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Timber framing is beautiful and long lasting, but expensive, requiring fine workmanship and specialized skills, and more importantly, high quality wood - long,
by beat 9y ago
Timber framing is beautiful and long lasting, but expensive, requiring fine workmanship and specialized skills, and more importantly, high quality wood - long, straight trees for beams.
It was more or less obliterated in the late 19th century with the arrival of inexpensive machine-made nails. Cheap nails allowed a shift from timber framing to balloon framing using 2x4 boards, using both cheaper wood and less-skilled labor. Until manufactured nails came along, nails had to be made one at a time, by hand, by a blacksmith. Nails were expensive. That's why 19th century and earlier furniture has such beautiful joinery - it was cheaper to hand-carve dovetail joints and other woodwork than it was to nail it together.
The history of architecture is a history of economics. Fascinating stuff! (None of this is meant as a knock on timber framing, btw - it's superior in every respect but cost.)
- Houshalter 9y agoThere's also survivorship bias here. Perhaps there were a lot of poorly made 9th century buildings and barns that didn't survive.
- beat 9y agoNo, this is a little different. It's not "poorly made", it's that the technologies didn't even exist. Without nails, there wasn't a market for the other materials of the balloon-frame construction world. I live in a neighborhood of century-old houses (my own house is either 104, 106, or 110 years old - it's unclear from the paperwork). Many of the houses in this neighborhood are in rapid decay, mostly due to inadequate foundations or inadequate maintenance. We're seeing a building boom, with developers buying up battered rentals, tearing them down, and building something new on the lot - trying to look old, but with modern construction and materials. I wonder how the new houses will hold up in another century, relative to the sturdier of the now-old houses?
- freehunter 9y agoThere are an absolute ton of poorly made 9th century buildings that did not survive, which is why it makes news when one is found and ones that exist are tourist attractions.
- gumby 9y agoThis is my theory about the amazing Victorian era bridges built before there was good theoretical understanding of how to build steel structures. All the crummy ones fell down. Timber framed buildings that have survived are a different story, but again that's because they are the result of thousands of years of learning how to get it right.
- cpr 9y agoAll true, but my memory is that timber framing is only 20% more expensive when looking at whole-house costs. So it's not prohibitive by any means.
- blacksmythe 9y agoNails were so expensive, I had heard that people would sometimes burn buildings down to recover the nails. However, it appears this might by a myth: https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/revisited-myth-19-iron-nails-were-so-valuable-that-people-burned-down-buildings-just-to-get-the-nails/ https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/revisited-myth...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]