Why use steel in commercial construction?
There is increasingly strong demand for premium quality office space, especially in compacted centre spaces of large cities. High-profile companies, such as banks, want buildings that offer impeccable architectural and environmental standards for their corporate headquarters.
That’s why steel is so dominant in the multi-storey commercial sector, offering a wide range of tangible benefits in the creation of daring, impressive structures.
Flexible
With steel construction, the aesthetic possibilities are endless. Steel offers the ability to easily provide column-free floor spans, add efficient circulation spaces, integrate building services into the design, and even factor local access conditions into the commercial construction process. It also allows buildings to take on complex architectural forms, from curves to highly glazed façades and atriums.
Efficient
Steel-frames are highly efficient, particularly for inner city projects where there is often a high level of pre-fabrication to shorten construction times, leading to savings in site preliminaries, earlier return on investment and reduced interest charges. It also limits disruption to nearby buildings and cuts the level of onsite storage required.
Adaptable
Steel can adapt to fit the needs of many commercial requirements. For example, it can help to make a building flexible enough to satisfy the needs of tenants who carry out the fitting and take charge of servicing. It’s also able to cater for smaller buildings that are designed for natural ventilation, or that need to feature a high proportion of renewable energy technologies.
Sustainable
Steel offers a number of sustainability benefits when deployed in the commercial sector. It can be used to create energy efficient building envelopes, it has high flexibility in long term use, does not rot or shrink, can be easily extended, adapted and can be completely refurbished, recycled and reused once its initial service life is concluded.