The advantage of this system was that the soft rivets fully filled the holes into which they were hammered and pulled the frame together as they cooled and contracted. In the US manner the beam-to-stanchion connections are riveted - a practice that involved the installation of small furnaces on site so that hot rivets could be hammered into drilled holes in the frame. It was not until 1904 that Britain got, arguably, its first fully loadbearing steel-frame structure when architect Mewes and Davis with the Swedish-American engineer Sven Bylander constructed the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, London. In 1905 Georges Chedanne designed an office building for Le Parisien Libéré in rue Reamur, Paris, in which the steel frame is expressed with the plastic qualities of rolled steel sections utilised in a striking manner to achieve an organic, Art Nouveau flowing line with a steel frame of minimal section permitting large areas of glazing.
The artistic potential offered by the plastic and structural qualities of steel was, however, realised more dramatically in France. In his Second Leiter Building, Chicago (now Sears Roebuck) of 1889-90, the elevations read clearly as a sheath over a steel frame. Most building codes and regulations had evolved to deal with relatively low-rise masonry construction and were gradually revealed to be inadequate or irrelevant when dealing with steel-frame construction.Īs early as 1889 the pioneering Jenny had decided that the frame should be clearly expressed. This was a question given added complexity by the debate over the behaviour of high steel-framed buildings in a fire or other disasters. The dilemma facing architects pioneering the use of steel frames in high-rise buildings was whether to express or to conceal and deny the presence of the structural frame.
As early as 1883 Bessemer steel had been used by architect William LeBron Jenny to form the frame of the Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago.Īs early as 1889 William LeBron Jenny had decided that the frame should be clearly expressed Steel gave strength, allowed the creation of flexible open-plan interiors and allowed high-rise steel-framed buildings to be constructed at great speed. During the decades when the Forth Bridge was being constructed, steel was increasingly used to form the structural frames of high-rise commercial buildings in New York and Chicago.
0 kommentar(er)
