Walls


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What is a wall? ** A wall is an upright structure of masonry, wood, plaster, or other building material serving to enclose, divide, or protect an area, especially a vertical construction forming an inner partition or exterior siding of a building. Its principal functions are to delineate a building, support its superstructure and divide the spaces of a building to create rooms. Nowadays we can find many types of walls, but the most important are the followings:

The building walls are conforming by the external and internal walls. They have one main purpose: to support roofs and ceilings. Such walls most often have three or more separate components. In today's construction, a building's wall will usually have the structural elements, insulation, and finish elements, or surface such as drywall.
 * Building walls **

Boundary walls ** When we have a parcel so close to another it is needed a line that divides them, this line is known as a boundary, a division that can be natural in cases like a river that divide two spaces, or man-made like a barrier that divide two proprieties. This last one is called a boundary wall. One recommendation that we need to consider at the time to construct a boundary wall in our house next to the car way is to not exceed the one meter, because it will obstruct the visibility to entry or exit from your house and your neighbors’ access.
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A separation wall is that used to separate one population from another, a famous example could be the Berlin Wall which divided East and West Berlin.
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A retaining wall is a special type of wall used to provide a barrier to the movement of earth or water. Its principal characteristic is that the surface or water on one side is higher than on the other. They can be used in small or big scales, for example: in a small scale, we can use it to make sections in a garden like some steps of ground where usually we can try different decorations, or in a big scale to prevent landslides, just like we find at the sides of some highways. Other example could be the famous dike that separate land from water, such as the flood-gate of Guri.
 * [[image:Imagen17.jpg width="142" height="158" align="left"]]Retaining Walls **

Shared walls ** The shared walls are those ones that belong to two properties and separate them. This wall can’t be altered by one of the proper without the agreement of the other because it will affect him too.

Portable Walls ** The portable walls are those frequently used in schools, churches, hotels and offices to divide big spaces into smaller partitions. Its principal characteristic is that they have a medium size such as cubicle walls and don’t connect the floor with the ceiling. An excellent example could be the cubicle walls of the architectures pavilion.

Curtain walls ** A curtain walls is an outer covering of a building. This wall is not structural, reason of why it doesn’t carry any dead load weight. It can be made using lightweight materials reducing the construction coasts. Some advantages of this type of wall are: The aluminium frame is typically infilled with glass, which provides an architecturally pleasing building. This type of wall allows the entry of daylight and also protects the building from weather changes. They represent a spatial barrier but not a visual one, allowing us to feel in contact with the outer space.

// It is important for us as architects and urban planners to have knowledge about walls, in order to improve the communication between us and the relation with the costumers. //

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