Load-bearing Wall - History

History

Load-bearing walls are one of the earliest forms of construction.

The development of the flying buttress in Gothic architecture allowed structures to maintain an open interior space, transferring more weight to the buttresses instead of to central bearing walls. Notre Dame Cathedral, for example, has a load-bearing wall structure with flying buttresses.

The birth of the skyscraper era, the concurrent rise of steel as a more suitable framing system first designed by William Le Baron Jenney, and the limitations of load-bearing construction in large buildings led to a decline in the use of load-bearing walls in large-scale, commercial structures.

Read more about this topic:  Load-bearing Wall

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)