The late nineteenth century saw the parallel development of reinforced concrete frame construction by G. In the s Ernest L. Ransome was managing a successful stone company producing concrete blocks as artificial stone in San Francisco. He first used reinforcing in , and in he patented a system using twisted square rods to help the development of bond between the concrete and reinforcing Collins, His largest work of the time was the Leland Stanford, Jr. Museum at Stanford University, the first building to use exposed aggregate.
He was also responsible for several industrial buildings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, such as the construction of the Kelly and Jones Machine Shop in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
The Ingalls Building, a landmark structure in Cincinnati, was built in using a variation of the Ransome system. Designed by the firm of Elzner and Anderson, it was the first concrete skyscraper, reaching 16 stories feet.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Francois Hennebique, a successful mason turned contractor in Paris, had started to build reinforced concrete houses in the late s. He took out patents in France and Belgium for the Hennebique system of construction and proceeded to establish an empire of franchises in major cities.
He promoted the material by holding conferences and developing standards within his own company network. Most of his buildings like Ransome's were industrial.
When the far-flung company was at its' peak, Hennebique was fulfilling more than contracts annually Collins, More than any other individual he was responsible for the rapid growth of reinforced concrete construction in Europe. If Hennebique was responsible for the acceptability of reinforced concrete as a building material, then it was Auguste Perret who made it acceptable as an architectural material.
The works of Ferret include not only factories and apartment buildings, but also museums, churches, and theaters. His better known works are in or around Paris, such as the delicately facaded apartment building at 25 bis Rue Franklin, completed in Just a few years later he designed the bulky, massive-looking, but spacious Theatre Champs Elysee.
Notre Dame du Raincy, constructed in , represented a significant departure from anything built in concrete before and is generally regarded as a masterpiece of architectural design. The lofty arched ceilings and the slender columns were very convincing statements as to the prowess of this newly accepted building material. Reinforced concrete permitted the development of an entirety new building form-the thin shell. In Eduardo Torroja, the brilliant Spanish engineer, designed a low-rise dome of 3.
Torroja was also responsible for the statically elegant cantilevered stadium roof at the Madrid Hippodrome in At first these were cast in situ, but most of Nervi's work, including the Exhibition Hall at Turin and the two sports palaces in Rome, was primarily of precast construction.
The master of the concrete shell, without dispute, would be the Spanish-born mathematician-engineer-architect, Felix Candela. He adopted the hyperbolic paraboloid form as his trademark and, making use of favorable labor costs, built many factories and churches in and around Mexico City using this form. His most striking building is the restaurant at Xochimilco, built in , consisting of six identical paraboloid vaults.
As a young architect Le Corbusier worked part-time in Perret's office but was always at odds with his employer, having no use for the espoused classical basis for design Collins, Le Corbusier was later to become the most highly regarded architect of the modern era, building almost exclusively in reinforced concrete.
Among his celebrated works are the Villa Savoye of flat plate construction, , the housing blocks on pilotis at Nantes and Marseille late s , the Chapel at Ronchamp with walls of concreted masonry construction, , the monastery of La Tourette , and the government complex at Chandigarh in India More so than his contemporaries, Le Corbusier was involved with the play of natural light as a design element, and concrete with its variable surface texture provided an excellent medium for his efforts.
Frank Lloyd Wright declared the prime assets of reinforced concrete to be its formability and monolithic property of construction, but he did not take advantage of this until late in his career. He was the first to exploit the cantilever as a design feature made possible by the continuous nature of reinforced concrete construction.
The Kaufman House Fallingwater , built in , is a tour de force in the use of the cantilever. Thin slabs seem to project beyond the possible, perhaps constructed containing as much steel as concrete! In Mies van der Rohe had proposed the idea of a structural core for a high-rise building with cantilevered floor slabs Drexler, , but it was not until that Wright brought the idea to fruition with his design for the Johnson Wax Tower at Racine, Wisconsin.
Steel is a low-cost material still used in the construction industry today. Steel is a non-combustible, recyclable, cheap material that is impervious to termites. Thanks to the versatility and affordability of steel, the construction industry achieved a new level of productivity in the 20th century. Construction was a means of survival for many immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Asia, and other countries around the world. Immigrants moved to America to start a family in a newly prosperous country — or even to escape oppressive living conditions back home — and construction was a means of realizing the American Dream.
Unfortunately, some people sought to prevent this dream from coming true for many immigrant Americans. In , President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the first significant law to restrict immigration to America. This was a prejudiced response to the major influx of Chinese immigrants who moved here for construction jobs.
Herein lies a major blemish acutely prevalent within the history of the construction industry: racial discrimination. Historically, immigrants have had to contend with disparate wages, hostile working environments, unsafe conditions as was the case with Chinese railroad workers , and many other forms of racial discrimination.
In spite of this adversity, the population of immigrant workers in the US continues to grow. Since it welcomes immigrants of all education and skill levels, construction is an appealing employment prospect. It was demolished in By the early s, advances in technology and production yielded a steel product that was consistently stronger.
Railroads thrived and structural steel became the building material by which others would be judged. From to steel production in America grew from , tons to 60 million tons annually, making the U. This allowed magnates like Charles Schwab and Andrew Carnegie to become some of the wealthiest men of the time. The incredibly rapid growth was built on a solid technological base and the ongoing development of office buildings, factories, railroads, bridges and more.
By , America was ready to reach higher into the sky and the Woolworth Building , a story tower, was built in New York. For a time, it was the tallest building in the world and was looked to as a model of pioneering American steel-frame construction.
By the s, hundreds of thousands of people worked in American steel mills, and steel was being regularly used in building construction — including those built by Steel, LLC. Steel, LLC is a leading structural steel construction firm, headquartered in Atlanta. Steel, LLC produces fabricated steel to frame all types of conventional and complex steel buildings, and specializes in suburban mid-rise office buildings, corporate campuses, aviation structures, and steel trusses.
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