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by mglz 897 days ago
> Its seems like every episode of Grand Design does include an almost spiritual journey to a glue-lam pre-fabricated wood factory in Germany.

This is really weird to me because nobody builds like that here. Brick and concrete rule supreme and people living in wooden houses are seen as old hippies who cuddle with termites.

1 comments

There's a misunderstanding here.

Glue-lams are not used for walls, they are used for floor support. While a lot of multi-unit concrete residential construction in Germany uses concrete for the floor without supports), for single family houses there it is still relatively common to span rooms with beams to create floor support.

This is also true for earthen buildings, which are remarkably popular (on a per-capita basis) in Germany. I say this as a US resident in New Mexico, where it is hard to imagine a place (Germany) less likely to use variants on the same best-practices as housing we build here.