this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Am I missing something? Aren’t most buildings bricks? Or is that just because I live in London?
Not here in the USA!
In the US houses are held together by thoughts and prayers.
Pine with a light dusting of steel & cardboard.
Plastic on exterior walls, paper and chalk on interior walls, and tar and gravel on the roof.
Early this year forest fire fighters in Alberta were complaining that new houses have so much plastic in them that they were combusting and consumed in like 5 minutes making saving them impossible and slowing the fire's spread harder.
I'm having a hard time finding the quote. I found this explaining houses burn faster now than before because of plastic https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/modern-homes-burn-8-times-faster-than-50-years-ago-1.1700063
Considering the ridiculous heat of those forest fires 5 minutes is believable
I can believe it; in the UK our fire regs have become rather stringent due to the Grenfell fire, though those changes are mostly on flats/buildings more then 3(?) storeis etc.
The PVC external cladding can melt from a mid to large sized bonfire 10-15 foot away. We can't use it to clad houses above the 2nd floor, though there are exceptions if your replacing existing cladding. So if you want to add a former to your loft you have to use tiles now.
Though there's this interesting product called magply which is roughly as strong as ply, but is made from magnesium oxide and silicate. It's considered incombustible so you can clad with it, then render it.
I wonder if we'll start seeing different materials used in areas prone to forest fires
Brick isn't as common in the US. It's more "regional." I'm most towns, you'll have like one or two brick buildings and that's it. A town hall, maybe a church.
What are they built from then?
Wood and sheetrock
https://time.com/6046368/wood-steel-houses-fires/
despite lumber shortage and wildfires, tornados and wood eating insects
Lumber is cheap, concrete is expensive. If the US were to switch to concrete, construction would become substantially more expensive everywhere in the world.
It’s not like you can’t use concrete in the US even if you want to. Commercial architecture and public infrastructure use it all the time.
Wood mostly.
Bricks aren't uncommon for commercial buildings, though they're often painted or otherwise different colors.
Bare brick boxes are very indicative of long-gone industry, but it's not the bricks themselves that are truly to blame for giving that impression.
London is an extremely old city. In the US, the older areas with older buildings like New York often have brick, but almost everywhere else, where most structures are less than a century old, they use alternatives. Most commonly this is lumber framing with exterior siding (either wood or plastic), interior sheet rock (“drywall”), with fiberglass insulation in between.