ABSTRACT
Basic raw materials for building since the most remote times were structural materials – timber, stone, brick, – and the mortars, the natural components of which are all sorts of calciferous rocks and sand. From the nineteenth century on, the use of iron, steel and concrete has become widespread. Other materials used for building: straw, reed, roof and decorative tiles, glass, slate tiles, non-ferrous metals, and recently plastics, are supplementary to these, used either for roofs or interior fittings and decorations, or else they are substitute materials, supplanting natural ones that have become scarce. Among basic building materials timber has been the prime and most natural one, appearing in almost all geographical zones inhabited by man, the most easily accessible and easiest to work with. In some European countries that trade developed in the eleventh century, reaching an important level in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in densely inhabited regions, urbanized and with navigable rivers.
