No_2_August_1963 — Page 119

SCALE OF BUILDING RESEARCH IN BRITAIN

made at 500 points on a grid cover- ing central London. This will pro- vide invaluable data. both from point of view of town planning and the design of buildings in such a way as to reduce the nuisance of noise.

OPERATION AND COSTS

econo-

Research is not only concerned with the functional and technical aspects of building but also with building organisation and mics; with such problems as pro- gramming, the design of incentive schemes. building methods. the de- sign of formwork. the economic aspects of concrete work, and so on.

An example of this type of work is provided by a recent study of the site construction of multi-storey flats. This involved the collection of production data for nearly 30 dif- ferent sites and the work has emphasised a number of aspects both in site production and design which can lead to economy.

It deals with such questions as the design of reinforcement and form- work; the advantages of the elimina- tion of beams by plate floors or, al ternatively, by precasting them rather than casting them "in situ"; the possibilities of eliminating plas-

tering and floor screeding and, on an entirely different question, the need to reduce the amount of routine and clerical work which site agents and general foremen are currently required to do.

Work on operational problems, of course. tends to range very widely and. at present, a good deal of at- tention is being given to the com- munications between designers and builders, whether they are part of the same set-up or not.

One aspect of this has been the study of the use of models in design. This involves not merely making models from de- signs which have been developed as drawings, but the actual develop ment of the design by the manipula- tion of models.

The technique has been widely adopted in the chemical engineering industry in recent years and models. of considerable complexity have been evolved and are used as a basis for tendering. It is claimed that they have halved design costs. The Building Research Station has been concerned, so far, with the applica- tion of these techniques. particularly in the design of engineering ser- vices; a simple technique for the study of site layout has also been de- veloped.

SCALE OF RESEARCH

Enough will have been said to show the relevance of building re- search to the problems of the indus- try and the cases quoted show that value is certainly being obtained for the money spent. It is often claimed that the returns from well-conducted research are of the order of a hun- dred times of the cost of the search itself.

re-

It is difficult to be precise about the cost of research carried out throughout the industry as a whole. The expenditure by the Building Research Station is equivalent to about 0.027 per cent of the gross output of the industry and, with the expenditure in the Research Associa- tions and the industry itself, the total is probably no more than 0.06 per cent. or less than on-sixth of a penny in the £ of gross output.

Compared with many industries, this is very small indeed and as building faces the transition from a craft basis to an industrialised

in- dustry, there must inevitably be a growing demand throughout the industry for more and more effort on research and development.

(Reproduced by permission from “Build", the house magazine of Wates Ltd., London.)

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