Refurbishing with steel - Strengthening and consolidation with steel

Rehabilitation represents a significant part of the construction business. It involves making major modifications to the interior, underneath, above or against an existing building. .

From facade remodeling to in-depth restructuring of floors and structures, steel is often omnipresent in all these operations.

Trends in building conversion and changes of use have accelerated in recent years, and it is no longer uncommon for a building to be rehabilitated twice within a period of around fifteen years to meet new needs. With the ageing of the 1950-1980 building stock, construction activities are increasingly involved in the transformation of buildings.

Steel can be used for a wide range of applications. It plays a key role not only in safety, but also in repair, reinforcement and the implementation of dry solutions... This material is also particularly effective in transitional stages.

A wide range of steel techniques are available to reinforce structures built in stone, cast iron, iron, wood, masonry or concrete. Steel construction offers the advantages of prefabrication, precision, speed, ease of assembly and immediate load-bearing capacity, with excellent strength-to-weight and strength-to-space ratios.

If they are to be sustainable, future building refurbishments should be part of the conceptual issues, and give priority to adaptable structural modes. A large proportion of recent buildings are not designed to accommodate foreseeable changes in ventilation, insulation or networks, or simply to allow partitioning to be modified at will...

The buildings to be rehabilitated are of a current or historic nature; steel is an excellent material for most of these jobs because it can be discreet and because it minimizes the impact of repairs.

While providing a general methodology for reinforcing or consolidating existing buildings, this article draws on numerous examples to illustrate some of the solutions that can be used.