Durability and follow-up Costs of cost-efficient Multi-family Houses

Authors : Rainer Oswald, Matthias Zöller, Géraldine Liebert, Silke Sous

According to long-term observations, minimising construction costs in multi-story residential construction often leads to significant follow-up costs in practice, since buildings often prove to be damage-prone or unsuitable for everyday use. Funded by a research grant from the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, The Aachen Institute for Construction Damage Research and Applied Building Physics researched to which extent cost-efficient construction can lead to building damage and in which construction components limitations are acceptable, if technical durability is guaranteed. In order to provide actors in planning and construction with well-founded recommendations for construction types with long-term usability, a number of existing multi-family houses were researched according to these aspects.