Steel in vogue for highrise buildings

There is no doubt looking at the way the population density particularly in metro cities, horizontal construction has been put on restriction, and comfortably spread out real estate is hard to find. Lack of space due to exponential rise in population in urban areas has not only given way to taller buildings with more floors, but also stresses on the fact that the construction has to be faster. The use of steel in highrise buildings comes into vogue. Highrise buildings or multi-storey buildings, built completely in steel or primarily with steel are fairly limited in India, and may even be viewed as some "new concept in the construction industry" but, as per history the first steel frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building (originally 10 storeys with a height of 42 m or 138 ft) in Chicago, Illinois in 1885. Even the Empire State building in New York, and many popular landmarks of the world were built decades ago using steel construction.


Building a highrise or any multi-level building demands the use of light-weight yet strong materials. Steel, by virtue of its high strength to weight ratio enables large spans and light weight construction. Steel structures can have a variety of structural forms like braced frames and moment resistant frames suitable to meet the specific requirements of higher buildings. Taller buildings also face higher wind loads, and hence steel being flexible, allows the building to move and deflect with the wind forces, rather than making it rigid like concrete.

Building tall with steel also allows more floors per total height of the building. This is due to the fact that the building structure in steel is lighter and more efficient, and has beams that are not required to be as deep as those of concrete to support the floors. The ability to have lighter sections, allowing the same load bearing capacity per floor, allows space for almost 1.5 extra floors in the same over-all external height of the building.

Interarch Multi storey steel buildings have un-matched benefits like: