building Stone

When we talk about building sector we should give the stone building a special importance because it is the most popular and oldest cladding material used for external walls  and for some other decorative purposes such as fireplaces frames.

What are the advantages of stone building than other cladding materials?

a stone villa 

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•        Stone is a natural material which resists weather conditions than other cladding materials like plastering etc, so it minimize  maintenance costs.
•          It has different natural colors that do not change from weather conditions and sun light depends on its chemical elements such as white, black, yellow, gray, pink etc.  
•          It has many surface textures depending on the type of its local name like Mulatash texture for rough surface, Matabeh for smoother surface, Sumsum for the smoothest and Tubzah for the roughest suface .

•          It gives the designer engineer a wide variety of design details and shapes to choose from for his building elevations and frames of openings such as arches, stone columns and curneshes etc, because it is available in  different colors and textures.

• It increase the insulation of the walls due to the increased thickness of the wall and the use of the insulation material between the concrete and brick. 

    There is a three wall cases in which we build stone:

1.       Stone  walls,firstly we build the stone pieces not less than 5cm, then backing with concrete behind with a thickness of not less than 15cm, then adding 2cm of insulation layer, then building a brick concrete block from 7-10cm thickness.
2.       Stone cladding for reinforced shear walls, firstly we fix a steel mesh on the reinforced wall with bolts or other like bending the tying rods remains from the formwork works, then we start building the first piece of stone and the last then tying with a thread between them, and building the rest of stone pieces in between and by that we have the same level and straightness for the whole row, then backing with 5cm concrete the stone pieces them self’s are fixed to the steel mesh with galvanized steel wires of about 3mm thickness, the whole thickness of the wall will be the sum of 5cm stone, 15cm concrete, 2cm insulation layer, 7-10cm bricks.

3.       In the third case we cast the reinforced concrete elements with the stone together like casting beams over openings or bottom of cantilevers etc, in this case we drill a steel studs in the stone pieces to strengthen the connection between stone and concrete,  the method of building mentioned in the stone cladding case are the same for the three types of wall cases  relative to the stone pieces rows.

The disadvantage of using stone building:

·         It slows the construction process because building the stone needs special care and accuracy to build it and while building you need always to choose the best stone for your project because it is always a matter of negotiation between the contractor and the supervisor engineer and the stone supplier about the quality of stone imported to the project so this will increase the time period of the project. also we can't cast the concrete backing behind it more than three row level in less than an our. 

·          It is an expensive cladding material relative to other cladding materials so it increases the cost of the project.

·         It is a heavy material so we should take this into consideration while calculating the loads on the building to increase the reinforcement steel, and this will also increase the cost of the project.

After all the mentioned above about stone building and the advantages and disadvantages of stone building, we can say stone building is one of the oldest building material used in the history of architecture and it's advantages are more than it's disadvantages.

This article  written by Taha Mesleh working as an experience civil engineer in the field of building and contracting   , if you want to read similar articles visit:construction-and-architecture.plogspot.com