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The History and Materials of Masonry Construction

• Masonry is the art of building with stone, bricks, concrete blocks or similar materials and has been practiced for over 6,000 years.
• The Egyptians used cut stones on a wide scale construction of temples and monuments, with blocks weighing several tons shaped and fitted together maintaining joints not to exceed 0.25 mm or 1/100 of an inch.
• Dry stone masonry, or the mortar-less construction, was also adopted in Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, China, and other places.
• The Romans introduced the use of mortar and perfected the technique of using masonry facing on a core of concrete and rubbles.
• Stone is good for making walls and pillars but poor as a beam and roof structure. Therefore, early large buildings were roofed with timber or timber in combination with other materials.
• Masonry building materials include stone, which can be classified as ashlar or rubble, and concrete blocks, which can be solid or hollow.
• Ashlar consists of carefully worked and joined stone blocks laid in parallel horizontal courses, with plain or tooled finished faces, and can be arranged in alternate thin and thick courses or be made from stones of various sizes to create broken or random ashlar.
• Rubble stone generally consists of irregular stones with a good surface for the wall, with gaps between stones filled with small or broken stone and cement mortar.
• Solid concrete blocks are heavy in weight and manufactured from dense aggregate, making them strong and providing good stability to structures. They are preferable for large work of masonry like for load-bearing walls and are available in larger sizes than bricks.
• Concrete hollow blocks consist of Portland cement and suitable aggregates combined with water. They can be load-bearing or non-load-bearing and have cells of different shapes and sizes.
• Load-bearing hollow blocks are used to carry loads aside from their own weight and have a thickness ranging from 6” to 8” (0.15m to 0.20m).
• Non-load-bearing hollow blocks are intended for walls, partitions, fences, or dividers carrying their weight only and are usually 4” (0.10m) thick.