It’s a not wisdom of individual builders. They obviously will go for the cheaper option. It’s more a wisdom of the crowds/market. A lot of folks outside the US have a cultural aversion to the American style of home construction. There’s a lot of areas of the world where even if a builder could affordably construct American-style stick-framed houses, that they simply wouldn’t sell. Look how some folks lament the “cardboard, sticks, and glue” that make up American homes, as if an inch-thick OSB panel is in any way comparable to the cardboard boxes used to package food. Even things like “tape,” as though the purpose-built and engineered weather-sealing “tapes” are in any way comparable to common masking or Scotch tape. It’s like denigrating a well-engineered concrete house as “just a pile of rocks.”
Americans have more of a cultural attitude of impermanence. It wouldn’t say it’s anything like the Japanese, but it’s still there. There’s an old saying, “in Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance. In America, a hundred years is a long time.”
There’s no wisdom there, dumbass. They build it that way because it’s cheap.
It’s a not wisdom of individual builders. They obviously will go for the cheaper option. It’s more a wisdom of the crowds/market. A lot of folks outside the US have a cultural aversion to the American style of home construction. There’s a lot of areas of the world where even if a builder could affordably construct American-style stick-framed houses, that they simply wouldn’t sell. Look how some folks lament the “cardboard, sticks, and glue” that make up American homes, as if an inch-thick OSB panel is in any way comparable to the cardboard boxes used to package food. Even things like “tape,” as though the purpose-built and engineered weather-sealing “tapes” are in any way comparable to common masking or Scotch tape. It’s like denigrating a well-engineered concrete house as “just a pile of rocks.”
Americans have more of a cultural attitude of impermanence. It wouldn’t say it’s anything like the Japanese, but it’s still there. There’s an old saying, “in Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance. In America, a hundred years is a long time.”
Reminds me of the Grand Strategy mirage of history, wherein people ascribe some overarching, long-term vision to some sequence of ad-hoc decisions