ABSTRACT
Load-bearing wall structures transmit the loads of the roof and all floors through the walls into the foundations and the ground. The tallest solid load-bearing wall building ever built is the Monadnock building in Chicago (1893), which reached 17 storeys, approximately 66m high. The disadvantages of this form of construction include the thickness of the walls at the ground floor (about 2m thick), which takes up a large amount of the building footprint, and the internal floor areas of upper floors vary with the reducing thickness of the external walls with height. The building is also very heavy, needing very substantial foundations. All of these factors make high-rise load-bearing wall construction uneconomical.
