I believe in Germany and Sweden, wood is now allowed for constructing medium-rise residential buildings, as long as it’s constructed “fire-safe.”
It has been 30+ years since I lived in a small town in Hesse but I observed several houses being constructed and talked to co-workers about homes there.
The construction methods, materials and approach to ones home in that part of Gemany struck me as a decision for a lifetime or several, with a family home passed on to children. Meanwhile in the US, people relocate or upgrade to a newer home in a decade or so. As a consequence, US homeowners are quite likely to be less interested in high quality and long lasting construction.
North America had (and still has) a LOT of wood resources.
It’s not universal, though - the home I sitting in right now is mostly cinderblock, with a couple of steel I-beams here and there (allegedly, they’re rejects from a lot cast for a bridge-building project appropriated by the builder, who worked/was connected to the local steel mills. Did not pass quality control for the bridge, but more than adequate as housing structural materials). The roof, however, is wooden rafters covered by sheeting and tar, and the second floor is built on wood joists (first/ground floor is on the concrete foundation).
Wood is a common building material because wood is common over here, but certainly you’ll see whatever is locally available used quite a bit as well, whether its stone, brick, concrete, or whatever.
A lot depends on how they’re built - wood can be quite sturdy as long as it’s good quality, well put together, and protected by a good roof.
Also, tornadoes are quite capable of destroying brick and cinderblock buildings, either because of structural defects in the building or because very few walls of any sort are going to stand up well to, for instance, having a fully loaded semi-trailer truck slammed into, which is one of the things tornadoes do. With tornadoes it’s not just the winds (although those are dangerous enough) but also the large debris that said winds throw about the landscape. This video has flying trucks starting about 18 seconds into the video and features other results of tornados flinging large pieces of stuff around. Brick walls won’t stand up appreciably better than wood will to that treatment. Makes more sense to build with less expensive, common materials either initially or when making repairs.
In tornado country the really critical thing is to have a secure shelter, whether that’s in a basement or a reinforced room of your house or something else. It doesn’t have to be big, as it only needs to shelter you for a maybe a minute or two, but it does need to be firmly anchored or underground so it doesn’t wind up in the air, and sufficiently reinforced to withstand heavy debris impact.
The wooden shakes on roofs are back to “it’s a common building material”.
The plastic/aluminum/vinyl walls required much less maintenance than the wood cladding they were intended to replace.
The classic post-Chicago Fire building is a brick shell but the interior floors, some or all of the walls, and the roof rafters are typically wood. This does make them more fire resistant than an all-wood building, but if a fire does get started you basically have a brick oven loaded with fuel. The addition of modern sprinkler systems have made them much safer but every so often you have one catch fire with an inoperable sprinkler system and the results are usually a complete loss of the building. On the upside, the fires spread much more slowly to adjacent buildings so its rare you have an entire block go up in flames.
My home in Hawaii was built without using any wood at all. Termites are a huge problem as is the warm humid climate that produces over 200 inches of rain a year. All construction wood is shipped over from the mainland $$$!
The framing is steel, the floors are tile over concrete, the solid walls are made from a heavy foam insulation with pre laminated cement board on both sides. The roof is painted steel. The walls and ceiling/roof are 6 inch single wall construction, no outer or inner walls.
My insurance agent likes the fact that there is nothing to catch fire.
And the only reason they are as rare as they are is that not a lot of people lived there 200 years ago.
I rented a house that was about 150 years ago in New Jersey, in a town that was there during the Revolution. It was the first house on the land, and is still in excellent shape 20 years after I lived in it. Lots of house are old in this town. The hardware store was good at supplying screen windows made to order, since nothing back then was made to standard sizes, as I soon discovered.
One big thing missing from this discussion is the builders / building material supplier lobbies. After a hurricane in Miami, my friend who is a civil engineer designed a house using concrete and cinder blocks - he had an uphill battle with local regulators, builders and even the insurance guys. Once the supply chain of houses are established, the lobbies protect them pretty well.
As others mentioned, North America has wood coming out the wazoo. It’s much more scarce in Europe, while clay and coal have been prevalent for several centuries.
Plus, in the days before pumper trucks, close-together wood housing was a major risk. Many towns have had their version of London’s Great Fire (or Chicago’s, or San Fran after the 1905 earthquake). Modern wooden housing is a lot less “crowded together” than pre-automobile towns and villages. Nevertheless, There are places like Amsterdam where it seems having liquid fire-breaks at regular intervals and a handy source of fire-fighting water has resulted in a lot of surviving structures with significant wood components. Whereas a brick structure was probably easier to rebuild if a fire severely damaged the wood floors; there are many buildings hwere a fire destroyed the roof and the brick or stone structure was reused - a full wood building would be a complete write-off as was London in 1666 - they even redrew the street map to some extent, things were so badly destroyed. So the reason you don’t see a lot of old historical wood buildings is fire rather than weathering.
See Anne Hathaway’s cottage, in Stratford-on-Avon, for an example of what was likely the transition - before powered equipment to cut panels, and as wood was becoming scarcer, houses were built with wood frames and mud-and-branch infill between the frames, the classic “Tudor style”. That isolated cottage has survived for close to 500 years, even with an extra-flammable grass roof. OTOH, there are buildings like Hampton Court from even earlier and some surviving castles, where the wood components escaped any significant fire damage.
The OP’s question is posed, really, because the OP is from Europe.
It is perhaps difficult to overstate the difference between Europe and North America in terms of the availability of wood. Western Europe was basically deforested generations ago; as far back as the days of the American Civil War, visitors from Europe remarked how Americans still had copious amounts of wood. Even today, just driving in basically any direction in any number of places in the USA, you will see what appears to be an endless array of forest. I drove from Vancouver to Seattle today and it was just miles and miles of forest. The United States’ available forest is the size of all of Western Europe - not the forested part, ALL of Western Europe. The USA and Canada between them have forested area larger than all but six countries in the world, and larger than the entire EU.
Constructing a house out of anything BUT wood is usually hideously expensive by comparison. It’s just so easily had here.
One humorous thing I did see on a visit to Britain - Hampton Court. The great rooms in the original part, was built by Cardinal Wolsley. Presumably after a visit to Italy and the fine mansions there, he wanted something equally modern and imposing. The first main room, on the way to the mail hall - it is designed to look like a marble wainscoting and plaster walls - but you can tell by the cracks from centuries of drying out - the walls are giant wood sheets instead. Wolsley wanted marble and plaster, but all the English workmen knew how to do for reasonable cost was wood (easiest available was wood), so that’s what he got. 4-foot wide sheets of oak painted to look like marble and plaster.
The ranch house that I was born in had its lower story build about 1800. 2nd story added about 1900. Was demolished around 1990.
^
But much of the original Tudor structure was brickwork.
For some reason the bricks at the time of Wolsey (Tudor) were purplish while later additions supervised by Christopher Wren used common red bricks.
Greensted Church in Essex has significant portions of the original 11th century woodwork
Germans and many other Europeans (for the most part) think slightly different about moving around in comparison to the US.
For example, the house my grandfather grew up belonged to his grandfather before and now houses my grandfathers grand-grandchildren, currently housing 3 generations.
Brick build houses take longer to build and are believed to last longer (in Europe) in comparison to wood frame houses, although many wood houses date back to the 17th /18th century.
It’s expected that a house build is easily taking 1 year, which to my understanding would not be tolerated in the US.
However, the number of new builds that are wood frame house is rising in Europe.
Well, oak panelling was ‘the’ way to clad interior walls in smart homes for centuries in England. Marble is readily available in Italy, but not in England, and plasterwork would crack and fall off the walls in our damp climate. Wood was a practical choice.
Presumably down to increased mechanisation of the process of manufacturing bricks.
Don’t forget that Hampton Court suffered a devastating fire: A phoenix from the flames. Note that the wood paneling, referred to above, was “hardly scorched”.
In the UK and across Europe there is just about every kind of house building that you can imagine. From concrete to hay bales you can find them all. My house, which was a fairly cheap construction in the 1950s has a double skin of bricks which originally had an air gap for insulation but was retro-filled with wood wool for improved insulation. The only wood is in the floors and ceilings. The roof is clay tiles. The house my wife was born in, a couple of miles away, is built from concrete panels between concrete posts on the ground floor with timber frame clad with clay tiles on the first floor. It was built cheaply by the Council in the 60s.
At one time virtually ever town had its own brickworks. Bedford, North of london was the source of many of London’s bricks. I can remember the sting of coke (roasted coal, not the white powder) in the eyes with smoke poring from scores of tall (brick) chimneys. That was in the 60s - they are all gone now, bricks are fired in gas ovens.
Oak has a special quality in that it gets harder and more impervious with age. Tourists look at the black and white Tudor houses in Stratford on Avon, little realising that the black colour was a Victorian addition. Many are being restored (or allowed to return) to their natural silver colour. I once tried to drill holes in an old oak beam and burned out several twist drills.
Jamestown colony made glass to sell in England. One reason they did that was wood was so plentiful it was easy to make glass. Even by 1607 wood was in short supply in England so glass was expensive.
Hay bale construction is vulnerable to wolves, though.
So is wood. Presumably you need a brick house to be Big Bad Wolf-proof.
In Europe they do. Here in the US we have guns.