A four-story street-front house with a shop on the ground floor. These photos are aerial shots taken after completion, and the only place the steel can be seen is the top floor.

Technical highlights

The exposed steel frame on the top floor — On the roof level you can see two dark steel columns, a white main beam and a set of X-bracing spanning over an opening. This is the only part of the structure not enclosed by the outer walls; everything else is hidden behind the exposed-aggregate finish.
A city street corner, with only a sidewalk to work from — The building is pressed against its neighbors on three sides, and the two street-facing sides open straight onto the arcade and the sidewalk. The ground floor is a convenience store that stays open for business. Steelwork on an urban townhouse has no room to stockpile materials, so the order in which members arrive is the order in which they go up.

Project notes

A four-story street-front house in central Changhua City, with a shop on the ground floor.

The photos for this project were taken after completion, so what you see is the result, not the process: the outer walls are washed exposed aggregate with a band of troweled pebble finish in between, and the massing steps back floor by floor. The steel is entirely enclosed.

The only exposed section is on the top floor: two dark steel columns hold up a white main beam, with a set of X-bracing between them, spanning an opening in the roof. When you need to add something on top of a townhouse, this is the approach that works. The columns land on the existing structural lines, the bracing takes the lateral loads, and the whole assembly is made in the shop and lifted up, because there is no room downstairs to put it together slowly.

Townhouse Steel Structure, Changhua City

Technical highlights

Project notes

Need a steel structure of a similar scale?