Quote:
Originally Posted by PhillyRising
My apartment building was built in 2014 and it's concrete construction. It received a silver LEED certification. It is so quiet in here. I don't hear hardly any noise. The people above have to do something really really really loud for us to hear anything. You can hear people in the middle of the hallway units if you pass by their doors..but not from our apartment.
They built a third building last year to complete our complex. That building was wood with the pieces shipped put together and a large crane lifted them into place. I am told they can hear a decent amount of noise from inside those units.
So no...I am going to try to hold out in my apartment as long as I can afford it. I love my unit.
Also, we know for a fact the fire suppression worked. A unit on the second floor had a kitchen fire on Mother's Day 2021. The oven caught fire and set the cabinets on fire too. The main smoke detector in our units that set off the sprinklers kicked in and spewed the water in the apartment. However, it sent a lot of that water into the hallway and then it started finding it's way into the unit below it which is right next door to us. That apartment basically got rained on and some of the water found a path to our second bathroom near our front door. We just had a tiny bit of water damage. The family company that developed the whole neighborhood and owns the apartments had Balfor onsite within an hour or two and they started remediation immediately. They used purple wallboard which supposedly doesn't get as moldy so they had fans and dehumidifiers in the hallways on two floors, the two apartments most affected and in our bathroom for over a week. So the concrete construction makes me feel a lot better than living in what I call match stick buildings. Also, our local township does require all housing units to have sprinklers in them since the 1980's. I think every new apartment complex in the US should have them...I don't think most of them do.
|
In terms of sound dampening, concrete does an amazing job. It is very thick & heavy, so it blocks many low-frequency sounds. With that said, sound dampening design can be implemented to basically any design fairly easily (not just concrete or masonry buildings) as long as the developer is willing to implement it.
Concrete also has many other advantages over steel or wood. Concrete floors are also stiffer than steel or wood joist floors, so they aren't as bouncy or deflective. And concrete is naturally fireproof.
But it isn't perfect by any means.
The reason that mass timber is in vogue nowadays is due to its low embodied carbon compared with either concrete or steel. Both cement and steel production output tons of CO2.
Another issue is that concrete's tensile strength is based entirely on properly engineered & placed steel rebar or pre-stressed cables. These tensile elements are fine as long as they don't oxidize when exposed to moisture, which almost never happens except maybe in warm desert climates. Concrete is porous and not waterproof, so extensive moisture exposure will eventually make its way to the tensile elements. If not properly maintained, concrete can fail spectacularly - see the Surfside, FL condo collapse.
Prev
Linear Mode
