Why are Latin American homes so ugly...

Why are Latin American homes so ugly? They're always built with multiple materials and have multiple colours and look like shit overall. Argentina is probably the only Latin country with homes that make sense.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=QtYywVZBePs
twitter.com/AnonBabble

cuz we're poor and homes are built over generations
sometimes each floor has been added by a new generation with different tastes and needs than the last one, but they didn't have money to redo the whole house in their preferred style

EL ARJENTINO CHICANO EN CACANADA SEÑORES JSAKJSAKJSAK

Go back to your igloo Bob Le Pierre

They look comfy to me

Our homes are as ugly as we are

>Argentina is probably the only Latin country with homes that make sense.

that's because they're actually European

They're usually made of cement though. Idk about Mexico but wood is far cheaper here. Even ancient Mexican cultures lived in wooden homes so it's not like cement is necessary.

But we've made adobe houses for literally thousands of years?

once erected, and if properly built, cement and cinder block structures are pretty resilient (family homes tend to not be more than 3 stories tall so earthquakes are not a problem) and require very little maintenance
the one i used to live in with my parents was 40ish years old and the only maintenance done on the structure was waterproofing every couple of years, scrapping the paint and repainting every 5 or so years
maybe we're all retards here, but is the way is done

That's not traditional homes but cheap monoblock structures and/or improvised brick diy projects. And yes they do have these in Argentina as well, traditional homes for Mexico and np doubt much of Latin America would be more like pictured.

The answer to your question is simply poverty.

Talking about Mayans, Aztecs, etc. who built wooden homes with grass roofs.

Wood doesn't stop bullets

They lived in apartments

Santiago, Chile has the closest thing to US style suburban sprawl in Latin America. Pic related is from Google Earth and probably the future as Chile get richer in general

He's not wrong tho, some peoples in the Pacific Northwest and other areas did build homes out of wood, there's a very good example of that at Mexico City's Antropologia but I haven't been able to track down a pick on the internet.

well that was then, now is this way

Newer developments are like that everywhere in Latin America.

Don't forget the part where it always has construction on the second floor that is never complete and looks like ass.

You said it was due to poverty, but yet wood is more abundant, it's renewable and it's cheap. All you need are a handful of nails to bind everything together. Our BARNS where animals are kept are bigger than your homes and are about as cheap as a new car (which is significantly less than a house).

The roof structure was made with wood but the walls were generally adobe as in pictured, those images you get googling for these that show wooden walls are generally enramadas, not real walls but part of semi-permanent dwellings made by less advanced peoples as in the Baja California peninsula.

There's actual cabins, good looking ones at that, constructed out of wood as I mention here I'm trying to find a pic.

I have never seen a house like that in my country
like i said maybe we are all retards here, but i don't even know people who do that kind of job whereas i know of at least 5 places near me where expert stone masons and construction workers are available for hire
perhaps is just a cultural thing and we like it that way
i certainly don't like the idea of wooden walls or floors, they might be cheaper and equally durable, but they just feel odd

I'd pick South america's mix-and match over the souless slab of uniformed concrete and endless grid-pattern streets that stand for urbanism in the US and Canada. It's like an architectural version of these dystopian futures where everyone looks,dress and speak the same

Because it doesn't last, user. When we build a house, we're building a house that our children are going to be living in, and then their children, and then their children. Eventually that wood is going to rot and will have to be replaced, and who knows in what financial conditions my descendants will be in to be able to fix it up? It's a very long term investment, Europe used to be covered in wooden castles, how many of those are still around compared to the stone ones?

I literally haven't been able to find any of shit like that on that scale in Argentina or Brazil. Pics?

It's not that hard to build out of wood. You just frame it and cover it. We take woodworking classes in high school, that's how easy it is. You probably wouldn't need insulation or central heating so it would be much cheaper than our homes

And if you're so worried about it not lasting, build a log cabin. They tend to last hundreds of years before needing replaced and can literally be built by a single person with enough time

Wood is more abundant but harder to work and difficult to mantain in hot humid areas, a very small home with a common room a bathroom and a single bedroom can be built out of brick for around USD$1k, that's with plaster, fittings, electrical, plumbing, etc. Obviously a lot of people make do with a lot less and not everyone knows what they're doing.

Pictured another traditional town, that' Mexico's most humid state, Louisiana meets rainforest type conditions.

>i certainly don't like the idea of wooden walls or floors
why not

I believe you, but to be honest i don't see a reason to be change, the houses we have work well enough and i'm sure as hell not going to learn woodworking to build me a house, if i ever have enought money to buy a plot of land to build a house i would rather it be a regular house, not a foreign house

Does this look like an American style development?

because wood is for furniture not houses
log cabins are for vacationing, not to live in them on a regular basis
next thing you guys are going to suggest is we drop the tacos and start eating sushi, vegemite, poutine and other exotic foreign foods

There's no way a brick home would only cost $1,000 unless you are making the bricks yourself. If I were to make a brick house the size of my bedroom alone, it would cost me about $6,000 for the brick alone, maybe $10,000 with electricity installed and plumbing.

Try to make a good house with $10000 budget for the first floor.

Yep, no money no nice house.

Government don't provide any kind of help, too. Sometimes owners have to help or build some parts.

Also, migration to cities is like 1900 NY style, I feel like Gangs of New York but in my city sometimes.

Forgot to attach pic

This has been going on for a LONG time, notice how homes in northern Europe were traditionally made of wood whereas in southern Europe it was stone.

>because wood is for furniture not houses
thats an extremely general statement

If I had $10,000 I could probably buy a used mobile home which, compared to what I've seen in most Latin American countries, is quite large. I used to live in one when we were in a bad financial situation and it was quite comfortable for 6 people. Some of my family still live in them because of how cheap they are to get.

you don't have to build the whole thing right away

I'd like to add wood is useless for Pacific countries. You know, earthquakes and humidity.

Also, you say that the weather would ruin the wood but yet most of the US has wooden homes even in places like southern California, Texas and Florida.

i never said the weather would ruin the wood
i said maybe we are all retards and that cement houses are probably a cultural thing

If it's easy to destroy, it's easy to rebuild. Again, California gets regular earthquakes (not big ones though) and the homes are fine.

Close enough. That's closer to England tho

and indeed i have no defense in favor of latin american houses other than we are used to them and will probably keep using them

>look at "modern" houses
>they're made from recycled wood, adobe and mud
are we going in circles

Wood is better for houses against earthquakes. Concrete is too inflexible against seismic waves

This, its a cultural thing through and through. We just don't like the idea of wooden homes.

Why would I move? Latin American countries hardly have more than 2 or 3 cities where you can live without doing absurd sacrifices.

And electricity and water are somewhat subsidized, so at the long term mobile houses are more expensive, dangerous (Latin America, duh). There aren't places to put your "mobile house" here, no facilities at all.

Californians get scared for a 5.0 earthquake, those fragile shits wouldn't resist a. 8.0 or 8.5 earthquake.

North Americans rarely see a real earthquake. Just see what happened in Mexico with anti-seismic buildings.

The idea is to have time to flee safely, not dying before crossing the door.

>Wood is better for houses against earthquakes.
Sure, buddy. You live in a highly active seismic zone ...

Don't bother to answer please, you said something really stupid.

concrete houses of the size we build have no problem with earthquakes
again, if properly build and with good foundations they last for generations and the ones i know have withstood dozens of earthquakes (at least two major ones) without relevant damage
but yeah, wood might indeed be a superior material, i saw a documentary about a chinese palace made with wooden columns which is capable of enduring cataclysmic earthquakes

Some of the older buildings in Latin America look comfy. A lot of them look old or worn on the outside, but the inside is roomy and full of courtyards or even a pool.

I could only see the benefit of cement or brick homes if you were producing the bricks by yourself because pre-made bricks are expensive as fuck here. I wish it was cheap because it's better at retaining heat than wood is and I hate waking up on a cold winter morning.

You ever wonder why film producers make sets out of wood? Because it's cheap. Even brick homes in films are just wood with fake brick on the outside. Wood is so abundant and cheap that it's basically like building your house out of mud.

You do understand that things are a lot cheaper in Mexico? USD$1k is around 20,000 pesos, just googled the price for bricks real quick and it's around 2 pesos for one piece in of the standard sizes, you could literally buy 1,000 bricks and still have 18,000 pesos left for everything else.

I've been forced into doing a contractor's job a couple of times.

You forget that in the majority of Pacific Latin America humidity is high, I left some strong and good quality wood outside for some months and it all got rotten.

And wood needs a lot of maintenance, too.

Why are Latinos so ugly? Specially males?

How much are bricks there? Here in Brazil, perhaps because of the prevalence of construction of brick homes, sellers know there is a huge market, an individual brick will cost ~10 American cents.

A concrete block (the biggest type of masonry unit you can buy) is like $2. I've done the math before and a room the size of my bedroom would cost about $6,000. That doesn't include reinforcing steel rebar and filler.

Brick construction lasts a long time even if you don't maintain it very well. A street like this is a typical older Central American environment. Those buildings have probably been there since at least the 1800's, with additions made from time to time. The exterior paint might be newer, but the brick itself stays in place for hundreds of years.

>Wood is so abundant and cheap
Maybe in your countries, you have huge forests with few ecological value but at least in Peru wood is taken from small Amazonian "safe" zones because of the ecological value we have, though nobody gives us money to save Earth's biggest source of clean air, so wood is really expensive.

Concrete is easier to work with and cheaper. Some bricks are designed to seismic resistance, they cost slightly more than normal bricks.

It looks shabby, but it's built to last.

You make a good point but there's no way anything in that street has been standing sinxce the 1800's, let's be real here.

Two 8.0 earthquakes and my 40 yo 4 floors house is still strong.

What matter's the time it lasts. Affording a house or only the terrain to build it here is big achievement...

My dad constantly builds barns and what not to hold all of his stuff (because he runs a business) and I can tell you that a wooden house would last far better than you think it would.

Recently though I've been thinking of taking a different route. I want to buy a shipping container (which are becoming common here as building materials), frame the walls, insert insulation and cover it with panels. It would look similar to a wooden trailer (pic related) but much larger and this would only cost me about $5,000 and I could probably get a shipping container for much cheaper anyway, so possibly $3,000 overall.

A friend pointed out to me that the steel frame would conduct electricity because that's not a problem here since lightning storms are very rare.

>wooden house would last far better than you think it would
I left cedar and other strong wood out like I said already and a fucking stupid would built his house of wood here, at least.

Idk how is the weather where you live but I'm talking from my Latin Americans country, and it wouldn't work, sorry.

I don't know man, my own experience with construction makes me wary of anything that isn't whatever's the cheapest viable local alternative, there's a reason everyone builds the same in an area, but if your guy knows what he's doing and the chances of delays and cost overruns are minimal then go for it.

that doesn't address the problem that the construction industry here is centered on brick and concrete and regular people (including myself) are not going to learn how to build a wooden house when it is easier to pay any random architect to build me a normal house
you might think wooden houses are comfy because you were raised in one, but i think they are alien
plus the government subsidizes national materials, like bricks and cement, so they are cheap enough

Come on man
You live in Canada, your forests cover half your land area, and you are the second largest nation on the planet
No wonder wood in Canada is extremely cheap. Throughout the rest of the world wood is expensive

>humidity
You've got a point here
In New Zealand most houses are made of cardboardy stuff, so the humidity allows mould to flourish in our damp homes
New Zealand has a big problem with many people, especially children, getting sick from our mouldy damp cardboardy homes

You make it sound like carpentry is a complicated skill. You take 4 boards, nail them together to form a square, then take a plywood panel and nail it on top. There are certain practices needed for building doors, windows and second floors but overall it's just building a frame and covering it with panels on the outside, then squeezing pink fibreglass insulation between the panels.

New Zealand houses are surrounded with corrugated iron or wood boards, the cardboardy stuff makes up the walls and interior

>cardboardy stuff
Seriously? We have 80%+ humidity whole year and even considering triplay (the combination of three sheets of strong wood) is seen as too dangerous for inside spaces.

Man, if you have asthma and come to Peru's coast better bring some medicine and stuff because it will shock you.

You're talking about gypsum board or drywall. It's really only used because you can hang stuff on the walls with it because it's like a giant bulletin board. Otherwise they would use more sturdy panels of plywood, but they're much harder to push thumbtacks into or install shelves.

There's some few places like pictured where people do build out of wood and in some places in the sierras using mostly pre-fabricated American wood cabins is affordable enough but for most of our territory wood is terribly impractical, and we don't like it culturally, it doesn't feel permanent, it's noisy and high maintenance, etc. Different strokes for different people.

I corrected myself in The outsides are surrounded by corrugated iron or wood planks
It is the insides that are made of very thin stuff that are stuck to wooden cross beams

No, the interior and walls of houses here aren't made of dryboard, they are made of a material much much thinner

>You make it sound like carpentry is a complicated skill. You take 4 boards, nail them together to form a square, then take a plywood panel and nail it on top.
or, you know, pay the master stone mason and his three sons to build me a regular house while i focus on my actual job and he focuses on his job and we both benefit from our specializations

You seriously don't have enough time to build your own house? This isn't something you'll achieve overnight. You do it after work, on weekends, etc. and eventually you'll have something for very cheap.

I can understand the logic on wood planks, but iron does not isolate anything.

It doesn't oxide? Iron gets cold quickly why using it to keep you warm?

not at all like england fuck off leaf

looks comfy to me.

I doubt kiwis need to be kept warm. They use lightweight material probably to keep their homes cooled down.

Yeah it doesnt have enough mosques

I could make time, I just don't want to.
It's the same with the rest of your argument, your wooden houses might be superior, but at least in mexico city is not preferable to a regular house (factors including the local construction industry being focused on other materials, local materials being subsidized by the government, and regular houses being familiar)
I don't think anyone in my family has built their own house.
You seem to like carpentry and building houses, me not so much.
Even if the wooden houses are better, the regular houses here are serviceable enough that I don't see the point in going through the effort of trying to construct anything else.

>You seriously don't have enough time to build your own house?
Time is a thing you can't waste in a Latin American city with more than 8 million people, you can spend 3-4 hours in traffic or getting to your work, university, weekends are to have fun or recover.

People are tired when they return home.

It's OK so.

Buy one of these, frame the interior, install installation and drywall. Cheap, easy, could be done in a day with a handful of people. The outside would look like shit, but you could improve on it over time.

you've gone from the exotic, but respectable, to the weird hipster territory
if you like that kind of house, that's fine
I don't like them and see no reason to do any sort of construction work when labor is so cheap and skilled around these parts

How is it "hipster"? If done right, they look like normal homes.

Chileans live in North American style housing. C

Yes, they sure do
youtube.com/watch?v=QtYywVZBePs

>normal homes
normality is relative
those containers belong in a cargo bay, i'm not a abstract artist nor am i in line with some new aesthetic vanguard, if i ever have enough money to buy land i would build a regular house, not repurpose containers nor build a wooden igloo or a fiberglass space station
you, on the other hand, seem to like these kinds of alternative homes, as well as woodworking and building. and that's fine
have a good night

As a streetview pro I can confirm that chile is the comfiest latin american country on average.

Corrugated iron is used because it is cheap

I live in South Island, so winters are cold here