>>The American ingenuity is 'remarkable' indeed. All those houses appear to be so fragile, being mainly from wood. Is that on purpose (fragile is cheaper to rebuild)? And I wonder why the Americans build a whole city in a soup bowl, in an area where hurricanes visit the ground each year. Doesn't sound ingenious to me.
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>Hi Peter,
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>That's a pet peeve of mine: construction practices in this country. It's as if the story of the three pigs and the wolf was forbidden to be read here!
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>I read a bit about "american construction techniques" a while ago and, as opposed to what is done in other countries, where main columns (mostly in the corners) support the weight of a house, here the weight of the house is supported by a number of wood beams (2" x 4" sections) every 16" or so.
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>This came to be because many many years ago, it was very difficult to get wood good enough to use as main supports, so ingenuititious builders came up with a solution: distribute the load among a number of less-capable beams and use more of them (in the walls). This way the structure is technically over-supported if all the beams are first quality, or just supported if some of the beams are allowed to fail.
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>Please note that higher buildings are built differently, but 99.999999% of all structures that are 4 or less floors high are built in this stupid way.
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>Nowadays the reasoning is that it'll probably be cheaper to fess-up to paying millions when disaster strikes and loose some lives, rather than spend the money up front and use better building techniques. If you can, rent a movie called "Class Action" (with Gene Hackman) and you'll get the idea of how things that may fail "work" here.
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>Alex


I think the real logic here is that here in the USA, we don't give a 2nd thought about ripping down a building to put up a bigger one - and this is a very common practice. So...since the odds are you're going to take down your 4 story building within 50 years to put up a 30 story building anyway...why bother to make it last?