steel and steel and concrete buildings
Steel and steel and concrete buildings are very safe, as long as they are designed by engineers who have worked on such buildings. A careless design loses much of this advantage.
Steel has high strength, it is elastic and ductile, and its quality is the same throughout its mass. That is why, for more than a century, taller buildings have been built in steel, even in earthquake zones, as well as buildings with long spans and no intermediate columns.
Greece is a seismic country, and every building is designed to the Greek and European seismic codes. With a steel structure, the way the building is designed counts even more.
We are often asked whether steel buildings can withstand earthquakes. A first answer comes from skyscrapers in earthquake-prone countries such as Japan, many of which have steel or composite frames. In an earthquake the building sways strongly. Because steel is elastic and the frame is light, the forces on the building are smaller, and the frame deforms without breaking.
Reinforced concrete buildings, the usual way of building in Greece, are much heavier, and concrete is a brittle material. In very large earthquakes this matters, even when a building has, as people say, plenty of rebar.
A steel building does not attract lightning more than a concrete building of the same height. If it is struck, the frame, connected to the foundation grounding, works as a Faraday cage, meaning the current passes through the frame into the ground and not through the interior. A lightning rod is added where the lightning protection study calls for it, usually on large industrial buildings.
Because they are light, steel buildings are more sensitive to wind. That is why wind is studied carefully, as the codes require, especially the connections of the roof and the wall cladding. The failures we know of in Greece were minor, mostly in the cladding of industrial buildings, and were caused by poor workmanship.
Snow is the load that needs the most attention in light portal frame buildings, not in steel and concrete buildings with slabs or tiled roofs. In the heavy snowfall of 2001 in Attica, a number of portal frame buildings collapsed, some of them new. That is why we take snow loads as the codes specify for the area and altitude of each project, with no discounts.
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