Advantages and Disadvantages of On-site and Off-site Construction

The needs and restrictions at your construction project may make you choose between one of the two main methods of construction: on-site and off-site. Both are widely used in today’s construction industry, depending upon the requirements at the site and according to design.

What is On-Site Construction?
On-site construction is the more traditional method. Here, structures are assembled from raw materials at the site itself, hence the name. The method has to be carried out sequentially and materials needs to be stored and used at the site.

What is Off-Site Construction?
With modern technologies, off-site method of construction has become possible. In this, parts or blocks of the structure are constructed in a designated factory or yard in standardized process. Then, these pre-built blocks are carried to the project site where they are assembled together to form the structure.

Both of the above methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, which make them suitable to different scenarios. Let’s discuss them below.

On-Site Construction

Advantages:

1. Customized Design: Since there is no restriction on what shape of objects are available of construction, there are limitless customization options in this manner. In fact most non-standard designs have to rely upon the on-site method just for this.
2. Alteration: After the construction you can easily modify the structure with this method. It doesn’t require you to depend upon third-party construction factories to add or change a room in your house that has been constructed in the traditional method.
3. Space-friendly: Transporting precast blocks in tight urban areas can get simply impossible. More often, it’s prohibitively expensive. In these scenarios you have no choice but to construct everything on-site.

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Published By

Rajib Dey

www.constructioncost.co

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Thumb Rules to Follow While Designing Columns

Columns are essential support structures that are almost inevitably used in any construction projects. From ancient times, columns have been an indispensable part of erecting buildings, them being one of the most important load-bearing members. Obviously, one needs to be careful while designing such important structures.

As per the construction sciences and technologies, there are many rules applicable to specific columnar structures. However, there are some few basic rules of column designing that all engineers can keep in mind while designing most types of columns and similar vertical supports.

Today, we will discuss these important thumb rules of column design in this article. Needless to say, columns need to be designed keeping in mind the total amount of forces acting on the structure. But also, keeping these basic guidelines in mind can prevent architects and engineers from making silly mistakes.

Rule 1: Essentially, the size of the columns would depend upon the total amount of forces acting on the column. In short you can consider this as the total load on a column. This will make or break the column, so you need to be ensuring that your columns design can withhold this entire load and anything else that may come later.

That is, the total load on a column may be not only the weight of the structure that it bears, but also the movable materials that structure will bear. For example, while designing a multi-storied godown, you will need to care about not only the weight of the floor and the walls and the roof, but more also, the weight of the goods that are going to be stored on that floor. This can get pretty great in case of solid materials.

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Published By
Rajib Dey
www.constructioncost.co
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