The United States, the country everyone claims to hate and also admire, is a country built on wooden houses, not brick, not concrete, not stone, WOOD.
How the hell did it grow so large with such precarious constructions? Well, first of all, because wood ISN'T precarious. It's just that after so many centuries of civilization, we see it as weak and fragile. But the homes of most of humanity have always been made of this noble material.
But why do gringos almost always use wood?
We see them on any newscast or documentary: a tornado devastates a farming town, leaving behind a devastation of planks and shingles, with only the chimneys and bathrooms remaining, the only parts of those houses built of a slightly more durable material.
We think this town will never recover from the punishment of the gods. Within a year, they'd already rebuilt all their houses. How do they do it?
We have to take into account the enormous difference in philosophy and context between the United States, the widest part of the American continent, vast plains, it is impossible to compare something similar with, for example, Europe.
In the old continent, you travel 20 km and you've already passed three towns and the language has changed slightly, at 200 km you've already crossed into another country and at 2000 km the continent ends. In the US, obviously, none of that happens, miles and miles (because they still use that inconsistent and imperialist measure of distance 😋) without seeing another town, farms, more farms and then, zap! a giant city full of industry, more countryside, more nothing, town, farm, mega-ultra-city, and so on.
But to understand why it's all made of wood, we have to go back to the "conquest" they made of their own territory, which was already occupied, but that's not the topic under discussion 😁 the truth is that it was full of natives, forests and plains.
When colonizing new lands, the first thing you need is houses, right away, and not ones that take months to build, but ones built as quickly as possible. What material was abundant? Wood.
It was a defensive necessity; the early years of the first settlers required a lot of fire, knife, and blood to "prosper" since the Native Americans quickly realized that these people who dressed strangely, were very pale, and sailed the seas were not just passing through.
How to build a house or fort quickly? By cutting down trees and using wood.
North American architecture was the continent's colonizing mechanism, the way to rapidly expand westward and take over the territory. These were cheap, fast, and efficient houses, since the settlers were poor and had to quickly establish settlements and prosperity (or starve to death).
The construction system we've seen in all kinds of movies is called "balloon frame," a standardized system that any carpenter from the 18th to the 19th century knew perfectly well and that is still used today by the ultra-religious Amish and other sects. A few people get together, erect a frame, and in one day they have the base structure, the roof in two, and the walls in three.
This is the foundation of American architecture, so creating a neighborhood from scratch is easy, efficient, and very, very fast: nothing is built to last.
This is key, in the mentality, in the psychology of that entire society, a house is something ephemeral, in the European's case it is made of stone, it is eternal, you live in the same house as your grandparents and possibly twenty generations back.
Construction contractors, with the exception of cities, are carpenters, not bricklayers, and the systematized, framing process extended beyond wood to steel.
From prefabricated houses to exotic designs, but all designed to be built much faster than any brick house, and this led the US to another type of construction using the same system: skyscrapers.
The standardized structure went from wood to metal profiles to skyscrapers, the same criteria, frames, profiles, standardization, speed and economy
The American house is designed to last 20 years, demolished and rebuilt—yes, they're like piggy banks—but this speed also allows them to resell another one, redecorate, redesign, take out half the house, and build something completely different.
Another advantage is the mobility this brings; you're not tied to a particular place, you can move from state to state and build the next house at a totally affordable cost. No one would abandon their brick and mortar home, but if you get bored of the wooden one, you recycle it and build a new one.
The price difference between construction and finished homes is huge in the US, so the business focused on construction and new ideas, constantly renovating. The cost difference between construction and final sale is tenfold; a cost of 50,000 allows you to sell a finished home for 500,000.
At the same time, a house you bought for 500k is worth 50k years later and is falling apart, so renovation is inevitable.
Over time, some localities have changed building codes requiring fireproof or more weather-resistant materials, but 90% of the country is made of wood. It's cheap, safe, and intimately tied to its culture.
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