Industrial and Civil Engineering

Today the building industry is very active in all countries throughout the world. Within a short time, towns and industrial plants have been created on land where there were quiet forests and small villages only a few years ago. Modern life of the twentieth century has set its stamp on the methods of building as well.

Apart from blocks of flats and imposing buildings for governments and parliaments, also hospitals, schools and universities, sport installation and other large-scale structures are required.

In our day, it is no longer possible to meet the ever increasing demand for new buildings by employing the conventional working methods of the buildings by trades used by masons and carpenters in the days of old. Now, time- and material-saving processes had, therefore, to be found in order to build an ever increasing rate.

This great construction has become possible due to the appli­cation of industrial housing techniques and the use of standard projects. Over the past few years thousands of construction sites have developed into assembly grounds. Here buildings and other structures are assembled with the use of various machines.

All the prefabricated ferro-concrete structural units and parts for these buildings are manufactured at house-building plants and are delivered to the construction site ready for assembly.

The basic trend of industrial housing construction at present is large-panel construction and it is expected to become the predominating construction method in the near future.

Another interesting trend, which is a great achievement of industrial technique of housing construction, is the use of block units. This method saves even more lime in construction than the above-mentioned one.

The general trend of big-panel construction has brought into being a new industry. Thousands of plants and factories making structural elements for apartment houses are already functioning or are to be opened in various parts of our country. As a rule these plants have full technological cycle, which goes all the way from the manufacture of structural elements to their assembly at the building site.

All the processes are mechani­zed and automated. On the TV screens the man at the control desk watches the structural elements, walls, supports, founda­tions, floorings, etc., moving along the conveyors in the huge shops. Sometimes these are big panels with walls already complete with windows and cornices, whole floorings and staircases. The basic design unit is either a two-room block of kitchen-plus-staircase elements blocks, each block being a complete finished product, ready for transportation. The whole block is loaded onto a trailer and towed off to the building site to be assembled.

While the building components are being made in the factory the site for the building is leveled and reinforced concrete piles are driven by a vibro-hammer and topped with prefabricated base units. On arrival the prefabricated flats ace picked up by a 35 ton portal crane, placed in position and joined together by welding.

As we can see today, the modern building site has been turn­ed into an industrial plant where complicated machinery cen­tuples the labour power of man.