chapter-5 "construction, materials, and technology as modifying factors"

To build any structure or a house we have to know about its ground reality, whether the house is going to be built for a person or a whole family, either a house should be permanent, portable, temporary etc. because once it has been built, then the house has to respond climatic forces but still after being built there remain a certain problems which are related to construction side.

Similarly while building a house, the choice of materials and construction plays a vital role, because they had a great influence and modify the form. And at the same time they have to respond to the climatic stress,(cold, dry, hot, warm, rainy, windy etc). The reason why construction and material are to important is, as their fundamental nature do not form accurate but they modify forms.

In architecture the basic problem of construction is “the spanning of space”, means to span certain area, by which the natural elasticity of material’s damages, as they weren’t capable on certain spaces. Because the gravitational force transmission to the ground required material having great strength and tensile strength.  

In early time people do have materials like animal’s skin, wool, bones feather, and wood etc. The only advancement in the preindustrial time was metal. There were no such materials available to built vaults and domes. Timbers were used in that time but they bring it from very far, because of its scarcity the beam were reused many times.

People in ancient times like: Eskimo have snow and ice, Siberian have felted hair, small amount of wood, and Sudanese have mud, palm logs…..due to this scarcity of material there were less choice but still things were available to build for some instance.

At that time every design was limited…primitive people do have knowledge a lot, regarding how to protect the house from climatic effects and construction wise. They have a great understanding, this chapter also deals that how they protect their houses from climatic effect but structurally they were weak, we can say they were at the beginning …..

They built particular houses where certain requirement was of no use, but still they build. For e.g.: a flat roof carried a cross beam, commonly formed on an immense area. Structure wise the roof should be as light as possible and the dead load is minimum. As in hot places heavy roof increase the time length of heating.

Overall it can be said that in least option, every form of construction was formed in primitive and vernacular building, including many structure concept. Structural type of work were also found at that time as well,but they were very weak…such as: tension structure in Arab tents, prefabrications found in Africa and that hatch construction in Biskupin (Poland).  


M. Arsalan Khan
B0998048