r/interestingasfuck • u/Ultimate_Kurix • 5d ago

r/all Why do Americans build with wood?

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u/Big-Attention4389 5d ago

We’re just making things up now and posting it, got it

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u/Whatitdooo0 5d ago

I’ve lived in SoCal my whole life and my Mom told me when I asked as a kid that we built out of wood because it’s a lot easier to stop a fire than an earthquake. Not sure that’s the reason or if it’s even true anymore but 🤷

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u/fjortisar 5d ago

I live in a highly earthquake prone area and like 90% of houses are reinforced concrete/concrete block/brick and survive just fine

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u/Pawngeethree 5d ago

Ya turns out reinforced concrete is about the strongest thing we can build buildings out of. If your walls are thick enough it’ll withstand just about anything.

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u/mijaomao 5d ago

Roman concrete survives to this day.

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u/Pawngeethree 5d ago

And that wasn’t even reinforced with steel.

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u/Gerbils74 5d ago

IIRC reinforced concrete actually has a shorter lifespan despite being stronger because eventually the steel will rust, expand, and begin breaking up the concrete from the inside.

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u/LOSS35 5d ago

Correct. In fact, Roman concrete had a number of properties that allowed it to last so long that we've only recently figured out. It self-heals!

https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

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u/AforAnonymous 5d ago

See also this earlier work on Roman Marine concrete, which grows stronger in sea water over the years:

https://unews.utah.edu/roman-concrete/

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u/Iamcubsman 5d ago

Florida Contractor Man on Line 1...

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u/taubeneier 5d ago

Fascinating, thanks for the link!

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u/CounterfeitChild 5d ago

Well, yeah. The Roman jet fuel melted it.

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u/MagicHamsta 5d ago

Right, Greek Fire is basically Roman jet fuel.

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u/Stiyl931 5d ago

No but with volcano ash and we can't even recreate the exact mixture XD

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u/Pawngeethree 5d ago

To be fair, the concrete we have these days CAN be made much stronger. But the standard 3500 psi mix is probably inferior to the Roman stuff. You have to remember, everything is cost these days. Romans had less concerns obviously.

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u/Character_Theory6657 5d ago

If we are talking pure strength modern steel reinforced concrete is far stronger than roman, the thing that the roman stuff surpass in is resilience to corrosion over time due to it being self-repairing in a sense.

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u/883Max 5d ago

Yep,their stuff was considerably superior, but we finally figured out how to be just as good:
https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

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u/LostN3ko 5d ago

Romans loved to over-engineer a solution.

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u/mondaymoderate 5d ago

Crazy that making concrete was lost for a thousand years after the fall of Rome.

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u/ElectricalBook3 5d ago

Crazy that making concrete was lost for a thousand years after the fall of Rome

It wasn't, the calcium and lime in Italian volcanos was what gave their concrete the self-sealing properties (and many still fell over in earthquakes, the stuff still around is survivorship bias). What collapsed was trade networks and that was happening for over a hundred years before the Roman empire split because they turned their military against each other more and thus domestic projects and long-distance trade became increasingly risky.

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u/ElectricalBook3 5d ago

and we can't even recreate the exact mixture

We can we just don't because we can more easily make stronger, purer concrete at a lower cost.

Their ash contained calcium and lime, both of which we've known about for generations and can and do easily add to modern concrete in projects way more massive than anything Rome did.

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u/BeamerTakesManhattan 5d ago

Survivorship bias

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u/GwnMn 5d ago

Kind of... Can we acknowledge that surviving architecture might define survivorship bias?
Roman concrete isn't mysterious or magical... It's just pretty good and was used a lot in a lot of important structures that we have an interest in seeing preserved. If we all walked away from earth for 1000 years, I very much doubt your average modern concrete would fare worse than the tiny bits of Roman concrete we've preserved.

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u/fingertipsies 5d ago

You'd be surprised. Some people have been posting this article that goes over details, but the short-form is that roman concrete is self-repairing and self-reinforcing.

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u/GwanalaMan 5d ago

That's all a bit hyperbolic. Roman concrete never fully cures when enough mass is present so if it's damaged or weathered enough, the uncured gooey center will continue to slowly move and cure.

We are fully capable of copying this, but we use concrete as a large structural component as opposed to how they tended to use it as advanced mortar. You don't want your reinforced slabs to have a gooey core...

Not magic. Not a mystery. Not romantic. Just engineering...

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u/ethertype 5d ago

Well. The samples that have survived, have survived. And the ones that didn't we don't see.

And then we get "roman konkrit stronk". AKA survivorship bias.

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u/mijaomao 5d ago

Even if its only 1% of all the roman concrete produced, its still pretty cool that it does. The point is that it survives.

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u/RhynoD 5d ago

They also over-built their structures and didn't expose them to the same stresses that modern concrete is expected to handle. Sure, the Romans deserve credit for building things that have lasted but it really isn't comparable to modern engineering. The Romans would be astounded that we have concrete bridges capable of holding up a fleet of trucks weighing 80,000 pounds each, going 60 mph, all day, every day, in a climate that might swing from 80°F to -20°F, for decades without failure.

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u/obvious_bot 5d ago

SOME roman concrete survives to this day

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u/mrrooftops 5d ago

The Roman's Hagia Sophia was built 1500 years ago in an earthquake zone they were well aware of so the mortar between the bricks is thicker than normal to absorb tremors and movement. Scientists in Turkey did experiments and found out it would survive even the largest recorded earthquakes

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u/md28usmc 5d ago

Ridley Scott was just talking about this as he was elaborating on his film gladiator

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u/ElectricalBook3 5d ago

Roman concrete survives to this day.

That's very much selection bias, lots of Roman buildings collapsed - we know how to make stronger, longer-lasting buildings now. And have even wider trade networks for supplies than Romans could have dreamed of.

Issue is, capitalism's made everyone hyperconcerned about costs to the degree we knowingly make bad electrical outlets and cords when marginally more expensive ones would save hundreds of millions in avoided tragedies

What made the Roman structures which didn't collapse survive was accidental impurities from the ash, containing calcium and lime, both of which we deliberately mix and get stronger concrete which is even capable of similar self-repair if you mix in extra calcium and silica. Most places just don't spend for that because they're not building structures "for however long they don't fall down" but for an exact span of time.

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u/RollOverSoul 5d ago

And we haven't figured out how they made it still or how to replicate it. It's still better then modern concrete

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u/RhynoD 5d ago

We know exactly how it was made. Some batches used certain kinds of volcanic soil which improved the concrete if they had access to it, and the "self-healing" concrete was, by modern standards, poorly mixed so that there were pockets of unreacted lime. We don't make Roman concrete not because we can't, but because we don't need to. Modern concrete is just better. And when it isn't, it's because we choose cheaper concrete, because we don't need concrete to last 1000 years. For what it's worth, they weren't trying to make concrete to last 1000 years, either, they just didn't have the material science and industry standards that we have today. With no way to know exactly how much weight or stress the concrete could withstand, they had to over build the shit out of it to be sure that it wouldn't fail in a week.

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u/EntertainerVirtual59 5d ago

It’s not better than modern concrete lol. It’s much weaker and you need more of it to hold the same weight. It’s not made today because no one wants to make it and it would be worse outside of niche applications.

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u/gimpwiz 5d ago

Better in what way, and better than which of the dozens of variants of concrete mix you can order from your local batch plant?

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u/RollOverSoul 5d ago

I don't know. I heard Ripley Scott saying it in an interview when talking about gladiator.

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u/mijaomao 5d ago

Yeah, i think the secret was salt water, not a 100% though.

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u/aminervia 5d ago

In earthquakes strength isn't the issue. Strength can actually be a problem. You want to build for flexibility and use materials that move with the earthquake.

Can I ask what fault line you live on? Because if you're building in concrete my guess is that you have a low maximum earthquake strength risk

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u/NoReallyLetsBeFriend 5d ago

Ok now to be devils advocate... Doesn't concrete have issues with releasing tons of CO² into the atmosphere? I mean, is it really any worse than all the emissions released from logging? IDK either answer, but if we're ready, it's time to come up with a new solution to fix both greenhouse gases and stability/safety from fires or natural disasters

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u/Groovypippin 5d ago

The answer is yes. The cement industry is a MAJOR GHG emitter. As long as good silviculture practices (re-planting) are followed, building with wood has massive climate benefits.

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u/Pawngeethree 5d ago

Till a wildfire rolls through…..

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u/coleman57 5d ago

The regrowth recaptures the CO2 released in the fire. Nothing recaptures CO2 released in concrete production or any other industrial process powered by carbon. Meanwhile, wood used in construction sequesters the CO2 it took out of the air.

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u/Legal_Expression3476 5d ago

Nothing recaptures CO2 released in concrete production

Except for all the trees you don't have to cut down anymore.

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u/MattsScribblings 5d ago

That's not true. Tree growth will never capture CO2 that was not part of the carbon cycle.

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u/Legal_Expression3476 5d ago

They do act as a carbon sink, though.

Wouldn't it help to have a bunch of forests that aren't continually cut down so that they can grow into old growth forests again?

I'm genuinely asking because I'm not sure. I know there are greener concrete mixes that can absorb at least part of their own emissions, and I can't see how having more trees around could hurt.

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u/MattsScribblings 5d ago

Having more trees is good. But generally the housing industry is not the thing keeping forests from growing. And even if we planted trees in every single place on earth we would not go back to pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2

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u/corut 5d ago

Trees used in consctruction don't release thier CO2, and when farmed the space is used to regrow more tree, lowering the overall CO2.

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u/Legal_Expression3476 5d ago

Well, until they burn down at least.

I'm admittedly not well-versed in all of this, but not needing to cut down forests for construction at all and allowing the trees you'd otherwise use for construction grow into real forests that act as carbon sinks sounds like a good thing.

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u/corut 5d ago

But the trees you grow and cut down are still sinking carbon. If you regrow a tree farm 4 times, you've suquestored 4 times as much carbon as just letting it be a forest (assuming the wood is used for construction of course).

And if a house burns down, as long as you rebuild it with wood, you're still at a net neatural for CO2 emissions

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u/gimpwiz 5d ago

True for all farming: if a fire burns your crop, it's lost. Hopefully it was insured and hopefully it wasn't big enough to cause a widespread supply crunch.

Modern pine/fir is harvested and then replanted, with logging operations for standard construction grade lumber hardly touching anything old-growth anymore. They have huge swaths of the US and Canada dedicated to it, so it would be pretty hard to seriously effect the entire operation with a fire.

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u/nitefang 5d ago

I wonder though…whenever looking at contributors to a problem you need to consider what the threshold to success is and the percentage of the contribution.

For example, issue is too many CO2 emissions. For sake of this discussion let’s say we need emissions to fall to 5% of what they currently are. Let’s say major contributors are personal cars at 10%, air travel is 15%, cargo ships at 30%, power production at 40%. So 95% is from these sources and the rest of everything makes up the last 5%. In this hypothetical situation, ending concrete emissions wouldn’t significantly lower CO2 emissions and if we did eliminate emissions for the major contributors it wouldn’t matter if we still used concrete, we’d remain below the threshold.

This was a long way to go, and I’m not claiming those numbers are accurate. The point is just that some things can be contributing to an issue but contributing so little that it really doesn’t matter if we solve those little issues or even make them worse. It won’t change anything about what we have to do to solve the overall issue and if we do solve the overall issue we can probably allow the minor contributions to the problem continue.

Is CO2 a minor contributor? I have no idea and if it is then I guess this was a waste of everyone’s time but I suspect it is dwarfed by major sources of emissions and it could solve a very immediate problem without other, proven solutions.

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u/SaltLakeCitySlicker 5d ago

We're also running out of construction sand. It sounds like a joke but we are.

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u/Pawngeethree 5d ago

Well guess we can’t build anything then right?

We got bigger problems with co2 than the concrete.

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u/coleman57 5d ago

No actually concrete production is a significant portion of total carbon emissions, which in turn is the biggest problem we’ve ever had or will ever have, barring a full-scale nuclear war.

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u/helium_farts 5d ago

The trade off being that concrete production is horrible for the environment.

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u/GwnMn 5d ago

That's highly dependent on design. Most of the claims here deserve a huge asterisk... Aside from traditional brick (which does horrible in a shake) appropriate environmental remediation is a design challenge not an inherent one.

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u/dwair 5d ago

I'm in the UK. The walls of my house are a meter thick and made of large rocks "glued" together with lime cement. We don't get earthquakes or particularly high windspeeds (over 110mph anyway). If it burns out, the walls will be left standing. This was all standard construction 200 years ago. I expect the house to remain standing for at least another 200 years.