History of construction

[1] It has evolved and undergone different trends over time, marked by a few key principles: durability of the materials used, increase in building height and span, the degree of control exercised over the interior environment, and finally, the energy available for the construction process.

However, it is believed that the earliest evidence of construction in the world is the 1.8 million year-old stone circle found at Olduvai Gorge representing the remains of a windbreak.

Because of this, what little can be said about very early construction is mostly conjecture and based on vernacular architecture or what is known about the way nomadic hunter-gatherers and herdsmen in remote areas build shelters today.

Pre-historic men made tools out of bone, ivory, antler, hide, stone, wood, grass, metals (gold, copper and silver) and animal fibers.

The most remarkable Neolithic structure in Western Europe is the iconic megalith known as Stonehenge, regarded by some archaeologists as displaying methods of timber construction such as at woodhenge translated into stone,[12] a process known as petrification.

[13][better source needed] There is also evidence of prefabrication of the stonework; the symmetrical geometric arrays of stone clearly indicate that the builders of Stonehenge had mastered sophisticated surveying methods.

[15] Unrefined copper was malleable, tough, strong, resistant to corrossion and much more versatile than stone causing a shift in preference of tool-making material.

Both were also used to "harden" the cutting edge of tools such as the Egyptians using copper and bronze points for working soft stone including quarrying blocks and making rock-cut architecture.

Steel can be hardened and tempered producing a sharp, durable cutting edge allowing for the creating of better tools such as hammers, chisels, knives and axes.

The smaller dwellings only survive in traces of foundations, but the later civilizations built very sizeable structures in the forms of palaces, temples and ziggurats and took particular care to build them out of materials that last, which has ensured that very considerable parts have remained intact.

Adobe (sun-baked mud brick) construction was used for ancillary buildings and normal houses in ancient times and is still commonly used in rural Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians are credited with inventing the ramp, lever, lathe, oven, ship, paper, irrigation system, window, awning, door, glass, a form of plaster of Paris, the bath, lock, shadoof, weaving, a standardized measurement system, geometry, silo, a method of drilling stone, saw, steam power, proportional scale drawings, enameling, veneer, plywood, rope truss, and more.

The Greeks made many advances in technology including plumbing, the spiral staircase, central heating, urban planning, the water wheel, the crane, and more.

Their surveying skills were exceptional, enabling them to set out the incredibly exact optical corrections of buildings like the Parthenon, although the methods used remain a mystery.

They used brick or stone to build the outer skins of the wall and then filled the cavity with massive amounts of concrete, effectively using the brickwork as permanent shuttering (formwork).

Jade Gate Pass (Yumenguan) Great Wall Fort was built with 20-cm layers of sand and reed, an impressive 9 meters high.

The Middle Ages of Europe span from the 5th to 15th centuries AD, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance, and is divided into Pre-Romanesque and Romanesque periods.

But some Roman techniques, including the use of iron ring-beams, appear to have been used in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, c. 800 AD, where it is believed builders from the Lombard Kingdom in northern Italy contributed to the work.

The Cistercians may have been responsible for reintroducing brick-making to the area[clarification needed] from the Netherlands, through Denmark and Northern Germany to Poland leading to Backsteingotik.

The poor hardening properties of these mortars were a continual problem, and the settlement of the rubble filling of Romanesque and Gothic walls and piers is still a major cause for concern.

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.

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.

[citation needed] Many tools have been made obsolete by modern technology, but the line gauge, plumb-line, the carpenter's square, the spirit level, and the drafting compass are still in regular use.

Large-scale mill construction required fire-proof buildings and cast iron became increasingly used for columns and beams to carry brick vaults for floors.

With the Second Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century, elevators and cranes made high rise buildings and skyscrapers possible, while heavy equipment and power tools decreased the workforce needed.

For economy of scale, whole suburbs, towns and cities, including infrastructure, are often planned and constructed within the same project (called megaproject if the cost exceeds US$1 billion), such as Brasília in Brazil, and the Million Programme in Sweden.

The United States was the first adopter of 3D printing technology in construction where huge machines would "print-out" cement in layers to form the walls of buildings.

[29] The earliest surviving book detailing historical building techniques is the treatise of the Roman author, Vitruvius, but his approach was neither scholarly nor systematic.

In the seventeenth century, Rusconi's illustrations for his version of Leon Battista Alberti's treatise explicitly show Roman wall construction, but most of the interest in antiquity was in understanding its proportions and detail and the architects of the time were content to build using current techniques.

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.