Choosing a building material for your home depends on many factors. It’s important to consider the climate where you live, your budget, and several other considerations.
This study examined whether people’s building cultural backgrounds impact their preferences for structural and cladding materials used in city buildings. The results indicated that residents of countries where wood is not common tended to prefer concrete and steel as structural materials.
Cultural Values
Cultural values are the core principles that an entire society is based around. They include a nation’s traditions, language, beliefs, arts, and music. They also determine how people will conduct themselves and interact with one another. These values may be passed down from generation to generation or they can be learned through education.
Cultural studies are the interdisciplinary fields that explore and analyze cultural phenomena such as languages, institutions, norms, behaviors, and values. While there are many definitions of culture, it is typically used to refer to the sum total of a group’s guiding principles and expectations.
A person’s cultural values shape their preferences and actions, including the building materials they choose to use in their home or business. These values are not universal and vary from person to person, but understanding them can help you interact effectively with other cultures.
For example, some cultures value egalitarianism, while others believe in traditional gender roles and stereotypes. In addition, some cultures prioritize self-sufficiency and individualism while others place importance on community and family. Cultural values may also influence a person’s beliefs and attitudes towards different social issues. For example, a person who has cultural values that emphasize benevolence, courtesy, wisdom, honesty, and loyalty is likely to support environmental and human rights issues. While these differences are not necessarily right or wrong, they can cause conflict and friction between individuals.
Material Traditions
The choice of materials in architecture is inseparable from the overall context of the building, which can be viewed as an expression of cultural values and traditions. This concept is sometimes referred to as material culture, which has been the subject of extensive anthropological study. The term can be defined in various ways, but the general consensus is that it includes artifacts and architectural forms as part of a larger system of communication and exchange.
The term can also be applied to the way people use objects in everyday life, including the usage, consumption, creation and trade of items. This is sometimes referred to as nonmaterial culture, but scholars disagree over whether this is a meaningful distinction. For example, some scholars argue that nonmaterial culture is a subset of material culture, while others think that it should be considered a separate category.
The physical aspects of a culture are often considered to be the most important elements, such as buildings, roads and bridges. These can serve as symbols of a culture, and they may be used to define the level of development of a particular society. Other physical cultural expressions include clothing, tools, furniture and household items. Non-physical aspects of a culture are ideas, values, rules and norms, which determine how people behave. For example, religious beliefs dictate how people should dress, how they should interact with each other and how they should treat their environment.
Context
Context is all the information that surrounds something, including its surroundings, circumstances, and background. For example, when someone says someone’s words were taken out of context, that means they were taken away from their surrounding environment and distorted in meaning.
Similarly, building material choices have a context. For instance, a home built with wood from the forest has a different cultural context than a home built using prefabricated wood panels. The latter is more likely to be found in a suburban setting, while the former is more likely to be used for urban housing.
Some cultures have specific places that are sacred, such as cemeteries or military grave sites. It is important to respect those cultural spaces and not build structures in them. Similarly, some Native American communities have sacred areas where they perform ceremonies. It would be inappropriate for us to disturb those sites and build structures in them, as they have a very significant contextual meaning for the tribes that use them.
The influence of contextual factors can be quite significant in the design process, as they impact the materials that are chosen and the way in which they are used. For example, a piece of writing written for a class assignment will have a very different rhetorical context than an editorial opinion piece on an issue the author is passionate about that will be published in a newspaper.
Preferences
The building environment should not only be aesthetically pleasing, it should also meet the practical demands of everyday life. It is therefore important to consider how a specific material fits in the context in which it will be used. This will include the availability of skilled labour for its construction, as well as its cradle to grave impact on resources and environment.
In this study, we aimed to identify differences in consumer preferences for structural and cladding materials for multistory city housing between people with different building cultural backgrounds. We expected that people coming from countries where wood is used in wooden houses would have a higher preference for this material than others. However, the results showed that only small differences between native Norwegians and immigrants were found in their preferences for different materials. The majority of the respondents preferred commonly used city building materials, such as concrete and steel. When it came to cladding, stone/brick and painted or stained wood were the most preferred materials.
When the respondents’ preference for living in a city was high, they were more likely to prefer concrete as a structural material (Figure 3, row 1 and row 2), whereas their preference for untreated wood decreased with increased preference for city living (Figure 4, first column). The interaction between respondent’s region of origin and the importance of structural material was significant at the 5% level, but only for concrete and steel.