4 • THE STORY OF THE THREE LITTLE PIGS

AT THE END OF NOVEMBER 1836, THE FIERCEST WINDS FOR more than 100 years swept southern England. At Horsham, Sussex, midway between London and the south coast, “there raged the most tremendous storm that ever happened in my life . . . the streets were strewn with chimney pots, bricks, and all sorts of debris. . . . Outside the Town trees were dismembered and uprooted by the score, by the hundred.”¹

Privately educated in Brighton, Sussex, James Orchard Halliwell was an impressionable sixteen-year-old at the time of the storm.² He went on to study at Cambridge and in 1843, when he was twenty-three, produced his first publication, a compilation (possibly for the entertainment of a younger cousin or sibling) entitled Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales. Among the traditional nursery tales was an original composition, “The Story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.”³

In case this story was not read to you as an impressionable five-year-old, I will summarize.

The three little pigs are exploring resilience in building materials. The first little pig acquires the materials to build a house out of straw. “Huff and Puff and Huff and Puff and Blow Your House Down,” says the Big Bad Wolf, who demolishes the house of straw and eats the little pig. The second little pig, having seen the culinary fate of his brother, builds his house out of sticks, but again the Wolf blows down the house and consumes the pig. Then the third little pig selects bricks as his building material, which proves beyond the power of the Wolf’s huffing and puffing. The third little pig not only thwarts the Wolf but leads him a merry dance until, inverting the food chain, pig eats wolf.

Hurricane-force exhalation is not a characteristic of timberwolves.⁴ It is a windstorm that huffs and puffs at a house, which, if built out of straw, would quickly disintegrate, as happened to the thatched roofs of the Horsham cottages in that November storm of 1836. In contrast to Holland’s “Waterwolf”—the name given to the rapacious power of rivers and the sea⁵—the force that terrorizes the three little pigs is the “Storm-Wolf”: the destructive power of windstorms.

“The Three Little Pigs” is a powerful fable of risk management, employing the modern idea of alternative futures.⁶ The tale identifies the key to upward mobility at the start of the Victorian period and contains the most shameless (but presumably unsponsored?) example of product placement in children’s literature, at least until Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The moral is blatant. To keep “the wolf” from the door, a prudent pig should live in a brick house. Brick equals resilience in the face of local vicissitudes. Brick, by enabling the urban Victorian to rise above a savage world in which poor people live in huts made of sticks or thatched cottages roofed with straw, is civilization.

The little pigs acquire their building materials by imperiously demanding them off carters. While straw and sticks could plausibly be valueless waste, a load of bricks would require real money. Brick therefore also means capitalism.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, brick was an expensive and high-status building material. Mechanical brick-making started in the 1820s. Even as mass production kicked in and brick production doubled, the price of bricks scarcely budged from the 1820s to the 1890s, remaining at £6 per 1,000 high-quality bricks for building railway arches.⁷

AS THOUGH PART OF AN ORCHESTRATED MARKETING CAMPAIGN, soon after the story of the three little pigs was composed, the British began exporting industrialized brick construction around the world with a missionary zeal. Brick was the epitome of Victorian modernity. Brick was not only wind-resistant but fireproof—a principal concern of the Victorians. Two places where climatically the British felt particularly welcome to sustain this mission were northern California and Japan.

At the height of the California gold rush, San Francisco suffered six big fires in eighteen months.⁸ The largest destroyed three-quarters of the wooden buildings in the new city. With the population exploding (from 200 inhabitants in 1846 to 36,000 in 1852), speculative builders, after each fire, erected wooden stores and rooming houses at even higher density on all the vacant lots. In a town filled with reveling gold prospectors, a volunteer fire brigade, and no effective water supply, resources for checking the fires were few. Among the buildings, a small number were made of brick, and those largely survived the fires, confirming their Three Little Pigs superior status (as a Big Bad Wolf armed with a blowtorch would have much the same impact as the Storm-Wolf who “huffed and puffed”).

Industrialization had brought fire for manufacture and warmth into the heart of the city. In 1852, San Francisco established a city center “fire district” and imposed a building code requiring “fire-resistant” (i.e., brick) construction. By 1853, San Francisco had acquired 626 brick buildings, half of them constructed that same year; the number had risen to 1,500 brick buildings by 1860. The San Francisco city center was starting to look like Liverpool.

The thirty-year-old Londoner George Gordon arrived in San Francisco in 1849 intent on making his fortune.⁹ By 1850, he had constructed a wharf, and in 1852 he established the third iron foundry in the city, providing the materials for a city block of iron buildings. In 1851, he set out to make South Park the smartest address in the city—an imitation London “square” with a central garden surrounded by brick and stone Italianate houses.

On October 8, 1865, the new city was shaken by a strong earthquake. The shock was centered close to San Jose, 30 miles south of San Francisco, where, it was said, “a very slight increase in violence would have thrown every brick building in the city into a mass of ruins.” Meanwhile, in San Francisco the local Alta California newspaper reported reassuringly that “brick buildings should no longer be considered hazardous during the prevalence of earthquakes.” Instead, the story focused on the influence of geology, noting that “in those parts of the city which were formerly part of the Bay, and have been filled with earth, few of the foundations are firm and there the most damage has been done.”¹⁰

Three years later, on October 21, 1868, there was an even stronger earthquake; we now know that this one was located on the Hayward Fault, along the flank of the mountains on the eastern side of the bay.¹¹ Again, the most serious damage in San Francisco was on filled ground. This time it was more difficult to claim that brick buildings had a clean bill of health. Yet the tally was modest: seven buildings had been wrecked, and thirty-five seriously damaged. Six people died in the city, killed by falling cornices and a runaway team of horses.

At the instigation of “Lord” George Gordon, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce set up the Joint Committee on Earthquakes; Gordon was the committee’s president.¹² As a prominent developer of brick buildings in the city, he had a personal interest in the findings. The committee established seven specialist work groups to research everything from building materials to past earthquakes to testing apparatus. By December, the subcommittees were collecting Spanish mission records of earthquakes and devising a simple shake table for testing brickwork. This agenda was on the way to seeding the world’s first earthquake research institution in California.

And then . . . nothing. The committees all stopped meeting. None of them produced a report. It was as if a plug had been pulled. We only know that the Committee on Bricks, Stones, and Timber planned to champion wood as the most earthquake-resistant material, proposing that it could somehow be made fireproof “through electrical or chemical means.”¹³

After the 1906 earthquake, the only surviving member of the committee, George Davidson, admitted that the 1868 “report was suppressed by the authorities, through the fear that its publication would damage the reputation of the city.”¹⁴ In fact, it seems that Gordon the businessman also colluded in the report’s suppression, after reflecting on what it implied for the commercial future of San Francisco. Following a family scandal, he died in February 1869.¹⁵

The transcontinental railroad was completed in May 1869 and reached Oakland in November of that year. Behind the scenes, “booster” financial interests not wishing to deter immigration or to blight the economy, actively sought to discourage raising the specter of earthquakes.

Although nothing came out of the experience of the 1868 earthquake, some lessons from the 1865 earthquake were incorporated into an 1866 revision of the San Francisco fire code: iron anchors were to be used to fasten brick walls to each tier of beams and to secure the front and rear walls, while beams and girders were to be strapped together with wrought iron.¹⁶ San Francisco set out to make its largest brick buildings both fireproof and earthquake-resistant, through laying horizontal strips of “bond-iron” in walls, or inserting vertical reinforcing rods through holes drilled in the brickwork. During the 1880s and 1890s, however, as the large earthquakes stayed away, unreinforced brick once again became widely used for downtown stores and municipal buildings throughout the towns and cities of California.

AMONG THE SEVEN DEPARTMENTS IN THE NEW TOKYO COLLEGE OF Technology was the Architecture Department, led from 1877 by an Englishman, Joseph Conder, who would stay in Japan for his entire lifetime and become revered as “the Father of Japanese Architecture.”¹⁷

The architecture students’ education in the history of world architecture culminated in the use of brick and masonry. In an 1879 diploma examination, they were allowed to choose from a range of potential building materials—“brick and stone,” “brick and terracotta,” “entirely brick,” or “entirely stone”—as the subject of their drawing.¹⁸ Japanese students proved receptive to learning about these materials. Fire had been the curse of the capital Edo (Tokyo) for hundreds of years. There had been forty-nine great conflagrations in the wooden city between 1601 and 1867, some killing tens of thousands.

The first students of architecture graduated from the Tokyo College of Technology in 1879 to begin rich and successful careers. During the 1880s, Japanese architects took over the design of the principal brick buildings and industrial factories for the ministries, in a style that was indistinguishable from that of their British teachers. One of the new generation of Japanese architects wrote in an architectural journal in 1888: “Gradually we should make every building in Japan completely brick or stone. . . . This is the basis of a strong nation.”¹⁹

One key obstacle in imposing brick construction on the builders of Japan, however, was the hierarchical relationships among Japanese craftsmen. At the top of the craftsman pyramid were the high-status daiku who worked in wood on the finest buildings, while those naturally suited to become workers in brick were the lowly plasterers, as they possessed mortar trowels. One compromise was a “hybrid” design in which a wooden building was faced with brick so that it had the appearance of modernity (and therefore preserved the relative status of the artisan craftsmen). In fact, the only buildings being constructed fully of brick were those sponsored by the ministries, banks, and new industrial corporations.

In 1872, several city blocks in Ginza, in the center of Tokyo, became cleared after a fire, and the Council of State instructed the government of Tokyo city to rebuild in brick and stone.²⁰ “No matter how much money it costs we should do it for the sake of our honour.” And so a neighborhood of wide-columned brick shops was built, a symbolic first step in the long-term goal of re-creating the whole city of Tokyo in brick and stone, just like London after the Great Fire. Yet seeding a new architecture was not as easy as it sounded. By 1883, the brick shops had been largely abandoned when they failed to find Japanese tenants.

Moreover, some of Tokyo College’s architecture students were questioning whether their teachers really knew Japan. One wrote fatalistically in 1883: “Our great enemy—Earthquake—is glaring at us incessantly, with its fiery keen eyes, to dash upon our houses, suddenly and unexpectedly.”²¹ The Japanese were becoming less willing to assume the merits of European learning, and the tenure of foreign professors was coming to an end. Many of their contracts expired in 1886 when the Tokyo College of Technology became the Engineering Department of the newly formed University of Tokyo.

On the morning of October 28, 1891, the arguments about the relative merits of European and Japanese buildings became tested by the Great Nobi earthquake.

The first reports to reach Tokyo were from the city of Osaka, where only one building had been completely destroyed: the Naniwa cotton textile mill, “a three storey redbrick structure in the usual English factory style” that had “only been standing for a few months.”²² Twenty-one people had died in the collapse. On November 3, the first news arrived from closer to the center of the earthquake in Nagoya. Headlines focused on the dramatic collapse of “those magnificent brick buildings,” the symbols of modernity, including the post office, the divisional headquarters of the army, a large spinning mill (in which more than 200 women workers died), the police headquarters, the prison, an electricity company, and certain hospitals and schools. The newspapers quickly got into their groove around what was “the Story” of this earthquake: the failures and collapses of the brick buildings developed in the European style and imposed on Japan by the Meiji government.²³ Falling brick was said to have caused more grievous and life-threatening wounds than falling wooden Japanese roofs. Editorials thundered in condemnation of “the negligence of the architects and engineers” and of the government for having allowed these foreign practitioners to operate without controls. As more information emerged it became clear that Japanese buildings had also fallen, more than 1,000 in the city of Nagoya, and that in rural areas the fall of temples had in some places killed as many as the collapsed brick mills. (The city of Gifu had caught fire and burned down after the earthquake, for entirely Japanese reasons.) However, “the Story” of the Great Nobi earthquake was already established.

The Association of Japanese Architects—whose membership was almost entirely the new professionals educated either at the Tokyo College of Technology or the University of Tokyo—met fifteen times in the aftermath of the 1891 Nobi earthquake to learn from what had happened and set a new direction.²⁴ Their first response was to consider how brick could be refashioned to resist earthquake shaking. Maybe bricks could be made in shapes that interlocked (like Lego pieces). Maybe vertical iron bars could be inserted through holes in the brick work, as pioneered in California. Architecture meant brick. There was no possibility for giving up the whole project and admitting that only wooden buildings were viable.

Brick buildings—welcomed in the 1850s as the answer to the fire dangers of San Francisco and expected by the 1870s to take over all the cities of Japan—had encountered headwinds stronger than those of the Storm-Wolf. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, one observer reported that “streets on all sides were filled with brick and mortar buildings either completely collapsed or brick fronts had just dropped completely off.”²⁵ Jon D. Galloway, a San Francisco engineer, summarized the situation: “Brick buildings are a menace to life.”²⁶ New buildings made of unreinforced masonry (i.e., brick) would finally be banned by law in California after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.

In Tokyo, the earthquake of September 1, 1923, provided the toughest test. Brick buildings designed by the first generation of European architects, or their original students, were shattered and demolished at Ginza, Ueno Museum, and Tokyo University, including those that housed the seismological laboratories. However, some reinforced masonry buildings designed after 1891 performed quite well; for instance, the Tokyo Main Railway Station building, which looks like something from a provincial town in Sweden, survived the Great 1923 Earthquake, proving that, with suitable reinforcing, brick construction could be made safe.

What if we transpose the Three Little Pigs to the “climate” of California, where seismic “storms” are more troubling than windstorms? In “The Story of the Three Little Pigs and the Quake-Wolf,” once again the little pigs go about their investigation of resilient building materials, but now, instead of huffing and puffing, the Quake-Wolf shakes and quakes. For the little pig in the house built of straw, the vibrations prove uneventful, as is also true for his brother in the house built out of sticks. However, for the house built out of bricks, the tremors prove catastrophic, and the walls collapse on its smug little pig owner. The moral has been transposed: there is no universal set of threats, and you should build according to your hazard climate.

Other cities at other times have discovered the folly of brick in earthquake country by not knowing what is “earthquake country.” The city of Seattle, rebuilt in brick and stone after a great fire in 1889, still does not think of itself as a city on the earthquake frontline.²⁷ The brick city of Tangshan, China, population 1 million, had not seen a big earthquake for 2,000 years when it was entirely destroyed in 1976.²⁸ The brick towns in the Po Valley of Italy had not experienced a strong earthquake before May 2012.²⁹ In 2006 a modest-sized earthquake led to 5,700 deaths in the brick city of Yogyokarta on Java.³⁰ In some places, earthquakes happen less frequently and therefore the challenges of brick take longer to emerge. London has had tremors, as has New York City. The brick city of Charleston, South Carolina, was shattered by a surprise earthquake in 1886.³¹

One-third as energy-intensive (weight for weight) as concrete and 6 percent as energy-intensive as steel, clay brick remains a vital building material and lives on, even in earthquake country, where it is transformed into lighter concrete blocks with internal holes so that reinforcing rods can be run through a wall—whatever it takes to prevent the bricks in the wall from moving out of alignment when shaken. In “confined masonry,” panels of bricks or blocks are sealed tightly between cast-in-situ concrete pillars and beams, so that the bricks are locked in permanent compression.³²

WHERE AND WHEN DID PEOPLE FIRST LEARN HOW TO BUILD earthquake-proof houses? Let’s return to that second little pig: the one who built his house out of sticks. Faced with the Quake-Wolf, timber is an excellent material from which to construct resilient dwellings.

Hundreds of years ago, before engineering, before science, before builders were even literate, the people who first had this insight were practical and observant. If the original shock was experienced as a unique punishment from the gods, never to be repeated, no one would have felt a need to take any action, so these early observers must have lived in an earthquake-prone area. In a town with a mix of housing styles, it would have been possible to see how different buildings responded, which structures survived intact, and which collapsed. We can see how the natural selection of the buildings (and of their owners) might have come about.

Big earthquakes are triggered somewhere along the braided North Anatolian fault boundary through northwest Turkey several times each century, and the most earthquake-afflicted large city in Europe is Istanbul (formerly Constantinople). The Ottomans captured Constantinople from Christian Byzantium in 1453. To make the city their capital they went on a building spree in stone. On a late summer evening in 1509, the city was shaken by the most violent earthquake for hundreds of years, what we now know to have been an estimated Magnitude 7.5 earthquake on the east-west plate boundary that runs underwater through the Sea of Marmara, 6 miles (10 kilometers) south of the city.³³ Thousands of buildings collapsed, and not a structure in the city, it was said, was left undamaged. An estimated 5,000 people died in “the Little Day of Judgment.”

In 1542 another great earthquake killed 4,500 in the city. More destruction and damage followed in 1556.³⁴ The Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and glory, having conquered the Mamluk Empire of Egypt in 1517 and marched to the gates of Vienna in the late 1520s. The city of Constantinople was the cultural and economic center of a great empire stretching into three continents, yet the Ottomans’ new capital was wracked by earthquakes. In reaction, architects switched to building out of timber, whether palaces with flamboyant turrets, mansions with large paneled bay windows, or simple peasant houses.

At the start of the seventeenth century, a visiting Italian nobleman reported what he had learned from Constantinople builders: “They first build a timber frame as in the ships and then cover it from the outside in wooden boards. The filling is of mud brick or simple adobe.”³⁵

The architects of sixteenth-century Constantinople had discovered how to construct earthquake-resistant buildings: copy the boat builders. To withstand the shocks as it crashes over the waves, a boat has a strong and flexible wooden basket frame that links the keel, ribs, and canopy.³⁶ If house construction had been left to boat builders, the problem of earthquakes would have been solved centuries ago. From the early seventeenth century, it was boat builders who designed the wooden churches on the island of Chiloe at the earthquake front line in southern Chile.³⁷ Two years after the latest 1868 earthquake disaster, and at the end of the era of timber ships, San Francisco’s wood-frame Grand Hotel advertised its safety, the result of “having been built like a ship.”³⁸

The boat builders’ method is called “timber lacing,” or hımış in Turkish. In Kashmir, the old Persian dhajji dewari translates as “patch quilt wall.” A framework of beams is latticed together, with diagonal members creating triangles that maintain their form and cannot be skewed. The spaces between the beams are in-filled with insulating rubble, weak brick, dried mud, lime, or a mixture of plaster and horsehair—material that is not rigid and therefore does not prevent the wooden beams from flexing. The design is strong, light, and easy to construct using the timber offcuts, thick branches, or twisted beams unsuitable for cutting planks.³⁹

This is a very ancient building style. There were timber-laced structures in Knossos on Crete, older than 1600 BC.⁴⁰ The AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius preserved a complete two-story timber frame house in Herculaneum as well as many timber-laced walls.⁴¹ By the eighth century, hımış had become a standard style for Turkish village houses, and it was still the standard into the twentieth century.

Known in England as “half-timbered,” in France as colombage, and in Germany as Fachwerk, timber lacing was also common in northern Europe. In Port au Prince, Haiti, there were even old late-Victorian half-timbered pan de bois, or “gingerbread” building styles.⁴² After 1910, following city fires, such timber-frame houses were banned by the mayor of Port au Prince.⁴³ However, these imports from Normandy survived the 2010 shaking better than ordinary rubble stone masonry structures, and far better than the downtown concrete buildings, of which more than one-third fell.⁴⁴ None of these northern European styles were built to withstand earthquake shaking, but rather to resist the force of the wind and the load of a heavy snowfall. The presence of half-timbered houses in Istanbul seems to have become a teachable moment in the life of the sixteenth-century city. Following an earthquake in 1688 in Izmir, a visitor noted that the upper stories of buildings were constructed of timber frames in-filled with panels of brick and that this “technique . . . proved resistant in the earthquakes that followed.”⁴⁵

By the late seventeenth century, it was general knowledge that wooden buildings offered protection from earthquakes. After half the brick-built streets of Port Royal Jamaica sank into the sea in 1692, the surviving colonists would not relinquish “that fatall spott,” as they called it, but rapidly rebuilt in timber on the remaining land. (In January 1703, the wooden town was almost entirely destroyed by a fire lit by a disgruntled pirate captain.⁴⁶) When, in 1766, an earthquake damaged the Topkapi Palace, the Ottoman sultan relocated to temporary wooden buildings, just as timber structures had housed the king of Portugal after the Lisbon earthquake eleven years before.

Yet the timber building stock of Istanbul, notable for its earthquake resistance, was only a toppled oil lamp away from a conflagration. In a fire on April 7, 1588, 22,000 houses, 15,000 shops, and 28 mosques were destroyed.⁴⁷ With ready supplies of timber, the wooden buildings were reconstructed. Paul Lucas, a Frenchman, witnessed another bonfire of the vanities in 1715 that destroyed 15,000 houses. The great fire of 1755 burned so close to the Ayasofya mosque that lead from the cupola melted and ran down the drainpipes. Then an earthquake in 1766, the most destructive since the sixteenth century, ruined many stone houses in the city, killed 880, and served to ensure that the builders’ yards would remain well stocked with timber.

For the next 150 years, while the fires spread, the strong earthquakes stayed away. The fire of 1782 destroyed 7,000 buildings.⁴⁸ During a visit in 1852, the French traveler Théophile Gautier witnessed a whole neighborhood of the city consumed in an enormous fire—“this spectacle of disastrous magnificence.” There were twenty-nine great fires in the city between 1853 and 1906.⁴⁹ The 1865 Hocapasa fire burned thousands of houses in a broad zone from the Golden Horn in the north all the way to the Sea of Marmara. By the second decade of the twentieth century, as Turkey was fighting alongside Germany in the Great War, 16,000 buildings were lost to fire, half of them in a single conflagration in 1918.⁵⁰

With the earthquake threat long forgotten, the city government wanted to be rid of the timber city. From 1865, each mass burning provided the opportunity to replan and widen the main streets and line them with brick and stone apartment buildings.

A DIFFERENT THEORY OF THE EARTHQUAKE-PROOF HOUSE EMERGED independently at the other end of Asia. The city of Manila was founded in 1571 on the banks of the River Pasig, in a magnificent natural harbor. Streets were laid out in the standard Spanish colonial grid, with the main government buildings and cathedral arranged around a central plaza. Spanish residents (the intramuros) lived within the city walls, while beyond the walls lay a community of Chinese merchants and a smaller Japanese settlement. Within fifty years after its founding, the city’s population had reached 40,000.

In the beginning, all buildings were constructed out of the plentiful timber, bamboo, and palm, even the grand cathedral. Then, in 1583, almost the whole city burned down.⁵¹

In 1587 a new governor-general, Santiago de Vera, outlawed further wooden construction and commanded that buildings within the walls be constructed out of volcanic stone sourced from a new quarry opened up river. Roofs were to be made from locally fired tiles. Just as Istanbul was switching from stone to timber, Manila was swapping timber for stone.⁵² In the first year after the decree, twenty new stone buildings were built. The rebuilding was accelerated when another fire, in 1603, destroyed half the remaining wooden city; by 1609, Manila had 600 stone buildings. At eight o’clock in the evening on November 30, 1645, a great earthquake demolished 150 of the principal buildings of the city, including the palace, the royal Audienzia, and the cathedral, and left the rest in such a perilous state that many had to be abandoned. Joseph Fayol, the royal chaplain in Manila, wrote that “the inhabitants of Manila, while avoiding in their buildings the activity of fire, fell into the terrible power of the earth.”⁵³

And so the search was on to find some compromise, to thwart the twin perils of shaking and fire. In response, building heights in Manila were reduced to no more than two stories⁵⁴ and hybrid construction styles, such as the arquitectora meztisa, were adopted.⁵⁵ These alternative styles were said to have been strongly influenced by the Japanese artisans who lived in lightweight wood and bamboo houses in their settlement at Dilao, outside the city walls.⁵⁶ In the arquitectora meztisa style, above a first story of stone was a wooden upper floor of lightweight wood or lattice frames.⁵⁷ The roof was dovetailed and morticed into house posts, or haligues, embedded in the ground to prevent the roof collapsing should the stone walls be damaged. The stone concealed the internal wooden structure (and protected it from spreading fires). This architecture would evolve into the heavier bahay na bato style, which was sustained for some of the grandest Philippines houses for more than 200 years; the ground floor was constructed of stone or brick, and the upper floor of hardwood lattice walls was reached via a grand internal staircase.⁵⁸

Recognizing the fragility of their traditional churches, the colonists imported a robust “earthquake baroque style” from Mexico.⁵⁹ The height of the nave was reduced and constructed with overthickened walls and multiple massive buttresses. At Poaoy, on the northwest coast of Luzon, the squat church, built around 1700, resembles a Mayan pyramid: it looks as if the building were located on a planet with twice the force of gravity (which is not a bad way of combating earthquake shaking).⁶⁰ Across the island, bell towers were reduced in height and the square or octagonal plan stepped inward at each level, like a toddler’s stack of nesting plastic beakers.

The earthquake-resistant architecture from Manila even found its way back across the Pacific. Following the destruction of Lima, Peru, in 1746, buildings had to be either single-story or built with a second story built from quincha, a light woven-reed walling.⁶¹ Copied from the indigenous Indians, these second stories imitated Manila’s bamboo or lattice frames.

WITHIN A MONTH OF THE 1755 EARTHQUAKE, QUESTIONS WERE being asked: How should Lisbon be reconstructed? Which architect had survived the earthquake with his reputation intact? The undamaged stone arches of Lisbon’s new 11-mile (18-kilometer) Águas Livres Aqueduct testified to the integrity of the work of the eighty-year-old military engineer Manuel de Maia, the aqueduct’s principal engineer and designer. De Maia was tasked to recommend a scheme for the city’s regeneration.⁶² No rebuilding was allowed before agreement had been reached on the plans.

De Maia and his team returned the following spring with their proposals.⁶³ For the Baixa area—60 acres of the low-lying city center that had been obliterated by shaking and fire—he mapped out an orthogonal plan with wide streets. All buildings would be four stories high, with an internal timber “birdcage” framework with X-shaped cross bracing in every rectangle, in-filled with rubble—what was termed a “Gaiola” framework.⁶⁴ The boat builder’s timber triangles had become formalized into a structured mesh. The full plans for reconstruction were published in May 1758. Landowners were given five years to rebuild or they would lose their tenure.

After the Calabria earthquakes of 1783, the government in Naples authorized the introduction of the casa baraccata (barracks house) design for earthquake-resistant buildings. This time the wooden cross bracing was placed on the outside of the (typically) two-story stone buildings, where it was less resistant to the weather.⁶⁵

The cross-bracing earthquake-resistant designs in Lisbon and Calabria were independently feeding off some mother lode of insight whose roots may have gone back to sixteenth-century Constantinople. There had been trade ties between Portugal and the Ottomans for at least two centuries.⁶⁶ In Lisbon the earthquake-proof house was treated as a novel experiment and was adopted only in a single “model” district at the city’s center. In contrast, in Calabria casa baraccata was to be used for all official reconstruction. Yet unlike the situation in Manila, the new styles were alien, not adopted by ordinary builders. Masons in Portugal soon went back to their traditional ways and were once again raising walls out of unreinforced rubble.

By the late nineteenth century, all of these independent streams of innovation—from inserting a boat builder’s wooden basket framework into a building to adding a second story of wood frame—had begun to clash with the principal urban mission of the age: to make all city buildings fireproof.

IN ALL OF THESE VERNACULAR EARTHQUAKE-RESISTANT BUILDING styles, the key building material was timber. Thus, the proportion of a country that was forested—that is, the local availability of timber—might then determine the innate earthquake resistance of ordinary houses. In Turkey, 26 percent of the country is forested. Haiti was 60 percent forested in 1923, but scorched-earth clearance for farming and firewood has reduced the proportion to 1.5 percent—Haiti is now, in arboreal terms, a “desert.”⁶⁷

Where wood is simply unavailable, as in the deserts of Iran, traditional single-story adobe village buildings have proven to be the most murderous anywhere on earth during earthquakes (as first identified in the 1960s by the great earthquake investigator Nicholas Ambraseys).⁶⁸ Yet the traditional buildings of Iran are also celebrated as some of the best vernacular examples of “bioclimatic architecture.”⁶⁹ The deserts are scorching by day but freezing at night, especially in winter. To gain protection from searing dust and sand storms, house walls are built up to a meter thick, and the close grouping of buildings reduces wind exposure and enables them to share shade and warmth.

Design appropriate to the weather climate, however, made death traps of these same buildings in the tectonic climate of earthquakes, generated along the faults that slice through the mountains and deserts of Iran. A new layer of mud is applied to the roof dome each spring to cool the building through the baking summer sun. As the roof becomes ever heavier, it cannot endure even moderate shaking and collapses on the occupants, who are as likely to die of asphyxiation as of crush injuries. When the ancient mud-walled houses of the city of Bam were hit by a strong local earthquake at 5:26 a.m. on December 26, 2003, more than 90 percent of them collapsed (leaving a death toll of 26,000, or 30 percent of the population).⁷⁰

The most earthquake-ridden country on the planet is Japan, which is also two-thirds forested. From that you might conclude that Japan should have the safest of all houses. Yet traditional Japanese timber houses are not particularly earthquake-resistant.⁷¹ Their wood frames do not employ cross bracing or the rigid wooden triangles of the boat builders. The platform is raised off the ground on short, unbraced, vertical timbers, while a traditional roof of heavy tiles embedded in a layer of sand is supported on posts and lintels. It is not that Japanese architects have been unaware of how to defeat earthquake shaking: the late-eighteenth-century Jishin-den “earthquake palace” on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto has thick timber beams and continuous foundations, while avoiding the raised floors and heavy tiled roofs that weaken most traditional Japanese buildings.⁷² Yet the pursuit of earthquake resistance was not going to usurp the simplicity and openness of traditional Japanese houses, with their fragile sliding screens. Tiled roofs were designed to resist fire, a far more frequent hazard, as well as tropical downpours and gusting typhoon winds. That is why, in the 1995 Kobe earthquake, 55,000 traditional houses collapsed and another 32,000 were left wrecked: the natural resistance of wood-framed buildings was sabotaged by the weight of the heavy roofs.⁷³ Like an inverted pendulum, a tiled roof swings around in the shaking, cracking the wooden lintels, collapsing the house, and all too often crushing those sleeping inside.

The islanders of the Caribbean share the same conundrum. The winds from an intense hurricane can be just as dangerous to life as an earthquake. The original Spanish owners of Jamaica considered hurricanes the greater threat, but that was before the 1692 earthquake catastrophe. Almost a century later, “the dread of earthquakes” was still sufficient to motivate Jamaican colonists to build “slight houses . . . chiefly of wood.”⁷⁴

In 1690 a strong regional earthquake in the northeast Caribbean destroyed many brick buildings in Charlestown on the island of Nevis. Builders switched to wood until the 1733 Nevis hurricane, after which the local vicar, observing that “many a Life has been lost . . . by the Fall of Houses in a Storm,” considered stone the better building material.⁷⁵ Over time on most Caribbean islands, just as in southern Japan, hurricane/typhoon resistance took precedence because strong cyclones were more frequent than damaging earthquakes. The seeds of the 2010 tragedy in Haiti were being sewn. With no timber and with a focus only on keeping out the wind and rain, the buildings in Port au Prince had become as dangerous in strong shaking as the domed mud-brick houses of Iran.

The choices in house construction have become like the Japanese game of “paper-scissors-stone.” To every peril there is a resilient building style, but each building style makes the structure more vulnerable to another peril. Build out of stone to resist the wind, or out of mud to withstand the heat, or with a heavy tiled roof to protect against fire, and you invite earthquake demolition. Build lightly out of timber to withstand the earthquake and fire will consume your structure or hurricane winds will overturn the fragile frame. There seemed to be no alternative but to build to withstand the latest disaster, and then pray the other hazards stayed away. The notion of a building resistant to fire, earthquake, heat, and wind remained a pipe dream.

JUST AS BRICK BUILDINGS WERE CASUALLY IMPORTED TO EARTHQUAKE country, so the modern equivalent of stick houses have been constructed in the heart of cyclone territory.

In 1974 in Darwin, a city with a population of 48,000 on the tropical north coast of Australia, most houses were constructed like a box erected on sticklike stilts; they were designed for tropical living free from insects and snakes. At 10:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the radio station broadcast a warning about a Category 2 cyclone, christened Tracy, expected to cross the coast close to the city.⁷⁶ By dawn on Christmas Day Darwin had been almost completely erased. The small cyclone packed winds up to 150 miles per hour (240 kilometers) and scythed slowly through the city with a forward speed of only 6 miles (10 kilometers) per hour. More than half the houses in the town were destroyed, and all of those built to the latest “cyclone-resistant” standard were gone.⁷⁷ Around 70 people died and 650 were injured. The 41,000 left homeless wandered naked or in their nightclothes.

Because the Coriolis force is too weak in a band around the equator that extends about ten degrees of latitude north and south, this region is free of cyclones, and hence of strong winds. Darwin is located 12.5 degrees of latitude from the equator—not quite close enough to be protected. By contrast, the fragile architecture of Bali, with its wooden buildings missing walls and its delicate pagodas, is only possible because the island is 8.5 degrees from the equator and has not experienced high winds, at least not for the last century. But then, in November 2012, Supertyphoon Bopha hit the Philippine island of Mindanao, only 7.5 degrees from the equator, and more than 1,000 were killed.⁷⁸ The romantic wooden Balinese architectural style has been copied at resorts across the Caribbean, at latitudes between 15 and 20 degrees, where every few years the Hurricane-Wolf comes rampaging.

What would be the equivalents in our modern rich world of houses “made of straw”? Since the 1950s, a new style of residence has appeared in the United States: the mobile home (now rebranded the “manufactured” home). Mobile homes have proved to be “houses of straw” in tornadoes, getting flipped, rolled, upended, and smashed. From 1985 to 1995, more than 60 percent of the 321 people killed in their homes by twisters were in mobile homes, which housed only 6 percent of the US population during that period.⁷⁹ In a mobile home, you were more than twenty times as likely to be killed by a tornado than in permanent housing. The statistics had improved somewhat by the 2006–2011 period, when you were only five times more likely to die in a mobile home, which by then could be tied down.⁸⁰

Mobile homes constructed after 1995 have proved to be more resilient to the wind. A well-regarded theory for what drove this improvement relates it to the 1995 repeal of the federal speed limit of 55 miles per hour, which was raised in most states to 70 miles (112 kilometers) per hour.⁸¹ Mobile homes transported on flatbed trucks at the new speed limit were found to disintegrate during the journey. So that more homes would arrive intact at their destination, improvements had to be made in design and fabrication, and these improvements provided benefits to any mobile home owners who now see a supercell thundercloud advancing toward them. It would not make a suitable motto, but on this occasion, raising the speed limit saved lives. If we increased the speed to 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour, the mobile home problem would be solved.