The construction of a building

1. A building is a construction which is raised on a foundation and is generally made of stone, concrete blocks, bricks and mortar or cement. Bricks and concrete blocks are held together by mortar. Walls made of bricks and those built of concrete blocks are suitable both for small buildings and multistorey structures. Nowadays houses are often built of complete concrete structural units which are factory-made and assem­bled on the spot.

2. Every detail of a house must be carefully planned. The working plan itself is called a blueprint. Without a blueprint the workmen would make all sorts of mistakes and waste a lot of time.

3. Plans for building a house are drawn by an architect. The architect draws a separate plan for each individual floor. He shows all the parts of the house exactly as if the house were already built.

4. It is from the blueprint of the architect that the workman sees where to place the walls, the windows, the doors, the staircases, etc. The size of the rooms, the width of the doors, and windows, the height of the ceil­ings are also marked on the plan by the architect.

5. Different workmen are employed in building a house. The stonema­son builds the foundation. The bricklayer builds the walls and other parts made of bricks. He lays the bricks one on the top of another and puts mortar between them with a trowel. The slater or tiler is employed for putting slates or tiles on the roof. The plumber fixes all the baths, water pipes and the sanitary fittings of drains and lavatories in the places marked for them in the plan drawn by the architect. The electri ­ cian runs electric wires and makes connections all through the house from the cellars under ground to the attics under the roof. All the doors and window-frames are made by the carpenter and put into their places by the joiner. The latter also lays down the floor. Then the plasterer puts piaster or cement over all the walls and ceilings and makes them smooth. The walls are then painted, papered or whitewashed as the case may be.

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What is a blueprint?

 

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CEMENT: MAN’S MIRACLE MIX

1.One of man's oldest building materials is finding its way into a lot of new places these days. Concrete, first discovered by the Romans, is now more widely used in con­struction than all other materials together.

2. The magic ingredient that makes concrete possible is ce­ment, about which, according to one expert, more has been learnt in the past three decades than in the preceding 2,000 years. Concrete is a synthetic stone which can be formed while soft into practically any shape the builder wants. Portland cement mixed with water is the paste that binds sand, gravel, clinker into an artificial rock that becomes harder as the years pass. Portland cement does not come from a place of that name; it was called Portland because Joseph Aspdin, the English builder who invented the first dependable, scientifically made cement about 1824, thought it resembled the rock excavated on the Isle of Portland on the Dorset Coast.

3. What's so new about cement after all these years? Several things. One item is “squeezed” concrete, known technically as pre-stressed concrete. By giving concrete a big squeeze after it has hardened, builders can increase its elasticity ten times, so that it will bend under a heavy load without breaking. This is important in building bridges, viaducts, and floors of large buildings. The simplest way to pre-stress concrete is to put steel wires or rods in the concrete when it is poured.

4. An unusual American use of reinforced concrete is the floating highway bridge across Lake Washington. The depth of the lake made piers too expensive, so engineers built the bridge on hollow concrete pontoons anchored in place by steel cables. It is the longest pontoon bridge structure on earth.

5. Until recently, the aim of engineers was to make concrete with as few bubbles as possible. Now they have come up with a new concrete that has millions of microscopic bubbles per cubic foot. It is made by adding an agent which foams to form the bubbles when the concrete is mixed. This concrete doesn't crack when freezing. The first "air bubble" roads were built many years ago. They have stood up under winter freezes so well that today this concrete is used for new road construction.

6. Another discovery is "soil cement". Several years ago road builders lacking funds found that they could mix cement with soil on the site of the road, wet it and compact it, then cover it with a bitumen. The first road they built is still carrying traffic. There are miles of soil-cement secondary roads and streets in the US today. Construction goes so fast that with modern equipment a road builder can complete a mile of soil cement road in one day.

7. Scientists are working on research into the behaviour or cement and concrete under all kinds of conditions. Collaborating with engineers they are developing new ways of using concrete. Cement is changing the face of the Earth.

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How is the cement with microscopic bubbles made?

 

 

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