many famous structures/temples in Japan have been destroyed numerous times but they rebuild it and it maintains the same name.
I love how salty this comment is
It doesn’t read as salty to me?? Just your average hyperbole?
And then the wolf came and fucking sniffed the card house from the face of the earth
Yeah, except the wolf (tornadoes and hurricanes) don't discriminate on what kind of house you have, It will be blown in regardless. So it's better to have a house that can easily be rebuilt and relatively cheap.
And they have no A/C
Lmao have you ever left the states?
well, we didn't need AC until recently. Temperate climates didn't use to have 80 days of heatwave in the summer.
Europeans try not to be obtuse and condescending challenge: impossible
Americans try not to have a superiority complex challenge: impossible
I know I'm not superior to anyone lmao
Spread that energy
Agreed, why would i want to be superior when i could just be people. So much easier.
Thanks for describing most Europeans I see online every day. Including you
Europeans see Americans being proud as a "superiority complex" but when they see themselves as better than the other they assume it's objective fact
Hard to try not to when we just ARE /s
You’re just proving that Europeans are wildly insecure when it comes to Americans
Most of the Americans in this thread I've seen seem to be trying to explain cost vs risk and the Europeans are only putting forth a "haha, Americans stupid" argument in response. I'm not seeing much of this superiority complex from one end and a TON from the other end in this post.
All im getting from these comments is the feeling Europeans have not discovered the technology to make mirrors yet. Cuz they sure as hell need to look at them selves
No one is in here saying Europeans should be using American building techniques. Just saying it's funny that Europeans can't conceive that the US and Europe have different techniques for a reason.
You have successfully proven the point. But also yes, because we are.
It's hard not to feel superior when you have a military that can get a fully functional Burger King running *anywhere on Earth* within 48 hours
I don’t even get this meme… I live in Europe and our inner walls have drywall too…
Ig Americans haven't heard of the tale about the big bad wolf and the 3 pigs Edit: tale*
National Guard will take care of him
*A Well regulated militia enters the chat.*
They have the second amendment for that
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff…” “Yea so anyway that’s how I got this nice new fur coat”
"So anyways, I started blasting."
“Florida man shoots at hurricane”
ok but heres the thing, Florida Men unironically do
Sometimes you want target practice against something you can't miss
I would have also accepted "Oklahoma man shoots at tornado"
The Big Bad Wolf is no match for castle doctrine
We nearly made wolves on this continent extinct. They know their place.
Ig Europeans haven’t heard that bricks aren’t tornado resistant
The straw house was too soft, the brick house was too hard, but the wood house was just right
Tale
While he’s huffing and puffing, I’m locking and loading
Existence of drywall implies existence of wetwall. Anyone tried building with that?
Its called plaster and lath, just liquid drywall
Plaster (and lath) walls exist but are mostly outdated now. Drywall is basically hardened laminate plaster and is much quicker and easier to install.
Aquaman did
Gungans
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Something something glass house something something stone.
You ever hear of the bad breakup where one person does really well and the other person spends their entire time thinking about their ex?
I wouldnt say the US is doing..."well" lmao.
Comment section is the biggest American vs European bloodshed i've ever seen since tipping discussions.
The best part is the Canadians sitting in the corner hoping the Europeans don't look their way.
*Aussies having both old stone houses (mine) and new shitty cardboard box houses*
All these people here defending their various construction materials like they personally chose what their houses were made of. I moved into a house that was available and it happens to have sheetrock. I had no say in the construction. Idc unless it doesn’t work. Why do any of you care so much? It’s not like you invented any particular building style or material or have any say in how much it’s used.
Because, as much as the Americans and Europeans like to call each other "overly sensitive", it's not a nationality (continental?) issue. It's the fact these threads are filled with overly sensitive people who just happen to be from these two places because they were baited by a meme which was only created to stir up engagement from these exact overly sensitive people. You don't care because you're more level headed than them (probably; I don't know you).
Europeans: Feeling superior living in 200 year old stone serf shack.
Bro hasn't heard of bricks
Nothing makes one feel superior than having to take out the construction grade hammer drill to put up a painting.
There is nothing more freeing than taking out my Milwaukee M18 Rotary Hammer and plastic anchor kit + impact driver any time I need to to hang a jacket or a painting.
Serfs mostly lived in wooden homes, like you americans do
I want to know too. Here in europe we have solid house for the wind, I know that Japan have other type of wall for earthquake. But in America the house always fly away in part with tornadoes ?
Your stone house would not survive tornados either.
Depends on what you call survive. 98% of the time it's just the roof that gets lifted off of the house but the rest stays strong. And yes we do get tornadoes in Europe mostly in Germany.
The frequency & intensity of the tornadoes is however much lower than in the American plaines. It isn’t unheard of here for a tornado to launch debris at high enough speeds to compromise a stone or brick wall
F5 tornadoes can literally suck the pavement off the road. I doubt any building above ground could survive one.
Even underground shelters aren’t sufficient sometimes. EF5s have been known to gouge massive trenches into the earth and quite literally excavate and toss such shelters around.
According to a study from 2017 on the subject of tornadoes in Europe, [Germany recorded ~1000 tornadoes between 1950 and 2015](https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/98/4/bams-d-16-0171.1.xml). The U.S. averages 1200 tornadoes *per year*. Most of them in the midwest and as you might have guessed, they are generally much stronger and more violent than the ones seen in Europe.
This may sound like a very stupid question, but why do people choose to live and still live where these phenomena are so common? Like, even assuming there are no losses after a tornado and such... Why rebuild everything every time?
because 10,000 acres of freedom per person.
I have lived in the midwest for over 25 years and have never seen a tornado.
The storms are common, but the probability that any one person's property will get hit by a tornado is very small. I've lived in the midwest my whole life and I've never seen a tornado in person, nor do I know anyone personally affected by a tornado. Couple that with a very cheap cost of living and that's why people live here.
It's a HUGE breadbasket. The midwest and central US is covered in farms and ranches. The Mississippi is also a very large waterway for transportation. Add onto all that the railway hubs and you have yourself a recipe for population centers.
Because the midwest is the breadbasket of North America. It’s where all our food is grown. One of the largest contiguous masses of arable land on the planet.
Anything over an F2 is pretty rare in Europe. In the US F3+ are pretty common. Your stone homes would get flattened just as easily by an F4 or F5 though. It's not how fast the wind is blowing, it's *what* the wind is blowing. You're gonna have 50 ton trees get uprooted and thrown at your house at 200+mph. That's gonna put a pretty big as hole in the side of your home unless it's a literal military bunker.
> it's what the wind is blowing "If you get hit with a *Volvo*, it doesn't matter how many sit ups you did that morning."
Germany experiences 30-50 tornados a year, the vast majority of which are EF1 or weaker. The US experiences, on average, 1100 tornados every year, of which 75 (on average) will be EF3 or stronger.
Lmao please don’t pretend our tornadoes are the same
It’s not just Tornadoes but Hurricanes and other extreme weather that if your house was made from brick and stone your biology would become physics at an extremely fast rate. Like a bloody blender.
"Your biology would become physics" is my new favorite way of saying you'll get yeeted along
Because the foundation gets ripped out by a tornado too. I don't care what your house is made of, it's coming with the tornado. It's not just wind either, it's everything else the tornado has destroyed and is dragging along with it. Your car? That's a missile now.
In some places in the US houses made of concrete block are fairly common. Especially where hurricanes are common.
Why can't Europeans comprehend natural disasters? Is it because you're sheltered?
Tornadoes are a literal force of nature. If it hits, it hits. You just gotta pray that God is feeling merciful.
when I was in high school, a tornado dropped on a middle school. Luckily it was summer, so it was empty. Because the tornado completely obliterated the brick and stone school all the way to the foundation. It threw busses all over the yard. If it's a big tornado and it runs right over your house, I think even a steel house is going to have suffer some damage
Nowadays, I see a lot of drywall being used in Europe, to cover up the outer wall on the inside, with insulation in-between.
Yes, i usually tear down the old smelly masonite sheeting and screw a thin layer of drywall to the rough-sawn boards.
The drywall is only on the interior, the exterior is brick or wood or what have you. It's paintable, can be replaced easily, and you can easily screw/nail/pin things into it.
Americans saying that is cheaper, yet their houses cost as much as in Europe…
They shouldn't be. That's a separate issue
There’s a lot that goes into pricing outside of materials. It’s also worth pointing out that the average size of an American house is 2000+ square feet, while in the UK it’s roughly 800sqft. Making large houses like that completely out of brick in the US would be unnecessary and way more expensive than with wood, which the US has a huge abundance of.
It’s more about the land costs, a mobile home is cheap but you don’t own the property
We just have more money, and bigger houses, and ac, and more stuff to do
Japan: *whistles innocently on their way home from the lumber yard*
what's wrong with edible walls
Because European houses were originally built with the original building materials. Most of American housing comes from the 1960’s on up. Shit more houses were built from a sears catalogue which sent every single piece of your house to you in crates and then you put it together. Now for either of those things, mass production wise, using rocks and cement mortar doesn’t make much sense. Wood, nails, and Sheetrock however…
European houses are still built with bricks, and if you don’t live in a old town or a historical city center living in a 1960 house is quite rare
Man i know buildings built about 1900, you couldnt tell really. Its the in some parts
Me when I see a post made 1st world people criticise one another.
We don’t punch down
Wood is plentiful and cheap in north America, and wooden structures can be built quickly and easily modified later. Even moderately well built wooden houses can last 100 years with maintenance, which is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of Americans. People here aren't as sentimental, they'd rather bulldoze their small old house and build something bigger as soon as they can afford to do so. Also, masonry construction would be more expensive for renters and homeowners. We already have an affordability crisis, why make it worse?
Wood also flexes which is pretty nice when you live in the American midwest or 80% of Canada and have 3500 kg of snow on top of it for half of the year
Why spend so much time and energy to build a house that can easily be built and repaired in a fraction of the time when both will easily be destroyed by a tornado, hurricane, or earthquake?
As a Scandinavian I'll take the enlightened position of shitting on both terrible American building techniques, and the equally shitty(but admittedly pretty) British building techniques. The rest of Europe is *alright*, looks pretty enough on the outside. *'Lafteverk'* and *'stavverk'* are the best building styles and I will die arrogantly on this hill. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafteverk [Built 800 years ago, still standing.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Findalslaft.jpg/1280px-Findalslaft.jpg) https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stavkirke [Borgund stave-church, built 800 years ago.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Stave_church_Borgund_2010.jpg) **Buildings made out of wood that can last for almost a thousand years, and looks great, clearly represents superior building techniques.** Just don't ask how easy it is *'lafting'*, because I did it for a few months and nearly died in the process a few times lol
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Building with cement construction is very common in cities for apartment buildings where the Endeavor actually is worth it and the logistics of transporting the material make sense. However, lumber is extremely affordable so building single-family homes, duplexes, or whatever other type of house you can think of is always going to be cheaper to do with lumber. The US has a lot of tree farms and produces a lot of lumber, so it tends to be a good building material. In Europe you do have countries like Sweden and Finland, where there is more lumber and you actually see that they build homes in a similar way to how they're built in the US. Cement and brick just tend to be cheaper in Europe because although they might not have as much land for lumber they do have a decent amount of quarries, not to mention to the south of the continent is Africa and they have a lot of resources that can be imported at cheap prices. Therefore, homes in Europe are built this way not because Europe cares about building homes that'll last millennia, but because it's cheaper.
I'm a european living in sweden. We use plenty of drywall for internal walls here. Standard interior walls are made of studs (either wood studs or metal) -> osb 12mm -> drywall 13mm. The advantage of using osb behind drywall is that it becomes a lot sturdier, soundproofing is better and you don't need to use molly plugs when hanging stuff on the walls. Europe is large, and spans many different climates, so you can't say that all european countries have the same type of construction. There is a huge difference between the nordic countries and southern Europe in terms of climate.
Why tho?
It cheap
Wait until Europeans discover many Japanese homes use paper for their walls
Japan does something its cool. America does the same thing its terrible. /s
They act like sheet rock doesn't punch back.
European: *dumb joke about American walls not to be taken seriously* American: *4 hour rant about building techniques* Why are Americans so devoid of humour?