Masonry - Introduction

Masonry is considered the most widespread construction technique. Since it essentially uses only small, mortar-filled elements, it does not require any major handling equipment on the building site. It can therefore be used by all companies, and in particular by the artisan mason, who is responsible for most small-scale construction in remote areas.

In France, masonry combined with reinforced concrete for floors is the most widely used technique for building walls in residential buildings, but also increasingly for tertiary buildings and industrial, commercial and agricultural buildings.

For a time, masonry was supplanted by the use of reinforced concrete in the post-war years, when large-scale housing projects were built at a rapid pace. Today, masonry is once again used to a significant extent for load-bearing walls in small multi-family buildings. In the case of single-family homes, on the other hand, given the wall thicknesses required to satisfy requirements other than mere load-bearing capacity, walls can only be considered weakly load-bearing, given the low stresses they have to withstand.

Let's not forget that a wall, especially an exterior wall, has to meet many different requirements, depending on the role it plays in the construction:

• mechanical resistance to the various stresses to which it is subjected in its plane, mainly vertically, but also horizontally (building bracing) and perpendicularly to its plane (wind action, earth pressure, impact);

• resistance to rain penetration ;

• contributes to the thermal and acoustic insulation of the premises it delimits.