History of construction

The pile driver was invented around 1500.

Achievements

The scale of fortifications and

Renaissance

The

Materials

The major breakthroughs in this period were to do with the technology of conversion. Water mills in most of western Europe were used to saw timber and convert trees into planks. Bricks were used in ever increasing quantities. In Italy the brickmakers were organised into guilds although the kilns were mostly in rural areas because of the risk of fire and easy availability of firewood and brickearth. Brickmakers were typically paid by the brick, which gave them an incentive to make them too small. As a result, legislation was laid down regulating the minimum sizes and each town kept measures against which bricks had to be compared. An increasing amount of ironwork was used in roof carpentry for straps and tension members. The iron was fixed using forelock bolts. The screw-threaded bolt (and nut) could be made and are found in clockmaking in this period, but they were labour-intensive and thus not used on large structures. Roofing was typically of terracotta roof tiles. In Italy they followed Roman precedents. In northern Europe plain tiles were used. Stone, where available, remained the material of choice for prestige buildings.

Design

The rebirth of the idea of an architect in the Renaissance radically changed the nature of building design. The Renaissance reintroduced the classical style of architecture. Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on architecture raised the subject to a new level, defining architecture as something worthy of study by the aristocracy. Previously it was viewed merely as a technical art, suited only to the artisan. The resulting change in status of architecture and more importantly the architect is key to understanding the changes in the process of design. The Renaissance architect was often an artist (a painter or sculptor) who had little knowledge of building technology but a keen grasp of the rules of classical design. The architect thus had to provide detailed drawings for the craftsmen setting out the disposition of the various parts. This was what is called the process of design, from the Italian word for drawing. Occasionally the architect would get involved in particularly difficult technical problems but the technical side of architecture was mainly left up to the craftsmen. This change in the way buildings were designed had a fundamental difference on the way problems were approached. Where the Medieval craftsmen tended to approach a problem with a technical solution in mind, the Renaissance architects started with an idea of what the end product needed to look like and then searched around for a way of making it work. This led to extraordinary leaps forward in engineering.

Techniques

The wish to return to classical architecture created problems for the Renaissance buildings. The builders did not use concrete and thus comparable vaults and domes had to be replicated in brick or stone. The greatest technical feats were undoubtedly in these areas. The first major breakthrough was Brunelleschi's project for the dome of Florence Cathedral. Brunelleschi managed to devise a way of building a huge dome without formwork, relying instead on the weight of the bricks and the way they were laid to keep them in position and the shape of the dome to keep it standing. The exact way the dome was built is still subject to debate today as it is not possible to take the dome apart to study its construction without destroying it. The dome is a double skin, linked by ribs, with a series of wooden and stone chains around it at intervals to attempt to deal with hoop stresses.

Brunelleschi's dome was completed (up to the base of the lantern) in 1446. Its size was soon surpassed by the dome of St Peter's, built using flying scaffolding supported on the cornices and constructed using two stone shells.

Early Modern

17th century

The birth of the modern science in the 17th century greatly affected building construction. Towards the end of the centuy, architect-engineers began to use experimental science to analyse the forms of their buildings. Seventeenth-century structures relied strongly on experience, rules of thumb and the use of scale models. It was not until the eighteenth century that engineering theory developed sufficiently to allow sizes of members to be calculated.

Major improvements to the manufacturing process of glass was happening during the 17th century. The first cast plate glass were developed in France and iron was increasingly employed in structures. For example, Christopher Wren used iron hangers to suspend floor beams at Hampton Court Palace, and iron rods to repair Salisbury Cathedral and strengthen the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Most buildings had stone ashlar surfaces covering rubble cores, held together with lime mortar. Experiments were made mixing lime with other materials to provide a hydraulic mortar, but there was still no equivalent of the Roman concrete. In England, France and the Dutch Republic, cut and gauged brickwork was used to provide detailed and ornate facades. The triangulated roof truss was introduced to England and used by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren.^{[citation needed]}

Many tools have been made obsolete by modern technology, but the

Despite the birth of experimental science, the methods of construction in this period remained largely medieval. The same types of crane that had been used in previous centuries were still being employed. Flying scaffolds were employed at St Paul's Cathedral, England and in the dome of St Peters, Rome, but otherwise the same types of timber scaffolding that had been in use centuries before were retained. Cranes and scaffolding depended on timber. Complex systems of pulleys allowed comparatively large loads to be lifted, and long ramps were used to haul loads up to the upper parts of buildings.

18th century

The 18th century saw the development of many the ideas that had been born in the late 17th century. The architects and engineers became increasingly professionalised. Experimental science and mathematical methods became increasingly sophisticated and employed in buildings. At the same time the birth of the industrial revolution saw an increase in the size of cities and increase in the pace and quantity of construction.

The use of cast and wrough iron brough breakthroughs in this period. Iron columns had been used in Wren's designs for the House of Commons and were used in several early 18th-century churches in London, but these supported only galleries. In the second half of the 18th century the decreasing costs of iron production allowed the construction of major pieces of iron engineering. The Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale (1779) is a particularly notable example. Large-scale mill construction required fire-proof buildings and cast iron became increasingly used for columns and beams to carry brick vaults for floors. The Louvre in Paris boasted an early example of a wrought-iron roof. Steel was used in the manufacture of tools but could not be made in sufficient quantities to be used for building.

Brick production increased markedly during this period. Many buildings throughout Europe were built of brick, but they were often coated in lime render, sometimes patterned to look like stone. Brick production itself changed little. Bricks were moulded by hand and fired in kilns no different to those used for centuries before. Terracotta in the form of Coade stone was used as an artificial stone in the UK.

Industrial Revolution

1st Industrial Revolution (19th century)

Construction became recognized as separate from design.^[24] Theoretical concepts on physics, mathematics, chemistry and thermodynamics were being developed and applied to create building science as a discipline. The various building professions (architecture, engineering, and construction) were becoming defined.

The

As steel was mass-produced from the mid-19th century, it was used in the form of I-beams and reinforced concrete. Glass panes also went into mass production, and went from a luxury to a commonplace item. Plumbing appeared, and gave common access to drinking water and sewage collection.

Building codes have been applied since the 19th century, with special respect to fire safety.

2nd Industrial Revolution (20th century)

With the

By the end of the 20th century, ecology, energy conservation and sustainable development had become important issues of construction. Construction methods prioritize sustainability and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification was created.

Innovators utilized the concepts of

The Digital age also led to various construction methods such as fast-track construction. Fast-track construction has been increasingly popular in the 21st century. Some estimates suggest that 40% of construction projects are now fast-track construction.

Academic discipline

There is no established academic discipline of construction history but a growing number of researchers and academics are working in this field, including structural engineers, archaeologists, architects, historians of technology and architectural historians. Although the subject has been studied since the Renaissance and there were a number of important studies in the nineteenth century, it largely went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century.^[28] In the last thirty years^{[as of?]} there has been an enormous increase in interest in this field, which is vital to the growing practice of building conservation.^[29]

Early writers

The earliest surviving book detailing historical building techniques is the treatise of the Roman author,

19th century studies

In the nineteenth century, lecturers increasingly illustrated their lectures with images of building techniques used in the past and these type of images increasingly appeared in construction textbooks, such as Rondelet's. The greatest advances, however, were made by English and French (and later German) architects attempting to understand, record and analyse Gothic buildings. Typical of this type of writing are the works of

Santiago Huerta Fernández [es] has suggested that it was modernism, with its emphasis on the employment of new materials, that abruptly ended the interest in construction history that appeared to have been growing in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. With the advent of concrete and steel frame construction, architects, who had been the chief audience for such studies, were no longer as interested as they had been in understanding traditional construction, which suddenly appeared redundant. Very little was thus published between 1920 and 1950. The revival of interest started in archaeology with the studies of Roman construction in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1980s that construction history began to emerge as an independent field.

Late 20th century

By the end of the twentieth century, steel and concrete construction were themselves becoming the subject of historical investigation. The Construction History Society was formed in the UK in 1982.^{[30][failed verification]} It produces the only academic international journal devoted to the subject, Construction History, twice annually. The International Congress on Construction History is held every three years, with the First International Congress on Construction History held in Madrid in 2003.^[31] This has been followed by editions held in Queens College, Cambridge, England (2006), Cottbus (2009), Paris (2012), Chicago (2015), Brussels (2018), and Lisbon (2021).^[32]

See also

• History of architecture
• History of structural engineering
• History of water supply and sanitation
• Construction History Society
• Timeline of architecture

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ancient architecture.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Neolithic reconstruction.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Historical building construction.

• History of construction at
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