A residential building consisting of a steel structure? It seems a strange, unusual idea. After all, it is not a shed: houses have always been made of masonry, concrete, or even wood.
This is usually the first reaction to the idea of building houses with a metal structure. However, this is a first impression, often frequent even among designers themselves, which is however dictated by habit and ingrained ideas.
Let us now look in detail at this new construction method in order to better understand its characteristics and, above all, its advantages.
The advantages of residential steel structures
A closer look at the subject reveals that these buildings, generally residential (but not exclusively), have a load-bearing structure made from the latest generation of thin metal profiles, cold-formed from structural steel, which are completed with sheet and panel systems for the external envelope, internal partitions, floors and roofs.
The aim of all this is to ensure maximum technological performance of the finished building and the construction process.
Building the load-bearing structure in this way brings significant advantages in terms of construction time on site. The wall and floor elements arrive pre-assembled and only need to be installed and connected together: this makes a big difference compared to bricks and concrete in terms of time and optimisation of construction work.
To better understand this type of construction, it is useful to use a simile. In fact, it is like dealing with a big box of assemblable elements, from which it is possible to freely choose the most suitable components in the best combination to achieve the desired performance, from basic but indispensable solutions, such as for emergency constructions, or without the need to meet particular regulatory and comfort requirements, to complex and high-performance constructions to meet the most diverse needs.
Dry layered construction: a growing trend?
Industry interest in dry layered construction has been growing in Italy over the last ten years and is still accelerating.
This is due to a number of factors:
- The need to have light and elastic constructions, due to seismic risk, able to resist and dissipate stresses
- The need to guarantee high physical, technical and acoustic performance and an increasingly high level of prefabrication and industrialisation.
Post time: May-23-2023