Types of Building Materials Properties and Uses in Construction

TYPES OF BUILDING MATERIALS
PROPERTIES AND USES IN

CONSTRUCTION
By May Myat Mon Kyaw

Building Material
• Building material is any material used for construction purpose such as materials
for house building.
• Wood, cement, aggregates, metals, bricks, concrete, clay are the most common
type of building material used in construction.
• The choice of these are based on their cost effectiveness for building projects.
• Many naturally occurring substances, such as clay, sand, wood and rocks, even
twigs and leaves have been used to construct buildings.
• Apart from naturally occurring materials, many man-made products are in use,
some more and some less synthetic.
Building Material
• The manufacture of building materials is
an established industry in many countries
and the use of these materials is typically
segmented into specific specialty trades,
such as carpentry, plumbing, roofing and
insulation work.
• This reference deals with habitats and
structures including homes.
Natural Construction Materials
• Construction materials can be generally
categorized into two sources, natural
and synthetic.
• Natural materials are those that are
unprocessed or minimally processed by
industry, such as lumber or glass.
• Synthetic materials are made in
industrial settings after much human
manipulations, such as plastics and
petroleum based paints.
• Both have their uses.
Natural Construction Materials
• Mud, stone, and fibrous plants are the most basic materials, aside from tents
made of flexible materials such as cloth or skins.
• People all over the world have used these three materials together to create
homes to suit their local weather conditions.
• In general stone and/or brush are used as basic structural components in these
buildings, while mud is used to fill in the space between, acting as a type of
concrete and insulation.
• A basic example is wattle and daub mostly used as permanent housing in tropical
countries or as summer structures by ancient northern peoples.
Fabric
• The tent used to be the home of choice among nomadic groups the world over.
• Two well known types include the conical tepee and the circular yurt.
• It has been revived as a major construction technique with the development of
tensile architecture and synthetic fabrics.
• Modern buildings can be made of flexible material such as fabric membranes, and
supported by a system of steel cables or internal (air pressure.)
Mud and Clay
• The amount of each material used leads to different styles of buildings.
• The deciding factor is usually connected with the quality of the soil being used.
• Larger amounts of clay usually mean using the cob/adobe style, while low clay soil
is usually associated with sod building.
• The other main ingredients include more or less sand/gravel and straw/grasses.
• Rammed earth is both an old and newer take on creating walls, once made by
compacting clay soils between planks by hand, now forms and mechanical
pneumatic compressors are used.
Mud and Clay
• Soil and especially clay is good thermal mass; it is very good at keeping
temperatures at a constant level.
• Homes built with earth tend to be naturally cool in the summer heat and warm in
cold weather.
• Clay holds heat or cold, releasing it over a period of time like stone.
• Earthen walls change temperature slowly, so artificially raising or lowering the
temperature can use more resources than in say a wood built house, but the
heat/coolness stays longer.
Rock
• Rock structures have existed for as long as history can recall.
• It is the longest lasting building material available, and is usually readily available.
• There are many types of rock through out the world all with differing attributes
that make them better or worse for particular uses.
• Rock is a very dense material so it gives a lot of protection too, its main draw-back
as a material is its weight and awkwardness.
• Its energy density is also considered a big draw-back, as stone is hard to keep
warm without using large amounts of heating resources.
Rock
• Dry-stone walls have been built for as long as humans have put one stone on top
of another.
• Eventually different forms of mortar were used to hold the stones together,
cement being the most commonplace now.
• The granite-strewn uplands of Dartmoor National Park, United Kingdom, for
example, provided ample resources for early settlers.
• Circular huts were constructed from loose granite rocks throughout the Neolithic
and early Bronze Age, and the remains of an estimated 5,000 can still be seen
today.
Rock
• Granite continued to be used throughout the Medieval period (see Dartmoor
longhouse) and into modern times.
• Slate is another stone type, commonly used as roofing material in the United
Kingdom and other parts of the world where it is found.
• Mostly stone buildings can be seen in most major cities, some civilizations built
entirely with stone such as the Pyramids in Egypt, the Aztec pyramids and the
remains of the Inca civilization.
Ice
• Ice was used by the Inuit for igloos,
but has also been used for ice hotels
as a tourist attraction in northern
areas that might not otherwise see
many winter tourists.
Wood
• Wood is a product of trees, and sometimes other fibrous plants, used for
construction purposes when cut or pressed into lumber and timber, such as boards,
planks and similar materials.
• It is a generic building material and is used in building just about any type of
structure in most climates.
• Wood can be very flexible under loads, keeping strength while bending, and is
incredibly strong when compressed vertically.
• There are many differing qualities to the different types of wood, even among same
tree species.
• This means specific species are better for various uses than others. And growing
conditions are important for deciding quality.
Wood
• Historically, wood for building large structures was used in its unprocessed form as logs.
• The trees were just cut to the needed length, sometimes stripped of bark, and then
notched or lashed into place.
• In earlier times, and in some parts of the world, many country homes or communities
had a personal wood-lot from which the family or community would grow and harvest
trees to build with.
• These lots would be tended to like a garden.
• With the invention of mechanizing saws came the mass production of dimensional
lumber.
• This made buildings quicker to put up and more uniform. Thus the modern western style
home was made.
Brick and Block
• A brick is a block made of kiln-fired material, usually clay or shale, but also may be
of lower quality mud, etc.
• Clay bricks are formed in a moulding (the soft mud method), or in commercial
manufacture more frequently by extruding clay through a die and then wire-
cutting them to the proper size (the stiff mud process).
• Bricks were widely used as a construction material in the 1700, 1800 and 1900s.
• This was probably due to the fact that it was much more flame retardant than
wood in the ever crowding cities, and fairly cheap to produce.

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TYPES OF BUILDING MATERIALS

PROPERTIES AND USES IN

By May Myat Mon Kyaw

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