Scarica Building Materials and Construction Techniques: A Comprehensive Guide e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Building material Natural: ● Stone: slipformed stone(a system of stone masonry in which short forms are placed on both sides of the wall and stones are placed inside them with the good faces against the form work), travertine(great range of colour, very hard and heavy and not porous, mainly used for flooring and wall cladding), granite(hard, also since before roman times used for city walls, doors, churches…, now for flooring, wall cladding and also garden decorations). ● Timber (wood modified by man with stage of production. Disadvantage: susceptible to water fire and bugs, logging can have an environmental impact, transmitter of sound waves, not very strong horizontally. Preservation and restoration of old wood is important) ● Plant materials: straw, bamboo Man-made: ● Brick(perfect for load bearing systems, with extreme weather the surface of some bricks can be damaged, masonry must be built on a firm foundation to prevent settling and cracking) ● Cement:(grey powder which becomes hard after being mixed with water and allowed to dry) Portland cement (most common modern cement), concrete (blocks of concrete, larger than bricks and used where appearance is not important, visual concrete, designed to be seen) ● Metals: steel is an alloy of iron and carbon and can be hard or soft, can be used for internal and external structures, less harm to the environment (stainless steel), aluminium is a light and high resistance material suitable for modern structural elements ● Glass: structurally unsafe, used to create curtain walls with a profile of metal, used to protect from weather or separate internal spaces ● Plastics: Thermosoftening plastic: when heated can be reshaped. Thermosetting plastic: cannot be reshaped but resistant PVC: rigid and non rigid used because of its good chemical resistance to corrosive fluids. Advantages ● Stone: strength, sustainability, beauty ● Timber: sustainability, versatility, cheapness, elegance and practicality ● Brick: strength, sustainability, durability, insulating properties, heat resistance ● Blocks of concrete: strength, resistance, durability ● Metals: resistance, durability, flexibility, versatility ● Plastics: low maintenance costs, can be recycled, thermal insulation and noise protection, versatility CAD: is a software which allows the use of computer technology for the development of design and design documentation. no special hardware is required for most CAD software. Advantage: low product development costs and much shorter design cycle. Rendering: computer generated graphics, it is an engineered program used to create three-dimensional images of animations from a virtual model thanks to computer software. British houses: ● Terraced house: part of a row of similar houses joined together by their side walls with no space for garden ● Tenement: is a rundown brick building divided into low-rental flats located on several floors ● Tower block: is a very tall building of over twenty storeys which is divided into flats and offices ● Detached house: is a house which stands alone with nothing on either side, they have a garden and are built mainly in residential areas ● Semi-detached house: is a house joined to another house on one side only by a shared wall, small garden and can be found in suburbs American houses ● Penthouse: luxury attic with exclusive services, panoramic view and occupies the entire top floor of the building ● Loft: is a house created below the roof of an office building, originally used to store things, huge dimensions ● Ranch: is a large farm used to raise animals, is rectangular on one level and usually open-plan with few interior walls ● Bungalow: is a house all on one level, small and surrounded by a verandah. popular in american towns, has high ceilings large doors and windows ● Skyscrapers: very tall buildings with fifty or more floors. They use glass curtain walls. A problem was the wind and engineers solved it by placing steel columns and beams closely together at the core of the skyscraper, to create a structure that could resist very high wind forces. Italian houses There are a lot of historical homes and historical centers Now there are also detached house, multi-family, terraced house, block of flats and also villas surrounded by great italian-style gardens, and farmhouses Foundations They are structures that transfer the weight from walls and columns to the ground. There are two types of foundations: shallow foundations, that are usually embedded a metre into the soil, and deep foundations that are embedded more in depth. Deep foundations are recommended when the soil is poor or with very large design loads. They can be made of timber, steel or concrete. Walls
