BUILDING TECHNOLOGY 1

BUILDING MATERIALS
 HISTORY
OF
BUILDING
MATERIALS
 The crux for your construction project
relies on an essential ingredient: proper
materials. Construction and its related
materials have been an essential
component to human evolution and our
standards of living. In fact, materials
commonly used in construction today can
date their beginnings to as far back as 400
BC.
HISTORY OF BUILDING The history of architecture is also

MATERIALS
the history of building
materials. Frank Lloyd Wright
wrote: “The nature of the
materials employed in
construction is inherent to the true
nature of every good building,
that is, of the kind of construction
we call Architecture.” He went on
to say that a house “will glorify
the material of which it is
composed.” Studying ancient
building materials enables us to
understand how far our society
has come, and how criteria
for choosing these materials have
changed over time. Nowadays,
we talk about resistance to
mechanical stress, thermal and
acoustic insulation
properties, breaking
loads, resistance to ageing and
so on, all the way to assessing
building materials’ fire
resistance, transmittance
and other more or less
fundamental details.
 In Antiquity, the only building

NATURE
BUILDING MATERIALS IN materials available were what
nature provided. When mankind
first formed into tribes, people
tended to build small villages of
simple wooden huts roofed with
animal pelts. Back in the
Paleolithic period, these were
elementary structures, offering
minimal protection from the
weather. During the Neolithic
period, as climatic conditions
worsened, man was forced to
exploit the main building material
around him – wood – in a variety
of ways, using it to build more
solid huts with real roofs, and
structures raised on piles, of
which traces have been found. It
was only at the end of the Bronze
Age, around the third millennium
BC, that stone started to be
seriously taken into consideration
as a construction material: we
know this from edifices such
as Stonehenge, and of course the
Pyramids, which were made out
of extremely heavy blocks of
granite.
 The first place that bricks

STONE, BRICKS AND CONCRETE

were used as a building
material was in Mesopotamia,
in the second millennium BC.
From then on, building
materials and their
characteristics rapidly evolved.
Worked stone began to be used
in tandem with metal beams
and staples.
Increasingly-advanced
construction techniques made it
possible for stunning cities and
magnificent temples to be built
in Ancient Greece. Associating
new technologies with classical
building materials, stately
villas and agora offered a
blueprint for European and,
more specifically,
Mediterranean architecture.
 The Romans took things a step

STONE, BRICKS AND CONCRETE

further, introducing an essential
new building material
– concrete – that made major
architectural advances possible.
Alongside the introduction of
concrete, the Romans
put bricks at the centre of the
art of masonry; stone was used
no longer as an out-and-out
building material, but as
cladding. Bricks underwent
their own evolution over the
centuries, from first
century BC raw bricks to the
widespread use of baked
bricks under Tiberius’ reign.
Timber was still used,
particularly as the main
material for building the upper
floors of insulae, buildings that
stood four or five storeys high.
 As we know, in
GLASS the Middle Ages stone
once again became the
main construction
material for the most
important buildings,
churches and castles.
This period also saw the
introduction of glass, a
new material that, from
then on, would be of
key importance to
buildings. The uptake of
glass was accelerated by
the expanding Republic
of Venice.
 The Renaissance

BRICKS heralded another change,

as brick returned to oust
stone. Brick remained the
undisputed construction
material for many centuries
to come, leading to unique
and truly ingenious works
such as Florence
Cathedral’s dome. During
the Renaissance, plaster
became widely used, both
as an architectural element
with a protective, bonding
purpose, and as an aesthetic
decoration for buildings.
 We have seen what building

AGE
INDUSTRIAL AND REVOLUTION
materials were used in
Ancient Times and the
Middle Ages. Another major
watershed in this long history
was the Industrial Revolution,
a huge paradigm shift that took
place between the late 18th
century and the early 19th
century. Alongside
brick, metals became an
important building material,
most notably iron and steel, as
did reinforced concrete.
The earliest works in iron, for
example the famous 1781 Iron
Bridge over the River Severn
in England, the first in the
world to be built out of this
material, were erected in the
eighteenth century.