The alternative is to build from wood whenever possible, and capture extra cabon in building material. This increases market need for wood and therefore forestation.
My parents live in a house that was originally built in the 1890s. It first had a fire place and wood stove for eating/cooking (surmised via chimneys), then it had gas lighting (some pipe are still in the walls), then it knob-and-tube lighting, then modern electrical lighting and cooking.
Walls were replaced, insulation added, etc. Lots of internal changes.
But the foundations and external brick is original (AFAICT).
Buildings are just boxes for people which keep the cold/heat/moisture at a comfortable level. As long as the "bones" of the buildings are good seismically, the "skin" has proper environmental control, then you can shuffle the inside around without too many issues.
Design/build things with minimal internal load-bearing walls and things can be shuffled fairly easily. Perhaps also use trusses instead of rafters as well for easier running of piping/wire.
So true. With the knowledge we have now about building materials you could create a very versatile, rigid, energy efficient base structure that lasts > 100 years, and adapt/update the internals to the current needs. You could even change the room layout completely.
I live in Europe and I can't understand why houses in the US are built with wood and drywall. It surely must be cheaper to use bricks/concrete and then renovate it fully every 20 years, or am I wrong here?
Milling large trees down to 2x4s and coupling it to drywall to build homes that don't last is a travesty.
The bulk of NZ houses are wooden, and have been for its entire history. They are also cold and are often damp, though these problems can be solved with decent building practices.
Concrete and brick are not that desirable in an earthquake prone country.
And yes, milling big old trees is bad. They are now made of treated pine, which comes with its own environmental concerns.
This one is about energy efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOvflXoWlw
I'm really interested in finding more videos like this because his videos go past "Home Depot said this is energy efficient", he instead tests these concepts and apparently works with different colleges that research these ideas.
I would think that renovations are much easier to do, regardless of the time interval between them, with wood and drywall. Drywall can be torn apart with by someone with just their hands; wood may need some cutting, but once in shorter pieces, can often just be yanked. Even a large house can probably be gutted/internally-exposed in a day or two.
With any kind of masonry you have to swing a sledge hammer with a lot of force or bring in jack hammers. Once set, concrete will resist a lot of force against it, which is why it's generally used for slabs and foundations.
It also depends on what you mean by renovate: often changes are in internal layout, so if one uses good design techniques for the shell:
* https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...
And floor trusses to reduce/eliminate internal load-bearing walls:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysT3zXkFGB8
It give completely flexibility on what can be done inside the box.
Wood is also fairly cheap and plentiful in North America.
As for drywall: what are the alternatives for internal walls? Lath and plaster?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lath_and_plaster
Some growth in popularity for wood in Europe; some Swiss examples:
But in brick houses renovation often means fixing what's broken and adding modern technologies such as insulation. Moving or adding walls can easily become quite a large scale project.
Wood structures have no issues lasting 100+ years as long as they’re protected from water and termite damage.
California? They last a long time. Deep South? I assume they don’t last as long. Canada? They last a long time.
At least a fifth of the UKs housing stock is over a century old, so the answer to that question is yes, if they're built properly...
The insulation, pipes, and wiring all are quite inferior to modern standards.
However, buildings built today to today's modern standards (with a little foresight) could easily be fine 100 years in the future. I'm not talking about fragile glass showpieces, but simple properly insulated homes built from durable materials.
My biggest issue with old homes is the layouts tend to be weird for today’s uses. Where I live many of the homes have a lot of small rooms and and narrow doorways instead of larger ones, for instance.
This of course goes back to conserving heat. But it makes house hunting difficult when trying to find a house with a layout you like.
The house where I grew up was made before Portland came to our zone, so it was made of lime mortar and rocks, some of them as big as a mellon, I found out when I tried to drill the walls to put a basketball basket.
It was demolished in the eighties, but not because it was in bad shape. I met the bulldozer operator years later and he recalled how he had a hard time with it.
I'm sure it would have been fine today, when it would be 100 y.o. or close. And I'm sure there's no other place where I'd rather live. It was cool in the summer, easy to warm in the winter, no mold, little noise from the outside.
Obviously, we do.
To put it in terms that may be easier to understand, we do not want to demolish a building when it serves all functional requirements.
Double so if they have urban and cultural value.
I suggest you visit places such as Amsterdam, where most of the city center was built in the 17th century and it's glorious.
I don't want a new house. Why? Because I refuse to live in a house with no natural ventilation. Most modern houses need air condition or at least ventilation systems, because they need to be so energy efficient, that there is no other way to get fresh air in. The fact that a house needs to be pressure tested seems insane.
Sure you can leave the windows open, but that defeats the purpose. Modern home needs to be ventilated three times a day, that means opening all the windows in the morning, when you get home in the afternoon and before going to bed. How many people will remember to do that?
The air in a modern home is often so dry that my nose start running the minute I enter. I don't want to live in that sort of climate.
Depending on the country, I think people should aim for home built from the late 1940 to mid 1970. Most likely additional isolation and new windows have been added over the years, making them reasonably energy efficient.
What's the alternative, building intentionally leaky houses? Better to be able to control the leaks to your benefit, aka active ventilation.
> Sure you can leave the windows open, but that defeats the purpose.
Actually the purpose of wind-ows is to let the wind in - no pun, that's the actually etymology of the word, (also in Spanish: ventana originally meant "for venting").
Even in an old air-leaky house if you don't open your windows, the ventilation is happening through your walls, using them as an air filter which they were not designed to be, and in the process pulling moisture through them, which can cause all kid of bad stuff to grow in them. You shouldn't rely on such passive depressurization for ventilation, as it depends totally on pressure differences between indoors and outdoors.
> Most modern houses need air condition or at least ventilation systems, because they need to be so energy efficient, that there is no other way to get fresh air in.
There absolutely are ways to get fresh air in and dirty air out, including the following:
- Exhaust ventilation systems (i.e. whole home extractor fans)
- Balanced ventilation systems
- Energy/Heat Recovery Ventilation systems.
The poorly ventilated houses you are referring to were built between the 80s and 90s - yes they have ventilation issues. I know this because I own such a house and have fixed the ventilation issues with solutions from the list above.
Today in most areas, some form of mechanical ventilation is required by code on new construction, and has been for 15 or so years.
In cold climates, the ability to safely humidify a house depends mainly on having good enough insulation and air sealing that the indoor humidity doesn’t condense on cold surfaces and rot the building. This is especially relevant near windows.
So if you want decent indoor humidity when it’s genuinely cold out, you want double- or triple-paned windows with insulated edges, proper air sealing near the windows, and possibly even an energy recovery ventilator.
(Or you can live in an old house, spend stupid amounts of money to heat it all the way to 63 degrees for a few hours a day, be cold and dry, and wonder what the heck anyone was thinking when they designed their single-pipe steam heating system.)
P.S. It is supposedly possible to properly design a single pipe steam heating system that achieves a comfortable temperature in more than one room. If so, I have never seen such a thing.
If you are interested in learning more about this "possibility", particularly if you have a steam system that you hate, you'd probably enjoy Dan Holohan's books. His basic thesis is that when designed and installed, they worked well, but the knowledge necessary to keep them functional has been lost over the years. Here's a New Yorker profile of him: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/steamed-the-jo...
I don't really understand your objection. in a leaky old style building without an effective moisture/thermal barrier, you don't get to choose whether ventilation is happening; it always is. with modern sealing, you can open the windows if you prefer fresh air, or you can enjoy much more efficient AC/heat if you don't. why couldn't you live in a modern home and just leave the windows open? it's easy to get a good draft going in any multifloor building with windows.
How can something powered by electricity/natural gas/etc be more efficient than simply opening the windows and letting Mother Nature do the work?
Now the thing is that I like old houses.
So, just pay a nice marketing team to make sure people love old houses (after all, we have marketing team that can sell poison such as cigarettes or carbon dioxide).
Or, as you said, just build with something easier to handle such as wood (provided you recycle it, else it'll go back to biomass, releasing its CO2 again)