I cannot say enough how much as I've aged I've come to appreciate how lots of big dumb matters around me feels essential to have peace & quiet.
You can find a peaceful out of the way place where there isn't sound or people, or you want stone and concrete aplenty around you. That's weight & mass. But that mass usually has so much cost. (And it has so many inconveinences. Where do the pipes and wires go when you are working with stone? It's not accommodating like framing & drywall.)
This is so cool. This is so so so cool. It's cheating, getting one of the best & nicest things you can get, and doing it not by just cladding your world in thick concrete, but by creative use of negative spaces. By resonance. It's a vast unmaterial triumph. Using much less matter but getting so many of the same upsides.
This is the arch of victory that embodies what I hope can carry us through the stars for a long time: getting so much from so little. Making stuff that is blisteringly effective. These are the triumphs that can sustain us as we voyage on.
(It also looks like something that would be pretty easy to mass produce! A bit bulky to transport though, but maybe there are some creative solutions.)
listen, if you want a bunch of concrete cheap, i gotta tell you people will literally pay you to haul away their construction waste, which is mostly concrete. it's almost 2 tonnes per person per year: https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-...
what's expensive isn't the stone and concrete. those are cheap as shit. even graded broken stone aggregate for mixing concrete is cheap. like a penny a kilogram cheap. sand, same story. random dirt is even cheaper and works fine to block sound
what's expensive is shaping the concrete and dirt (for example, as you point out, to run pipes and wires through them, but also for things like making thin walls stand up stably)
to a lesser extent, getting it delivered is also expensive, because it's heavy, but mostly it's the shaping. that's why concrete is so popular; concrete is mud, and mud is pretty easy to shape, but it's mud that turns into stone overnight. it turns out that it takes a lot of work to shape big things
The low-tech "old farmer" Goldilocks solution I've seen is to mostly fill in the large gaps with free concrete rubble or stones, so a lot less (expensive) concrete is needed to infill the rest.
But that ain't sexy, so most people ignore it. :)
Obviously it's somewhat impractical on large jobs, and inadvisable in very strength-critical roles, but for small household / farmstead projects it's a great way to save money and get rid of ugly rubble you have lying around.
Yep. Don't use expensive, new, pristine, energy-intensive materials wherever possible. Reserve those for finishes and exterior coatings. Appropriate filler materials should be suitable for the strength, longevity, and safety profile and function desired.
This also reminds me of some DIY and volunteer experiences installing residential fence posts. On a volunteer gig, I saw people using 200 lbs. of concrete and keep adding water until it's soup triumphally proclaim it's "the right way" while dismissing supervisors and others who knew what they're doing. Meanwhile, I was looking at depth, slope, wind risk, and soil (hydrology), and gathering site debris like rocks and chunks of metal to stick under each post so it wouldn't rot in 5 years or become the Big Dig in time, materials, or quality.
yeah, despite my extremely limited construction experience, i've done this, recycling concrete as aggregate
also though 'fill in the large gaps with aggregate' is what makes concrete concrete instead of cement
however, if you want to make soaring thin shapes out of concrete, you aren't going to do that with chunks of demolition debris as aggregate. even gravel won't do. for ferrocement you need an all-sand aggregate, and mining construction sand is a lot cheaper than crushing demolition debris into sand
Used bricks is very sexy solution. However it’s getting harder and harder to find old buildings to be demolished. And I wouldn’t use these bricks for critical infrastructure.
Yeah for something you're gonna see, bricks are fantastic. If you're just making an anchor for a post or similar, rubble-infill concrete is a great cost saver.
I feel the same way about directly using or mimicking systems of the natural world. Stuff like using birds as combined pest control and fertilizer or waste water treatment.
I think we haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible, particularly with microbes. I envision things like producing glue, converting plant scraps into fibres/wood, converting toxins into inert compounds, extracting trace chemicals from a massive volume of useless medium.
Right now I think the biggest obstacle to these kinds of techniques is the lack of control and the danger of escape and mutation. Just imagine if a plastic-eating bacterium escaped a waste facility and started eating our world. I hope that with better tools and better simulation we can make it work and make it safe. It would go a long way towards lowering our energy and resource use.
Helmholtz absorbers have been used for some time in built spaces. Look for a pattern of slats or holes like perfboard, often on the rear wall of the space. Lecture halls, museums, performing arts, and the like.
The author acknowledges present use and also gives intriguing historical examples from Vitruvius and and Da Vinci.
An acoustic jar, also known by the Greek name echea (ηχεία, literally echoers), or sounding vases, are ceramic vessels found set into the walls, ceilings, and sometimes floors, of medieval churches. They are believed to have been intended to improve the sound of singing, and to have been inspired by the theories of Vitruvius.
Thank you! I missed the show HN on your project, but it looks fantastic (and I like its promotion through HN comments for long-ish form videos, doesn't feel spammy, is helpful and very clear to understand what it does).
It would seem that just making the cavern with standard solid brick and using various gaps and walls would scale better. Very interesting video I learned a lot!
I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would not have simply cast bricks with an inflated balloon or plastic bag inside? They could even still do the inside/outside resonator combo which is a neat trick too. I laughed out loud when they were using the big robot arm to do the texturing. Use your friggin hands.
Im am anti car zealot. I'm labelling so my self auto-ironically (no pun intended), as i own a car, but i prefer cities with less cars. I'm angry how often we externalise damage generated by cars to someone else. We are technically capable to produce silent cars, yet we somehow try to workaround this by building houses of different materials? How backwards that is instead of just legally limiting the sound levels for newly produced cars. And eventually cars will have only rolling noice.
But then someone would say oh but then cars are dangerous when they are silent, let's install speakers in them so pedestrians can hear approaching car and move out of the way. See what's happening here? Instead of jus making a car unable (auto breaks) to hit a pedestrian, we are doing some silly workarounds (ok, no silly but cost saving) to emit noise and shift the burden of moving out of the way to the pedestrian. Again polluting city with noice.
Done ranting. Have not touched pollution, wight, speed limits and general car infrastructure :) Time to get my morning coffee.
P.S yes, i'm very much influenced by "Not Just Bikes". Youtube channel about European city planning (human/bike oriented) https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes
Societies thinking around cars really shows just how "unnoticeable" the influence of something becomes once it is ubiquitous. In a car-based world everything takes the shape of cars, and the crazy thing is, that many people won't even see how unusual that is.
I once lived next to a busy inrush road in a city. Once a week I could wipe black grime from my balcony desk. Every second night I would wake up from people speeding or trucks rushing through. One day I spent on the balcony counting cars. 100% of the SUVs had only one person in it. But the worst thing was the noise. I didn't notice back then, and I am not a sensitive person (I play in a noise rock band), but when I moved and was in a silent new flat, it felt as if someone had lifted a rock from my chest. And let's not think about the black grime.
Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car and don't care about the people living there. I especially dislike how naturally we are expected to yield public space to ever-bigger cars for only minor fees.
What I find most striking is that people with very rudimentary training are allowed to use machinery of 1.5 tons and more, in public, in the vicinity of unprotected bystanders.
This leads to about 43,000 deaths per year in the US alone. And for some reason this is considered normal.
In the meantime you have safety trainings for how to use a ladder properly in your org.
Don't get me wrong, work accidents do happen with ladders, and training/inspection can prevent them, but the risk stemming from ladders doesn't compare to cars.
The way society accepts risks tells a lot about that society.
If cars weren’t so ubiquitous otherwise in society, it would probably require several months of training to be licensed to drive a car in the workplace. And then you wouldn’t be allowed to drive faster than 15 mph except in special fenced in areas.
I mean I got my driving license in a country where the fast way of doing it takes 6 months and includes driving on a test pad where multiple dangerous situations are simulated:
- a wet road and you drive over a "moveable" section of road and as soon as your front wheels are over it jerks the rear wheels randomly to either the left and the right ans you need to recover
- a course that you drive through and randomly a wall of water emerges from holes in the street and you need to safely stop or avoid the obstacle (this teaches you about the safe stopping distance and problems that can emerge when you suddenly try to avoid things) with and without ESP
- driving too fast around curves on purpose
- trying to do similar things while multitasking in the vehicle to demonstrate how bad that influences your performance
I don't know what the level needed is in the US (I grew up in Austria), but even with that training I still feel cars are taken not seriously enough.
The level in the US is a written test on a subset of the rules, usually 6 months of mentored driving (need something like 50 hours with another licensed adult in the car), and a test that involves basically driving around the block and parallel parking. It sounds like a joke but it's true. Even most optional courses like driver's education generally don't put you on a skid pad or anything like you mention. I assume it's largely due to liability and lawyers - ironically they consider that type of training to be too dangerous even though you'll encounter more dangerous situations on the road and be unprepared for them.
The best thing I have found for this type of training is autocross (tire rack presents a special defensive driver course related to some autoX clubs too). Then snow/skid pad it's just finding a deserted parking lot cover in snow and ice for some low-speed recovery practice.
> Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car
Even if you own a car really. I've owned a car for the past 8 years because of how crap the public transport is. It's the only way of getting to many places. But I've never driven within my own town except for getting out of town. What I've always really wanted is an out of town car park I can cycle to with secure bike parking. That would completely eliminate the need to use a car in town. At that point I could probably do without actually owning the car and just grab one from a pool of rentals.
Unfortunately people don't know what they're capable of and insist on cars being parked right at their houses. So many people even get groceries delivered by someone else now. They are mostly just wheelchairs these days.
I am lucky enough to live in a european city with very decent public transport, so for the 2 times a year I actually need a car or a transporter I just rent it. I don't need to think about my car, where it is parked, what it needs in terms of maintenance, etc. I see this as a value that easily outweighs the benefits of having a car.
But that choice is easier if you live somewhere where you can both get everywhere using subways, busses, light trains and hop on a night train and wake up in the capital of a different country. I guess you have to experience this before you realize that a life without car is truly possible, when you shape your world in the right way.
Before I had a car I lived in a city and used my bicycle to get around everywhere. I could get to most places in the inner city far more quickly than my friends who had opted in to a disability: they now required cars to move around and their bodies had regressed into a blob-like form.
But this lifestyle became worse and worse over time and it was all due to cars.
Over 10 years I saw the roads become more and more clogged with cars. I saw cars get bigger and bigger and more and more powerful with the drivers seemingly less and less capable. I'd been using the road since I was 12. They'd been using it since they were 18 or so and only knew it from behind a dashboard. I saw more and more public money get poured into the car subsidy: "reducing journey times", making roads better for cars and worse for everyone else. Meanwhile train tickets increased, bike parking got worse or stayed the same and cars just seemed to get more and more affordable. I'm probably as experienced a cyclist as you can get but I now consider cycling on the road to be too dangerous to be enjoyable. Not to mention I started to question whether breathing diesel fumes and tyre dust in deeply was good for my health.
To add to that, just living in the city became unbearable. Car noise had become horrendous. I never heard my neighbours who lived in adjoined apartments. The only noise pollution to enter my own abode was from cars: the engines, the tyres and the sound systems (and I'm not talking about boom-boom subwoofers, just standard car radios). This really hit home one winter when we had weather bad enough to stop people driving for a week. Noise pollution is insidious: you only know it's bad when it's already driving you crazy.
Some cities have car-sharing schemes, where cars parked on the street (no particular place) are available to rent by the minute, hour or day. I use this in Copenhagen, though generally only a couple of times a year.
Green Mobility and Share-Now are the larger companies here.
Other than cars with mufflers cut out most car noise (above a certain speed) is the tire noise. At least that's how I understand it. Not to say it wouldn't be nice if cars would be otherwise silent, but i.e. highway noise wouldn't be significantly quieter with BEVs all around. Could you tell me what do you mean by technical capability to produce silent cars?
Tire noise is related to speed and (i'm guessing weight of car). Usually you don't live near highway, so urban street noice levels would be much lower when there would be no engine noise car would not weight 2+ tones and preferably would use low noise tires (quiet tires).
car tires are wide. Much wider than they need to be to do same speeds on normal roads. This is fashion driven and encourages drivers to go faster than they should. It also wastes fuel and makes more noise.
We could tax car tires by width and gain a lot.
The type of tire and depth and pattern of the tread on the tires matter far more than the width of the tire. My sedan with high quality 'skinny' winter tires will easily cruise on past an SUV with wide summer tires going up a snowy hill.
This is also true for noise - tread design and compound are much bigger factors for noise than section width.
Also, what you describe is not necessarily in conflict with the parent. Skinny tires are good in the snow because there's less plowing effect and more pressure to grip into the snow. However, more width is generally better on icy roads.
It counts, but does it in a meaningful amount? We are not on a race track. There is no need to be faster by 0.01 second. If road conditions are averse, slow down. You are not expected to WIN morning commute.
This is my favourite bit about cycling. The commute is a race. It’s often with others, but the likes of Strava gamify it such that you are racing yourself too.
I appreciate your sentiment but go to Google maps and take a look at at any non-coastal state. There's just no way cars are going away. Short of a quintillion dollar restructuring of our country, it's a complete pipe dream. Id encourage you to be pro clean/public transportation rather than anti car. Zealotry gets us nowhere.
There was recently a pro-car terrorist attack in London. I am not kidding - someome made a bomb and blew up a lamppost with cameras for reading number plates. Its hardly been reported.
Can you imagine the coverage if the climate protesters blew up a betrol station, or god forbid, if this was something to do with currst conflict in the middle east?
So why anti-wcar? So in inner London, like 40% of households have a car but 90% of public space is roads. When u suggest that maybe the 60% deserve at least 20% of space for walking and cycling, you get labeleled anti car.
People complain about having like 8 coherent cycleways across all of london taking up too much road space, compared to thousands of roads. People complain about not being allowed to drive ancient diesel vehicles that kills kids eith astma.
Easy - make 'Light commercial' use of your house a constitutional right. There, all of USA fixed in one day. Now you can open a coffee shop in your garage, and it cannot be interfered with by zoning laws and mandatory parking minimums. And now your neighbours can sell pizza, and you can walk there and pick it up.
And if you have 2 days, allow apartments to be built withing 300 meters of any public transit.
You can't be serious. That's where people park their cars and put their lawnmowers, snowblowers, etc. Good luck getting a garage OKd to sell food by the health department. Not to mention literally no one is going to buy pizza out of someone's garage.
Where are you from that you think this is feasible?
But that's my point, I feel like you can't imagine life elsewhere in the US. Someone having a pizza place in suburbia, in their garage is:
A: Impractical. That's where your car goes. There's no where else to park it. Park it elsewhere, what?
B: Not suitable for serving food.
C: Completely ignoring the social norms of the area/culture.
D: It's not dense enough for that to make sense. People will have to drive there for the business to survive unless all 100 people living in that 1 mile radius eat pizza every day.
E: It's simply not big enough.
F: Therefore, weather. No one is walking to an outdoor garage pizza place with no seating in the winter. They're not driving either.
Look up Oshkosh, WI on Google maps and tell me where these customers are going to come from. There is enough commercial. There aren't enough people.
Most of the country is very sparsely populated. The 100k cities have kind of a city core, but they are spread out over 400 sq miles. The rest is nothingness.
Your idea requires completely resigning zoning laws against literally everyone's will, somehow adding parking for everyone's cars, and what, adding more busses that already don't get used?
You identify the flat, dense, urban spaces fit for car-free living.
You build public transit in and between them.
You decide on an inner-city answer to delivery and trash trucks, like maybe the robots that move pallets around in warehouses...
You build easy ways for people to get in and out of their cars and trucks on the borders of those spaces...
You stop letting cars and trucks on to main street. #bollards
I recently heard cars described as "an insect-like exo-skeleton for people, who then feel free to act more like insects than citizens while they're inside of it"
> Instead of jus making a car unable (auto breaks) to hit a pedestrian, we are doing some silly workarounds
I have a car which auto-brakes when an obstacle is ahead. Usually helps when parking in tight spots, or when backing out — its systems have wider FOV than I do, and it warns of incoming cars of pedestrians a fraction of a second before I can see them, which is good.
Except when the weather conditions or something on the road trigger a false positive and I suddenly go from 45-50 km/h to full stop. It's also a lot of adrenaline fun for the drivers behind me. Happened twice last year.
So no. A speaker is more reliable and robust and simple a solution.
Separating your car from unprotected humans is the solution.
Your right to drive a 2 tonne machine through residential streets where other people live and their kids play is a historical and cultural anomaly. Let’s not pretend the solution is speakers to get pedestrians jumping quicker.
I welcome you to design such a block of streets, though keep in mind that it still needs to be maintained. Also when you have a grocery shop, something needs to load and unload groceries. Also, you have fire trucks, ambulances, police cars that need to have access.
It's going to take a long time to change our built envrinoment and habits, but it's not inevitably human nature to want cars whipping through the places our kids play. In fact, given a choice rich people rarely allow this in their neighbourhoods.
If you want to see what spaces look like when cars are deprioritised, NL and other European countries are leading the way. And you don't have to ban them entirely. Just stop through traffic, and limit to local residents. Also reduce speed limits and make public transport a viable alternative for people.
Drink driving also used to be normal and "inevitable". It's possible to change.
I wasn't talking about sirens at all. You make vehicle-friendly neighborhoods if you want emergency vehicles to be able to get there. The moment there are vehicle-friendly neighborhoods, the locals will inevitably come with reasons and excuses to have their cars parked as close to their house entrances as it gets.
There are lots of lowering bollards in the UK. That allows you to do things like slow emergency vehicles, or allow motor traffic only at designated times.
Perhaps if we're going to continue to have highways through cities, containing their noise and emissions should be a priority rather than shifting externalities as various kinds of pollution onto neighbors and visitors.
Build residences that are each bunkers with massive walls, airlocks, and HEPA filtration is probably not going to scale to all demographics very well.
I think (the US) needs more public transportation that gets people out of single-occupant vehicles without imposing time, money, or practicality costs onto them.
Yeah, but also, nah.
You can regulate cars and get 90% to a level society can deal with happily.
But then you get a hoon in a performance vehicle doing a burnout in suburbia, and the police twin engine helicopter thrumming overhead tracking them down.
Or the neighbours who enjoy Vietnamese karaoke, or the neighbours having a domestic on the street.
These aren't the most fun aspects of living in a community (unless you get invited for the karaoke!); but they benefit from ambient noise cancellation.
I feel like you're underestimating how loud cars in regular use are. On my walk over to the supermarket I basically have to shout if I want to have a conversation. No one is driving especially loudly and in fact the problem is mostly tire noise.
Where do you live? When I was still living in the city we could talk outside at a slightly raised voice when walking or biking. You had to speak in the direction of the other person obviously. Only sometimes at something like a gas station you have to really raise your voice.
> When I was still living in the city we could talk outside at a slightly raised voice when walking or biking.
True for most parts of the city I live in too, but that's mostly because in most parts of the city there's either no cars or very slow cars or only one car within hearing distance at a time. As soon as you're walking along a busy road where the speed limit is 50km/h it starts getting loud.
It's quite possible there's some cultural influence here too. Dutch people don't tend to speak especially loudly when compared to e.g. Americans.
I live in LA and the vehicle noise is negligible on any walk to anywhere compared to the low roar of the sounds of living otherwise -- unless you happen to get some muffler-less asshole driving his shitbox next to you; but that same rule applies just about anywhere.
I guess it could be a benefit of the low speed LA traffic?
Personally anytime i'm near traffic the stuff that bugs me is exhaust and brake/clutch dust. Nothing like a hot semi truck parking next to you in traffic after a long downhill stretch to cool his brakes and douse you in friction-material fumes while he waits for the light to turn green.
No, and in fact doing that here WILL get you picked up by the cops.
> I guess it could be a benefit of the low speed LA traffic?
Oh yeah lower speed traffic is much less bad for sure. But I'm still talking about a slowish speed limit here: 50km/h
> Personally anytime i'm near traffic the stuff that bugs me is exhaust and brake/clutch dust. Nothing like a hot semi truck parking next to you in traffic after a long downhill stretch to cool his brakes
I am blessed to not live near any hills and have cars subjected to frequent emissions checks. Still, can't tell you enough how much more I like the electric buses they use nowadays over the diesel monsters they had previously.
Appealing to the slippery slope is such a cop-out. Screw that. All most people want is common sense regulations on the top 0.5% loudest vehicles which produce incredible amounts of noise pollution and disrupt normal life.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to limit manufacturers from producing needlessly loud vehicles? We _know_ we can do it, but we _still_ allow idiotic V8 trucks, 2500kg SUVs with double turbos, Harley Davidsons that are _designed_ to be as loud as possible.
From about 30kph up the rolling noise is higher than the engine noise of most cars. That's why teslas and other huge electric cars are actually quite loud (huge tires + heavy weight)
That's not my experience at all. Full size cars have continuously shrunk since the 1960s at least.
What you might be referring to is the increase in choice of larger vehicles, or that weights have generally increased due to safety improvements. But the actual size of full size cars has certainly not gone up over the past few decades.
You can compare the older crown vic to the newer taurus. They are both full size cars. The newer taurus is about 100lbs heavier, 1-2" taller and wider, and about 10-11" shorter including a shorter wheelbase.
I highly doubt Tesla has any noticeably higher road noise than other full size cars. The tires are going to be the bigger culprit than weight/size if we're staying in the same size category (full size cars).
> That's not my experience at all. Full size cars have continuously shrunk since the 1960s at least.
You might be right that people are choosing larger vehicles, but wouldn’t that mean the average size is increasing?
When you look at cars with a long lineage (eg Golf) they are huge compared to what they used to be, however maybe this varies region to region or it’s just my bias.
The compacts have increased in size, but that's due to safety constraints and not being able to increase safety in the original size (eg beefier frames and larger crumple zones).
a bit of humor here for me : both bigger engines and turbos generally reduce noise pollution when compared to the other design choices available for that power envelope.
the loudest engine? a small literage non-turbo high compression motor of some sort.
the most famously loud race-car , the mazda 787b, had a 2.6 liter naturally aspirated motor. Small literage, small package, rotary. Fairly high compression. It deafened drivers.
turbochargers can be made to be annoying by enthusiasts, sure -- but that energy they produce is in large part thanks to the damping effect of the energy scavenging that they enable.
and as for engine size, as literage increases an engine developer has to do less to get the power they need -- that means they can use long and heavily dampened mufflers/exhaust systems, lower compression, lower RPM, less noise . Again, yes -- enthusiasts can ruin this, but the larger majority of these big motors are quieter/smoother than their counterparts that must go to extremes to meet the same power criteria.
This might be true for a fixed power output. But as you acknowledge, idiots (enthusiasts) means larger engines =more noise.
That said, We don’t have to specify the means to reduce noise … just set the limit and let people comply how they want. But a large engine is a probably dead weight given the range of reasonable speeds in residential areas or off of a motorway.
I’ll do you one better. We should limit cars and have everyone ride motorcycles. You don’t need a 6000 pound pickup truck to drive to Starbucks, Jim. You aren’t a contractor.
Look at Europe they have 80% motorcycles and otherwise small hatchbacks. Very very few large cars. That’s step one.
And you're reflecting to your neighbors across the street. A lot of times vehicle noise is less noticeable in the country because you don't have brick buildings lining the street to create an echo chamber.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and please especially don't start nationalistic flamewars. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The north-american building tradition is certainly peculiar, but it has substantial benefits [1] [2]. Its fire safety is also not that bad as one would assume.
For the specific conditions and large availability of lumber in North America, it seems like a good choice, and I say that as an European who built his own reinforced concrete house and that is working on concrete 3d printing.
The drywall over balloon framing technique is a high productivity method that is adapted to the relatively high cost of labour. You wouldn't be able to produce the square footages Americans expect using traditional wet plaster methods.
plywood is too expensive for most suburb construction in the usa; instead they nail together sticks, cover them up with paper-plaster sandwiches, and wrap it in plastic to keep the plaster dry, then put some tar paper on top to keep the water out of the plastic
i am not making this up, this is literally what they do
Parent is probably confusing plywood with OSB. Plywood is indeed expensive (esp. high-quality types like baltic birch), but laypeople frequently use the term to refer to OSB (oriented strand board) which is much, much cheaper and is commonly used in US construction.
The "paper-plaster sandwiches" you refer to is called "drywall" and is only used on interior walls. It's fine for that purpose. For outer walls, you have to use something else that's more structural, and they usually use OSB.
Honestly, I think American residential construction gets a lot of undeserved flak for the materials used. For the expected lifespan and the location, the materials really aren't bad; the problems I see are with workmanship quality, and the whole old-fashioned stick-building practice instead of doing more work in a factory to ensure better quality.
depends on which part of america you're in; especially outside the usa, things vary enormously. most places in america, the kind of wood and paper construction that's common in the usa is only found in illegal shantytowns. legal houses are built out of brick, reinforced concrete, or occasionally adobe. so are all but the poorest houses in the shantytowns, actually
We're talking about the USA here, not outside the USA.
In many places outside the US, you're right: brick and masonry are very common. Then an earthquake happens and tens of thousands of people die when all the buildings collapse. This happened in Turkey recently. So I wouldn't point to those places as having quality construction at all.
Here in Japan, houses are all made of wood, not that different than American houses (but probably with much better joinery), and they handle earthquakes extremely well. Taller buildings are made of steel-reinforced concrete, but standalone houses are not.
Plywood (more commonly OSB) is a great material and there is nothing wrong with using it.
But being cheap is still eventually the problem, sound insulation costs money without any immediately obvious benefits to buyers. It ain't even that expensive, but it is still enough money that someone is going to be like "Why is this house a bit more expensive? It looks the exact same! Of course I want the cheaper one!"
And of course the problem is exasperated on other side too. If someone wants and is willing to pay for better quality, how much non-quality garbage is added on to the price? Customer is willing to spend 20% more on higher quality stuff? Well we can add 5% more quality and then pocket the other 15% while still maintaining that it is better than the alternative (and that isn't just on builders, that is all the building suppliers too). Oh they want better windows than that? We can bump up it up to 15% more quality, but then jump up to 45% more markup!
Once I looked at a cheap lot in southern California on a whim and the ad specified "Neighborhood covenant requires 3000 square foot minimum for construction".
You can find a peaceful out of the way place where there isn't sound or people, or you want stone and concrete aplenty around you. That's weight & mass. But that mass usually has so much cost. (And it has so many inconveinences. Where do the pipes and wires go when you are working with stone? It's not accommodating like framing & drywall.)
This is so cool. This is so so so cool. It's cheating, getting one of the best & nicest things you can get, and doing it not by just cladding your world in thick concrete, but by creative use of negative spaces. By resonance. It's a vast unmaterial triumph. Using much less matter but getting so many of the same upsides.
This is the arch of victory that embodies what I hope can carry us through the stars for a long time: getting so much from so little. Making stuff that is blisteringly effective. These are the triumphs that can sustain us as we voyage on.
(It also looks like something that would be pretty easy to mass produce! A bit bulky to transport though, but maybe there are some creative solutions.)