Specifiers, contractors and building owners face an increasingly heavy burden of responsibility to choose and use materials that in themselves have to meet a rising number of criteria ranging from aesthetics and functionality through health and safety to life cycle costs and sustainability.
Various trends have driven these requirements, not least that of litigation, which has seen architects and designers shoulder more of the burden of ensuring buildings are safe and secure for their occupants and caretakers.
This is particularly relevant to the design and construction of multi-storey buildings where the potential to impact on more people per square metre of footprint is much greater than that of single-storey buildings.
While the downturn in the economy is affecting the number of domestic and commercial buildings being built, the impact is less on the market for multi-storey buildings such as apartments due to the Government’s continuing focus on the development of infill or brownfield sites.
One dry construction material that meets a host of performance criteria and is particularly suitable for buildings with multiple floors such as apartments, where the potential for an incident such as a water leak to impact on other occupants is huge, is fibre cement flooring.
In America, whole buildings are lined with fibre cement boards that reinforce the structure due to their high dimensional stability. They are simply painted or papered over, in the case of walls or ceilings, and tiled or carpeted over in the case of floors.
In the UK, such panels are increasingly used to floor rooms that are expected to be subjected to damp or wetness such as bathrooms and kitchens. The 12mm thickness matches that of plasterboard that is used everywhere that a waterproof panel is not required. But why bother switching between the two when fibre cement has many more benefits?
