INT322 - Interior Building Systems Week 4

 this week's reading I learned about how structural systems work and the three different types of structural systems. The book mentions the following, bearing walls, stud walls, and columns or beams. load bering walls are a type of system that are found in residential home, how they work is fairly simple, the walls in the exterior help carry the load from roofs and the upper floor down to the foundations, the exterior walls are made of materials like concrete, steel, and masonry. 

Load Bearing in Construction: Basics & Key Concepts 2026

stud walls, are walls frameworks that include both horizontal and vertical cuts of material that make up a wall like the picture below. Stud walls are found in both commercial buildings and residential homes, they help divide room within interior spaces and also help distribute the load of the building. Apart from helping distribute weight and divide room with the building, they are also really helpful to house any electrical, plumbing, or HVAC lines because of the space it has within.

Basic House Framing Terms You Need to Know - Zeeland Lumber

columns and beams, are like partners in helping each other bring the weight of a building downtown to the foundation and to the ground, beams are the horizontal cuts that run across in open spaces like the picture below, they help connect columns. the columns are the vertical cuts that connect to the foundation like in the picture below. together they work together to carry live loads and dead load within a building.

Blog | The Key Differences Between Beams and Columns

one interesting structural system that I found really interesting was how outrigger systems work, after doing some research online I found that it connects a building rigid core central to columns using trusses and horizontal beams, by doing this it helps reduce sway and makes the building even more stiff. this design is used for tall buildings and one of the benefits it has is it helps reduce material by 20% to 25%.

overall I think it's really important for interior designers to really understand how these system work, although they don't specialize in this, it's important to consider how they work because columns, beams, spaces, and walls can have an impact in their design.


Comments

  1. Professor VanderNoordaaSeptember 20, 2026 at 9:27 AM

    Marco- excellent Blog post! I enjoyed your diagrams and reading your thoughts on how "outrigger systems" work. 50/50 points

    ReplyDelete

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