Often wonder how places lose so many lives and buildings in relatively small earthquakes, then I see something like this and it all makes sense.
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It won’t, these things look funky as all hell while under construction, but are a steel frame with the concrete walls just being the wall material. Usually they’re covered later with any other whatever. Plaster, cement, decorative brick. The inside is either wall panels, plaster, dry wall or just polished concrete. The brick walls are internally tied down and clasped to the steel frame with steel wire and steel clamps. I’ve lived around buildings like these all my life, no they don’t crumble easily. It’s just that cement and steel are cheaper than wood around these parts. If anything, the worse part of the picture is the shoddy mason work, specially on the corners of the upper floor.
Then that’s an odd place to put a doorway wouldn’t a steel column be in the way? And if the walls are embedded in the frame wouldn’t we see steel columns on the corners?
Yes, it’s a weird place for a door-frame but you can see the horizontal steel beams in the inter-floor space (I don’t know what that’s called in English) and the ceiling beams are obviously not floating on top of the brick, they are supported by vertical beams somewhere. The concrete brick is just a covering, none of those walls are structural. Though there’s a way of building with structural brick and steel beam, but this is not it. The thing with steel beam is that it’s deceptively stiff. You might think that it’s too thin to be structurally sound, but structural steel beams can carry a lot of weight and resist deformation rather well. This is obviously not a professional construction, it’s just not up to rich developed world standards, but like I said, that doesn’t mean the building will fall.
What’s more interesting is how the hollow blocks are lined up. Shouldn’t they be placed in such a way that a block sits in the middle of the two blocks below it? I think it’s what the post is originally pointing at, not the necessarily the one layer thick wall (with the steal beams of course).
Yup, like I said, shoddy mason work. Not made by professionals. Perhaps not secure in an earthquake or anything. But, it’s a covering, that’s why they can get away with such incompetence. It still won’t fall easily. I know people who live in worse self-made homes constructed 30 years ago, and those houses are still standing.
EDIT: and forgot to mention that straight laying is a legitimate bricklaying pattern, it’s usually for decorative reasons, so that’s not what they were going for here. Apparently in English it’s called stack bond.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Minecraft in real life.
Hmm, looks suspiciously like South Africa
