The Cost of Building Structure

1. Introduction

The art of architectural design was characterized as one of dealing comprehensively with a complex set of physical and nonphysical design determinants. Structural considerations were cast as important physical determinants that should be dealt with in a hierarchical fashion if they are to have a significant impact on spatial organization and environmental control design thinking.

The economical aspect of building represents a nonphysical structural consideration that, in final analysis, must also be considered important. Cost considerations are in certain ways a constraint to creative design. But this need not be so. If something is known of the relationship between structural and constructive design options and their cost of implementation, it is reasonable to believe that creativity can be enhanced. This has been confirmed by the authors’ observation that most enhanced. This has been confirmed by the authors’ observation that most creative design innovations succeed under competitive bidding and not because of unusual owner affluence as the few publicized cases of extravagance might lead one to believe. One could even say that a designer who is truly creative will produce architectural excellence within the constraints of economy. Especially today, we find that there is a need to recognize that elegance and economy can become synonymous concepts.

Therefore, in this chapter we will set forth a brief explanation of the parameters of

cost analysis and the means by which designers may evaluate the overall economic implications of their structural and architectural design thinking.

The cost of structure alone can be measured relative to the total cost of building

construction. Or, since the total construction cost is but a part of a total project cost, one could include additional consideration for land(10～20percent),finance and interest(100～200 percent),taxes and maintenance costs (on the order of20 percent).But a discussion of these so-called architectural costs is beyond the scope of this book, and we will focus on the cost of construction only.

On the average, purely structural costs account for about 25 percent of total

construction costs, This is so because it has been traditional to discriminate between