Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In architecture, an area (areaway in North America) is an excavated, subterranean space around the walls of a building, designed to admit light into a basement. Also called a lightwell , it often provides access to the house and a store-room/service cupboard for tradesmen , such as a coal store vault under the pavement.
Basement walls may need to have the surrounding earth backfilled around them to return the soil to grade. A water stop, some gravel and a french drain may need to be used to prevent water from entering the basement at the bottom of the wall. Walls below grade may need to be sealed with an impervious coating (such as tar) to
Barrier walls are designed to allow water to be absorbed but not penetrate the wall, and include concrete and some masonry walls. Drainage walls allow water that leaks into the wall to drain out such as cavity walls. Drainage walls may also be ventilated to aid drying such as rainscreen and pressure equalization wall systems. Sealed-surface ...
A basement wall is thus one kind of retaining wall; however, the term usually refers to a cantilever retaining wall, which is a freestanding structure without lateral support at its top. [2] These are cantilevered from a footing and rise above the grade on one side to retain a higher level grade on the opposite side.
An example of lateral earth pressure overturning a retaining wall. The lateral earth pressure is the pressure that soil exerts in the horizontal direction. It is important because it affects the consolidation behavior and strength of the soil and because it is considered in the design of geotechnical engineering structures such as retaining walls, basements, tunnels, deep foundations and ...
Some zoning regulations exclude mechanical floors from a building's maximum area calculation, permitting a significant increase in building sizes; this is the case in New York City. [1] Sometimes buildings are designed with a mechanical floor located on the thirteenth floor , to avoid problems in renting the space due to superstitions about the ...
A 2005 U.S. Department of Energy study of homes in the southeastern United States found that closed crawl spaces with sealed foundation wall vents, sealed polyethylene film liners and various insulation and drying strategies had significantly reduced space conditioning energy use compared to traditional wall-vented crawl spaces with perimeter ...
A shear wall, in its simplest definition, is a wall where the entire material of the wall is employed in the resistance of both horizontal and vertical loads. A typical example is a brick or cinderblock wall. Since the wall material is used to hold the weight, as the wall expands in size, it must hold considerably more weight.