steel frame construction

gahsux

Hi all,
I live within sight of the new children's hospital in Dublin.
I'm wondering why the designers went with a concrete frame over a steel frame design.
The 'wet trades' have been slingin' buckets of concrete for months now!
To my mind, steel frame, lift-slab or other forms of construction would be cheaper and quicker.


Is it just building regulations that limit such methods in this country?

RandRuns

gahsux wrote: »

Hi all,
I live within sight of the new children's hospital in Dublin.
I'm wondering why the designers went with a concrete frame over a steel frame design.
The 'wet trades' have been slingin' buckets of concrete for months now!
To my mind, steel frame, lift-slab or other forms of construction would be cheaper and quicker.


Is it just building regulations that limit such methods in this country?

Building regs have nothing to do with it, there are plenty of steel frame medical, commercial, and, indeed, domestic buildings in Ireland.

I presume it was an architect/engineer descision. There are a lot of conservative engineers in Ireland who are addicted to poured concrete construction.
The design of the hospital, or what I've seen of it anyway, seems way more complex than it needed to be, with loads of curved walls.

Calahonda52

RandRuns wrote: »

Building regs have nothing to do with it, there are plenty of steel frame medical, commercial, and, indeed, domestic buildings in Ireland.

I presume it was an architect/engineer descision. There are a lot of conservative engineers in Ireland who are addicted to poured concrete construction.
The design of the hospital, or what I've seen of it anyway, seems way more complex than it needed to be, with loads of curved walls.

Its a B*M contract and concrete jobs much easier to create over runs

The chan chan man

BAM didn’t decide to go RC..

Its a designer decision based on performance requirement, loading, ease of construction etc. A steel frame that size would require an incredible amount of intumescent paint. The wall layouts to me look like they lend themselves to RC more than steel, which would require a lot of infill masonry.

Its often six of one, but RC looks right to me here. Its the overall project I have more of an issue with!

RandRuns

The chan chan man wrote: »

BAM didn’t decide to go RC..

Its a designer decision based on performance requirement, loading, ease of construction etc. A steel frame that size would require an incredible amount of intumescent paint. The wall layouts to me look like they lend themselves to RC more than steel, which would require a lot of infill masonry.

Its often six of one, but RC looks right to me here. Its the overall project I have more of an issue with!

I'd agree with you that concrete probably suits the design more than steel, the question I've been asking is why they went with that design..........
A suspicious man might think that the design was deliberately done to make it difficult to go with anything other than concrete.

sydthebeat

curved walls = higher costs

steel + curved walls = ridiculous costs

RandRuns

sydthebeat wrote: »

curved walls = higher costs

steel + curved walls = ridiculous costs

Exactly - the logical design choice would have been to ditch the curved walls, but for whatever reason, they went curved, so concrete was probably the only way to go.

BryanF

The chan chan man wrote: »

designer decision based on performance requirement, loading, ease of construction etc. A steel frame that size would require an incredible amount of intumescent paint. The wall layouts to me look like they lend themselves to RC more than steel, which would require a lot of infill masonry.

Its often six of one, but RC looks right to me here. Its the overall project I have more of an issue with!

Top floor over 20m? 2hr intumescent.. not cheap.

But concrete is slow going..

gahsux

Interesting responses. Thanks. In the case of this hospital and if you had to guess, how much quicker would steel frame construction be over RC?

RandRuns

gahsux wrote: »

Interesting responses. Thanks. In the case of this hospital and if you had to guess, how much quicker would steel frame construction be over RC?

Impossible to give any kind of remotely accurate answer, as the building would have been designed for steel frame if that's what was going to be used, whereas what is being built has been designed for............well, I'm not sure what it's been designed for, but it certainly wasn't designed for ease or speed of build, build economics, functionality, or anything else as far as I can see.

Typically, in my experience, a rapid-build system, whether that be modular, steel frame, ICF, or whatever, could be expected to reduce build time by anything from 10%-60% over traditional build, depending on the project. The maximum reduction is where the build is repetitive (like rows of houses, or a hotel with floors of similar rooms), and where the design was specifically carried out from day 1 with rapid build in mind.

In the case of the NCH, I would guess that something like an offsite modular system, if designed from day 1, could have reduced build time by 20%-30% and reduced costs substantially, though since we don't know what the build time is going to be, much less the costs, this is really in the realm of guesswork, based on previous experience, rather than anything based on that build specifically.

beauf

You would think that a hospital, considering it get constantly gets updated and repurposed and expanded. That some consideration to modularity, would have been a criteria. Similar to RandRuns, I'm completely baffled with everything about this project. The whole thing seems to be distorted around political considerations.

RandRuns

beauf wrote: »

You would think that a hospital, considering it get constantly gets updated and repurposed and expanded. That some consideration to modularity, would have been a criteria. Similar to RandRuns, I'm completely baffled with everything about this project. The whole thing seems to be distorted around political considerations.

Indeed - internationally, modular is now pretty much the defacto build choice for hospitals. Not here though - possibly something to do with the fact that costs tend to be much easier to control with modular perhaps?

BryanF

RandRuns wrote: »

Indeed - internationally, modular is now pretty much the defacto build choice for hospitals. Not here though - possibly something to do with the fact that costs tend to be much easier to control with modular perhaps?

Modular defacto? I know China built a few covid container cities recently, but in my experience (outside Ireland) modular systems only work so far with complex buildings.

RandRuns

BryanF wrote: »

Modular defacto? I know China built a few covid container cities recently, but in my experience (outside Ireland) modular systems only work so far with complex buildings.

Think you're mixing up modular and prefab.

Modular or offsite construction is rapidly becoming the construction type of choice for all buildings, especially in the UK.
Tophat, Urban Splash, Ilke, Boklok (Ikea's building arm), Sekisui etc. are the fastest growing construction companies in the UK, and are all modular construction.
Along with SIPS and ICF, factory modular will be responsible for around 70% of the new buildings in the UK within 5 years.
Laing O'Rourke, McAlpines etc. are now taking a "modular first" approach to all new builds.
The wholesale adoption of BIM and LEED makes modular the way forward.

Outside of high rise, the vast majority of new hotels, hospitals, and care homes in the UK and Europe are now modular.

PMBC

Interesting points here although I opened because I thought it was related to steel frame housing!
I believe some steel frame housing was built in Ireland in recent years but don't know how it worked out - appearance, cost, performance, speed of construction.
Post war in UK I think there was a lot of steel frame housing done but it doesn't seem to have continued or progressed from there. Anyone know more?

Gumbo

PMBC wrote: »

Interesting points here although I opened because I thought it was related to steel frame housing!
I believe some steel frame housing was built in Ireland in recent years but don't know how it worked out - appearance, cost, performance, speed of construction.
Post war in UK I think there was a lot of steel frame housing done but it doesn't seem to have continued or progressed from there. Anyone know more?

Not so much steel frame but we’ve seen a massive move to steel/metal stud work over timber here in Dublin.

Metric Tensor

I've seen a recent development using "steel frame" construction for houses. It was essentially the same as a timber frame house except anywhere you would expect to see a timber stud (in either external walls, or internal partitions) there were folded metal studs instead. The roof trusses were also steel.

In terms of appearance and "feel" you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and a timber frame house without doing a bit of investigation.

Gumbo

Metric Tensor wrote: »

I've seen a recent development using "steel frame" construction for houses. It was essentially the same as a timber frame house except anywhere you would expect to see a timber stud (in either external walls, or internal partitions) there were folded metal studs instead. The roof trusses were also steel.

In terms of appearance and "feel" you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and a timber frame house without doing a bit of investigation.

I was inspecting a development of these houses built by DCC in Finglas, Dublin 11 a few years back. Seems really solid and substantial compared to timber frame.