The Royal Liver Building was one of the first buildings in the world to be constructed with concrete reinforced with steel. It was a genius combination of both modern and old construction styles.
The building stands at 98m tall and was known as Britain’s first ‘Skyscraper’, this was also a way to gave it a more superiority feel over the surrounding buildings. It was one of largest reinforced concrete structures in the world; that was until the creation of tower blocks in the 1960’s.
The method of reinforced concrete used was the Hennebique-Mouchel system, this means that all of the elements of the building; arches at the top of the window frames on the top level, floors, walls, beams and columns act as a frame to transfer all of the buildings loads to the foundations. Reinforced concrete is achieved by pouring concrete onto a steel mesh frame to help improve the strength of the material while also reducing the amount of concrete needed for the supported load.
Concrete is a very common building material because it is strong in compression, however it is weak in tension; due to its low tensile strength and brittle nature, therefore concrete qualities can be improved through the use of retardants. These are injected into the concrete to improve it in areas required such as fire protection and water penetration thus improving the lifespan of the building.
One unique trait of concrete it that the material continues to improve its strength for upto 30 days after being poured. Reinforced concrete is one of the best building materials because it can hold just over 4x the weight regular concrete can and can also be formed into more artistic shapes.
Before concrete can be poured for a job it has to be cured. Curing is the process of maintaining a suitable amount of moisture content in the concrete as it hardens. If the moisture content is too high then the concrete will begin to crack, and if it is too low then it won’t be able to achieve its full strength potentiality.
Therefore to keep the concrete at the right moisture level workers have to dampen the concrete in hot temperatures with a sprinkler system, or alternatively they can place a large plastic sheet over the top of the concrete so that if any moisture starts to evaporate then it will hit the sheet and fall back into the concrete. The curing process takes between 7 – 14 days.
The exterior of the Royal Liver Building is made up of Clad Granite, this was mainly used as a design feature for the outside to hide the look of the reinforced concrete. However due to the immense hardness of clad granite one architectural feature was dampened by the use of this material, the granite is almost impossible to create intricate details so towards the top of the building the design goes into large undetailed swirls rather than a more appealing small, tightly detailed design. However this cannot be seen so well from ground level, so it isn’t a massive issue.
The Royal Liver Building was constructed as a rate of 1 floor every 19 days, and upon completion was awarded a grade 1 listing.
Royal Liver Building, Liverpool 