Today, for the second time this year, I noticed a new construction site where a small office building was to be built. Curiously, all that stood on the empty lot so far, were several narrow gray towers which appeared–based on size and door openings–to be the future building’s stairwells.
It strikes me as very peculiar looking. I think of buildings as generally being constructed footers first, foundation blocks second, then the load-bearing walls would be built from the bottom up with stairwells being a part of that general bottom-up process.
Is it a new protocol, to ship in the gray-block stair enclosures on a truck, erect them first, then surround them with the rest of the building?
All I can think of is that maybe stairwells nowadays are constructed with a particular fire resistant standard that the rest of the building is exempted from.
Or maybe buildings were always built like this, but I don’t think so.