- Also called:
- building construction
- Related Topics:
- masonry
- carpentry
- scaffold
- rammed earth
- shoring
A significant achievement of the first industrial age was the emergence of building science, particularly the elastic theory of structures. With it, mathematical models could be used to predict structural performance with considerable accuracy, provided there was adequate quality control of the materials used. Although some elements of the elastic theory, such as the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler’s theory of column buckling (1757), were worked out earlier, the real development began with the English scientist Thomas Young’s modern definition of the modulus of elasticity in 1807. Louis Navier published the elastic theory of beams in 1826, and three methods of analyzing forces in trusses were devised by Squire Whipple, A. Ritter, and James Clerk Maxwell between 1847 and 1864. The concept of a statically determinate structure—that is, a structure whose forces could be determined from Newton’s laws of motion alone—was set forth by Otto Mohr in 1874, after having been used intuitively for perhaps 40 years. Most 19th-century structures were purposely designed and fabricated with pin joints to be statically determinate; it was not until the 20th century that statically indeterminate structures became readily solvable. The elastic theory formed the basis of structural analysis until World War II, when bomb-damaged buildings were observed to behave in unpredicted ways and the underlying assumptions of the theory were found to require modification.
Emergence of design professionals
The coming of the industrial age also marked a major change in the role of the architect. The artist-architects of the Renaissance had the twin patrons of church and state upon whom they could depend for commissions. In the rising industrial democracies the market for large-scale buildings worthy of an architect’s attention widened, and the different users asked for a bewildering range of new building types. The response of the architect was to develop the new role of licensed professional on the model of professions such as law and medicine. In addition, with the coming of building science, there was a further division of labor in the design process; structural engineering appeared as a separate discipline specializing in the application of mathematical models in building. One of the first buildings for which the architect and engineer were separate persons was the Granary (1811) in Paris. Societies representing the building design professions were founded, including the Institution of Civil Engineers (1818) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (1834), both in London, and the American Institute of Architects (1857). Official government licensing of architects and engineers, a goal of these societies, was not realized until much later, beginning with the Illinois Architects Act of 1897. Concurrent with the rise of professionalism was the development of government regulation, which took the form of detailed municipal and national building codes specifying both prescriptive and performance requirements for buildings.
Improvements in building services
Environmental control technologies began to develop dramatically in the first industrial age. The first major advance was the use of coal gas for lighting. Coal gas was first made in the 1690s by heating coal in the presence of water to yield methane, and in 1792 William Murdock developed the gas jet lighting fixture. The first large building to have gas lighting (from a small gas plant on the site) was James Watt’s foundry in Birmingham in 1803. The Gas Light and Coke Company was founded in London in 1812 as the first real public utility, producing coal gas as a part of the coking process in large central plants and distributing it through underground pipes to individual users; soon many major cities had gasworks and distribution networks. Gas was expensive, however, and was used mainly for lighting, not for heating or cooking; it also contained many impurities that produced undesirable products of combustion (particularly carbon soot) in occupied spaces. Relatively pure methane in the form of natural gas would not be available until the exploitation of large oil fields in the 20th century.
The stove and fireplace continued as the major sources of space heating throughout this period, but the development of the steam engine and its associated boilers led to a new technology in the form of steam heating. James Watt heated his own office with steam running through pipes as early as 1784. During the 19th century, systems of steam and later hot-water heating were gradually developed; these used coal-fired central boilers connected to networks of pipes that distributed the heated fluid to cast-iron radiators and returned it to the boiler for reheating. Steam heat was a major improvement over stoves and fireplaces because all combustion products were eliminated from occupied spaces, but heat sources were still localized at the radiators.
Plumbing and sanitation systems in buildings advanced rapidly in this period. Public water-distribution systems were the essential element; the first large-scale example of a mechanically pressurized water-supply system was the great array of waterwheels installed by Louis XIV at Marley on the Marne River in France to pump water for the fountains at Versailles, about 18 kilometers (10 miles) away. The widespread use of cast-iron pipes in the late 18th century made higher pressures possible, and they were used by Napoleon in the first steam-powered municipal water supply for a section of Paris in 1812. Gravity-powered underground drainage systems were installed along with water-distribution networks in most large cities of the industrial world during the 19th century; sewage-treatment plants were introduced in the 1860s. Permanent plumbing fixtures appeared in buildings with water supply and drainage, replacing portable basins, buckets, and chamber pots. Joseph Bramah invented the metal valve-type water closet as early as 1778, and other early lavatories, sinks, and bathtubs were of metal also; lead, copper, and zinc were all tried. The metal fixtures proved difficult to clean, however, and in England during the 1870s Thomas Twyford developed the first large one-piece ceramic lavatories as well as the ceramic washdown water closet. At first these ceramic fixtures were very expensive, but their prices declined until they became standard, and their forms remain largely unchanged today. The bathtub proved to be too large for brittle ceramic construction, and the porcelain-enamel cast-iron tub was devised about 1870; the double-shell built-in type still common today appeared about 1915.
The second industrial age
Introduction of steel building technology
If the first industrial age was one of iron and steam, the second industrial age, which began in about 1880, could be called one of steel and electricity. Mass production of this new material and of this new form of energy also transformed building technology. Steel was first made in large quantities for railroad rails. Rolling of steel rails (which was adapted from wrought-iron rolling technology) and other shapes such as angles and channels began about 1870; it made a much tougher, less brittle metal. Steel was chosen as the principal building material for two structures built for the Paris Exposition of 1889: the Eiffel Tower and the Gallery of Machines. Gustave Eiffel’s tower was 300 meters (1,000 feet) high, and its familiar parabolic curved form has become a symbol of Paris itself; its height was not exceeded until the topping off of the 318.8-meter- (1,046-foot-) tall Chrysler Building in New York City in 1929. The Gallery of Machines was designed by the architect C.-L.-F. Dutert and the engineer Victor Contamin with great three-hinged arches spanning 114 meters (380 feet) and extending more than 420 meters (1,400 feet). Its glass-enclosed clear span area of 48,727 square meters (536,000 square feet) has never been equaled; in fact, it was so large that no regular use for it could be found after the exposition closed, and this magnificent building was demolished in 1910.
Early steel-frame high-rises
While these prodigious structures were the center of attention, a new and more significant technology was developing: the steel-framed high-rise building. It began in Chicago, a city whose central business district was growing rapidly. The pressure of land values in the early 1880s led owners to demand taller buildings. The architect-engineer William Le Baron Jenney responded to this challenge with the 10-story Home Insurance Company Building (1885), which had a nearly completely all-metal structure. The frame consisted of cast-iron columns supporting wrought-iron beams, together with two floors of rolled-steel beams that were substituted during construction; this was the first large-scale use of steel in a building. The metal framing was completely encased in brick or clay-tile cladding for fire protection, since iron and steel begin to lose strength if they are heated above about 400 °C (750 °F). Jenney’s Manhattan Building (1891) had the first vertical truss bracing to resist wind forces; rigid frame or portal wind bracing was first used in the neighboring Old Colony Building (1893) by the architects William Holabird and Martin Roche. The all-steel frame finally appeared in Jenney’s Ludington Building (1891) and the Fair Store (1892).
The foundations of these high-rise buildings posed a major problem, given the soft clay soil of central Chicago. Traditional spread footings, which dated back to the Egyptians, proved to be inadequate to resist settlement due to the heavy loads of the many floors, and timber piles (a Roman invention) were driven down to bedrock. For the 13-story Stock Exchange Building (1892), the engineer Dankmar Adler employed the caisson foundation used in bridge construction. A cylindrical shaft braced with board sheathing was hand-dug to bedrock and filled with concrete to create a solid pier to receive the heavy loads of the steel columns.
By 1895 a mature high-rise building technology had been developed: the frame of rolled steel I beams with bolted or riveted connections, diagonal or portal wind bracing, clay-tile fireproofing, and caisson foundations. The electric-powered elevator provided vertical transportation, but other environmental technologies were still fairly simple. Interior lighting was still largely from daylight, although supplemented by electric light. There was steam heating but no cooling, and ventilation was dependent on operating windows; thus these buildings needed narrow floor spaces to give adequate access to light and air. Of equal importance in high-rise construction was the introduction of the internal-combustion engine (which had been invented by Nikolaus Otto in 1876) at the building site; it replaced the horse and human muscle power for the heaviest tasks of lifting. Over the next 35 years, higher steel-frame buildings were built; in Chicago the Masonic Temple (1892) of Daniel Burnham and John Root reached 22 stories (91 meters or 302 feet), but then the leadership shifted to New York City with the 26-story Manhattan Life Building (1894). The Singer Building (1907) by the architect Ernest Flagg rose to 47 stories (184 meters or 612 feet), Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913) attained a height of 238 meters (792 feet) at 55 stories, and Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s 102-story Empire State Building (1931) touched 381 meters (1,250 feet). The race for higher buildings came to an abrupt halt with the Great Depression and World War II, and high-rise construction was not resumed until the late 1940s.
Steel long-span construction
Long-span structures in steel developed more slowly than the high-rise in the years from 1895 to 1945, and none exceeded the span of the Gallery of Machines. Two-hinge (made of a single member hinged at each end) and three-hinge (made of two members hinged at each end and at the meeting point at the crown) trussed arches were widely used, the largest examples being two great airship hangars for the U.S. Navy in New Jersey—the first built in 1922 with a span of 79 meters (262 feet), the second in 1942 with a span of 100 meters (328 feet). The flat truss was used also, reaching a maximum span of 91 meters (300 feet) in the Glenn L. Martin Co. Aircraft Assembly Building (1937) in Baltimore. Electric arc welding, another important steel technology, was applied to construction at this time, although the principle had been developed in the 1880s. The first all-welded multistory buildings were a series of factories for the Westinghouse Company, beginning in 1920. The welded rigid frame became a new structural type for medium spans, reaching a length of 23 meters (77 feet) in the Cincinnati Union Terminal (1932), but widespread use of welding did not come until after 1945.
Reintroduction of concrete
The second industrial age also saw the reemergence of concrete in a new composite relationship with steel, creating a technology that would rapidly assume a major role in construction. The first step in this process was the creation of higher-strength artificial cements. Lime mortar—made of lime, sand, and water—had been known since ancient times. It was improved in the late 18th century by the British engineer John Smeaton, who added powdered brick to the mix and made the first modern concrete by adding pebbles as coarse aggregate. Joseph Aspdin patented the first true artificial cement, which he called Portland Cement, in 1824; the name implied that it was of the same high quality as Portland stone. To make portland cement, Aspdin burned limestone and clay together in a kiln; the clay provided silicon compounds, which when combined with water formed stronger bonds than the calcium compounds of limestone. In the 1830s Charles Johnson, another British cement manufacturer, saw the importance of high-temperature burning of the clay and limestone to a white heat, at which point they begin to fuse. In this period, plain concrete was used for walls, and it sometimes replaced brick in floor arches that spanned between wrought-iron beams in iron-framed factories. Precast concrete blocks also were manufactured, although they did not effectively compete with brick until the 20th century.
The invention of reinforced concrete
The first use of iron-reinforced concrete was by the French builder François Coignet in Paris in the 1850s. Coignet’s own all-concrete house in Paris (1862), the roofs and floors reinforced with small wrought-iron I beams, still stands. But reinforced concrete development began with the French gardener Joseph Monier’s 1867 patent for large concrete flowerpots reinforced with a cage of iron wires. The French builder François Hennebique applied Monier’s ideas to floors, using iron rods to reinforce concrete beams and slabs; Hennebique was the first to realize that the rods had to be bent upward to take negative moment near supports. In 1892 he closed his construction business and became a consulting engineer, building many structures with concrete frames composed of columns, beams, and slabs. In the United States Ernest Ransome paralleled Hennebique’s work, constructing factory buildings in concrete. High-rise structures in concrete followed the paradigm of the steel frame. Examples include the 16-story Ingalls Building (1903) in Cincinnati, which was 54 meters (180 feet) tall, and the 11-story Royal Liver Building (1909), built in Liverpool by Hennebique’s English representative, Louis Mouchel. The latter structure was Europe’s first skyscraper, its clock tower reaching a height of 95 meters (316 feet). Attainment of height in concrete buildings progressed slowly owing to the much lower strength and stiffness of concrete as compared with steel.
Between 1900 and 1910 the elastic theory of structures was at last applied to reinforced concrete in a scientific way. Emil Morsch, the chief engineer of the German firm of Wayss and Freitag, formulated the theory, which was verified by detailed experimental testing at the Technical University of Stuttgart. These tests established the need for deformed bars for good bonding with concrete and demonstrated that the amount of steel in any member should be limited to about 8 percent of the area; this assures the slow elastic failure of the steel, as opposed to the abrupt brittle failure of the concrete, in case of accidental overloading. In 1930 the American engineer Hardy Cross introduced relaxation methods for the approximate analysis of rigid frames, which greatly simplified the design of concrete structures. In the Johnson-Bovey Building (1905) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the American engineer C.A.P. Turner employed concrete floor slabs without beams (called flat slabs or flat plates) that used diagonal and orthogonal patterns of reinforcing bars. The system still used today—which divides the bays between columns into column strips and middle strips and uses only an orthogonal arrangement of bars—was devised in 1912 by the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart.
