More housecleaning, so to speak... Here's another old post I drafted in October 2005 while studying at Bucerius but hadn't yet published.
At lunch the other day a Chinese student and I were talking about how Americans lived. Or not so much how they lived, but wherein they lived: houses, apartments, etc. This came up because I referred her to an article about the building boom in China, and she was describing the apartments where she's lived. Which sound big by Chinese and European standards, but small by American.
So I started off by describing the house where I grew up – how big it was, how many rooms it had, the architectural style (it was a Colonial)… And then I described other common types of American houses, like Cape Cods and split-ranch. We even found a website with pictures so she could see what they looked like.
But as I travel the world I get more and more perplexed about why Americans build houses the way we do: out of wood. Certainly there are exceptions (like houses made out of straw) but most houses are wood-frame. Whereas in most other places, it seems, houses are made out of concrete. And we aren't talking third-world places: in developed Europe houses are rarely not made out of concrete blocks. With the exception, perhaps, of earthquake prone areas (but perhaps even then) concrete would seem to offer several advantages over wood, including less flammability and lower susceptibility to hurricanes or tornados. And yet despite the preference for it around the world, we continue to build our houses out of lumber. I wonder why that is. Is there something about the saga of the three little pigs that Americans just don't understand?