Essays about buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Click to read Construction Physics, by Brian Potter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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Today in the US, most houses and apartments are built using light framed wood construction. This system consists of load bearing walls made from 2x4s or 2x6s, which support a wood-framed floor or roof - usually either trusses, joists, or engineered i-joists. This system is a variant of a framing style known as balloon…
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II.
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel.