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Contractors School Online - Building contractor terms Category: Architecture and Buildings > Building contractor information Date & country: 24/09/2013, USA Words: 431

Wythe
The inner or outer part of a cavity wall and each continuous vertical section of a wall, one masonry unit in thickness.

Wire Saw
Method of cutting stone by passing a twisted, multistrand wire over the stone and immersing the wire in a slurry of abrasive material.

Workability
The ability of mortar or grout to be easily placed and spread.

Wind (Wined)
A twisting warp from cutting slabs in the gang saws.

Weathering
Natural alteration by either chemical or mechanical processes due to the action of constituents of the atmosphere, surface waters, soil and other ground waters, or to temperature changes; the inclined top surface of a stone such as a coping, cornice, or window sill.

Web
The portion of a hollow concrete masonry unit connecting the face shells.

Wedging
Splitting of stone by driving wedges into planes of weakness.

Weep Holes
Openings placed in mortar joints of facing material at the level of flashing to permit the escape of moisture. An opening left (or cut) in mortar joints or masonry face shells to allow moisture to exit the wall. Usually located immediately above flashing.

Wear
The removal of material or impairment of surface finishing through friction or impact use.

Waterproofing
(1) The methods used to prevent moisture flow through masonry. (2) The materials used to prevent moisture flow through masonry.

Waxing
An expression used in the marble finishing trades to indicate the filling of natural voids with color blended materials.

Water Table
A projection of lower masonry on the outside of the wall, slightly above the ground. Often a damp course is placed at the level of the water table to prevent upward penetration of ground water.

Wash
A sloped area or the area water will run over.

Water Bar
Typically a strip in a reglet in window sill and stone below to prevent water passage.

Water Permeance
The ability of water to penetrate through a substance such as mortar or brick.

Water Repellency
The reduction of absorption.

Water Repellent
Material added to the masonry to increase resistance to water penetration and can be a surface treatment or integral water repellent admixture.

Wall, wind (wined)
A twisting warp from cutting slabs in the gang saws.

Wall, Wythe
The inner or outer part of a cavity wall.

Walls
One of the sides of a room or building connection floor and ceiling or foundation and roof:

Warped Walls
Generally a condition experienced only in flagging or flagstone materials; very common with flagstone materials that are taken from the ground and used in their natural state. To eliminate warping in stones it would be necessary to further finish the material, by methods such as machining, sand rubbing, honing or polishing.

Wall, Single Wythe
A wall of one masonry unit thickness.

Wall, Solid Masonry
A wall either built of solid masonry units or built of hollow units and grouted solid.

Wall, Veneer, or Faced
A wall in which a thin facing and the backing are of different materials but not so bonded as to exert a common reaction under load.

Wall, Reinforced
(1) A masonry wall reinforced with steel embedded so that the two materials act together in resisting forces. (2) A wall containing reinforcement used to resist shear and tensile stresses.

Wall, Retaining
A wall designed to prevent the movement of soils and structures placed behind the wall.

Wall, Screen
A masonry wall constructed with more than 25% open area intended for decorative purposes, typically to partially screen an area from the sun or from view.

Wall, Shear
A wall, bearing or nonbearing, designed to resist lateral forces acting in the plane of the wall.

Wall, Panel
(1) an exterior nonloadbearing wall in skeleton frame construction, wholly supported at each story. (2) A nonloadbearing exterior masonry wall having bearing support at each story.

Wall, Partition
An interior wall without structural function.

Wall, Prestressed
A masonry wall in which internal compressive stresses have been introduced to counteract stresses resulting from applied loads.

Wall, Multiwythe
Wall composed of 2 or more masonry wythes.

Wall, Nonloadbearing
A wall that supports no vertical load other than its own weight. By code, a wall carrying vertical loads less than 200 lb/ft (2.9 kN/m) in addition to its own weight.

Wall, Curtain
(1) a nonloadbearing wall between columns or piers. (2) A nonloadbearing exterior wall vertically supported only at its base, or having bearing support at prescribed vertical intervals. (3) An exterior nonloadbearing wall in skeleton frame construction. Such walls may be anchored to columns, spandrel beams or floors, but not

Wall, Foundation
A wall below the floor nearest grade serving as a support for a wall, pier, column or other structural part of a building and in turn supported by a footing.

Wall, Loadbearing
Wall that supports vertical load in addition to its own weight. By code, a wall carrying vertical loads greater than 200 lb/ft (2.9 kN/m) in addition to its own weight.

Wall, Cavity
A multiwythe noncomposite masonry wall with a continuous air space within the wall (with or without insulation), which is tied together with metal ties.

Wall, Cavity
A wall in which the inner and outer wythes are separated by an air space but tied together with metal ties.

Wall, Composite
A wall in which the facing and backing are of different materials and bonded together with bond stones to exert a common reaction under load.

Wall Tie
A bonder or metal piece which connects wythes of masonry to each other or to other materials.

Wall Tie, Veneer
A wall tie used to connect a facing veneer to the backing.

Wall, Bearing
A wall supporting a vertical load in addition to its own weight.

Wall, Bonded
A masonry wall in which two or more wythes are bonded to act as a composite structural unit.

Vug
A cavity in rock sometimes lined or filled with either amorphous or crystalline material, common in calcareous rocks such as marble or limestone.

Verd (Or Verde) Antique
A marble composed chiefly of massive serpentine and capable of being polished. It is commonly crossed by veinlets of other minerals, chiefly carbonates of calcium and magnesium.

Verde Antique
A commercial marble composed chiefly of massive serpentine and capable of taking a high degree of polish. Verde antique is not a true marble in the scientific sense, but is commonly sold as a decorative commercial marble and requires the adjectival modifier verde (or verd) antique. Verde antique is commonly veined with carbonate minerals, chiefly calcite and dolomite.

Veneer, Masonry
A Masonry wythe that provides the finish of a wall system and transfers out-of-plane loads directly to a backing, but is not considered to add load resisting capacity to the wall system.

Venting
Creating an outlet in a wall for air and moisture to pass through. (see cavity vent.)

Veneer, Adhered
Masonry veneer secured to and supported by the backing through adhesion.

Veneer, Anchored
Masonry veneer secured to and supported laterally by the backing through anchors and supported vertically by the foundation or other structural elements.

Undercut
Cut so as to present and overhanging part.

Unreinforced Masonry
Masonry, in which the tensile resistance of the masonry is taken into consideration and the resistance of reinforcement, if present, is neglected and also called plain masonry.

Vein Cut
Cutting quarried marble or stone perpendicular to the natural bedding plane.

Veining
Colored markings in limestone, marble, alabaster, etc.

Veneer Stone
Any stone used as a decorative facing material which is not meant to be load-bearing.

Tread
A flat stone used as the top walking surface on steps.

Trim
Stone used as decorative items only, such as sills, coping, enframements, etc., with the facing of another material.

Trimmer Arch
A stone arch, usually a low-rise arch, used for supporting a fireplace hearth.

Tuff
Cemented volcanic ash, many varieties included.

Travertine Limestone
A variety of limestone that has a partly crystalline or microcrystalline texture and porous or cellular layered structure, the cells being usually concentrated along certain layers and commonly displaying small stalactic forms.

Travertine
A form of limestone precipitated from ground waters, as in caves or in orifices of springs (see limestone group).

Tracery
Ornamentation of panels, circular windows, window heads, etc.

Translucence
Permitting light to pass through with little diffusing. Certain marble varieties are translucent.

Throat
The name sometimes given to the small groove under the windowsill or dripstone, intended of deflect rain water from the wall face.

Tile
Thin modular stone unit.

Tolerance
Dimensional allowance made for the inability of men and machines to fabricate a product of exact dimensions. The specified allowance in variation from a specified size, location, or placement.

Tooled Finished
Customarily are four, six or eight parallel, concave grooves to the inch.

Thin stone
Stone slabs generally of two inches or less in thickness.

Texture
Three dimensional surface enrichment independent of color.

Thermal Movement
Dimension change due to temperature change.

Thin marble
A fabricated marble unit of 2 inches (50 mm) thick.

Styrolite
A longitudinally streaked, columnar structure occurring in some marbles and of the same material as the marble in which it occurs.

Surround
An efframement.

Tablet
A small, flat slab or surface of stone, especially one bearing or intended to bear an inscription, carving or the like.

Terrazzo
A type of concrete in which chips or pieces of stone, usually marble, are mixed with cement and are ground to a flat surface, exposing the chips, which take a high polish.

Strips
Long pieces of stone, usually low height ashlar courses, where length to height ratio is at maximum for the material used.

Stucco
A combination of cement and aggregate mixed with a suitable amount of water to form a plastic mixture that will adhere to a surface and preserve the texture imposed on it.

Strike
To finish a mortar joint with a stroke of the trowel or special tool, simultaneously removing extruded mortar and smoothing the surface of the mortar remaining in the joint.

Strip Rubble
Generally speaking, strip rubble comes from a ledge quarry, the beds of the stone, while uniformly straight, is of the natural cleft as the stone is removed from the ledge, and then split by machine to approximately 4 inch (100 mm) widths.

Stone
Sometimes synonymous with rock, but more properly applied to individual blocks, masses or fragments taken from their original formation or considered for commercial use.

Stool
A flat stone, generally polished, used as an interior sill.

Stacked Bond
Stone that is cut to one dimension and installed with unbroken vertical. Horizontal joints running the entire length and height of the veneered area.

Start
A small fissure.

Statue
A sculpture of a human or animal figure.

Sticking
An expression used in the marble finishing trade to describe the process of cementing together broken slabs or pieces of marble.

Stirrup
Shear reinforcement in a flexural member.

Splitface (Sawed Bed)
Usually split face is sawed on the beds and is split either by hand or with machine so that the surface face of the stone exhibits the natural quarry texture.

Splitstone Finish
Obtained by sawing to accurate heights then breaking by machine to required bed widths. (normal bed widths are 3

Spot or Spotting
An adhesive contact, usually of plaster of paris, applied between the back of marble veneer and the face of the back-up wall to plumb or secure standing marble.

Spandrel Wall
That part of a curtain wall above the top of a window in one story and below the sill of the window in the story above.

Splay
A beveled or slanted surface.

Spline
A thin strip of material, such as wood or metal, inserted into the edges of two stone pieces or stone tiles to make a butt joint between them.

Split
Division of a rock by cleavage.

Split Block
A concrete masonry unit with one or more faces purposely fractured to produce a rough texture for aesthetic purposes and also called a split-faced or rock-faced block.

Spall
A stone fragment that has split or broken off. To flake or split away due to internal or external forces such as frost action, pressure, dimensional changes after installation, vibration, impact, or some combination.

Spalls
Sizes may vary from chip-size to one and two man stones. Spalls are primarily used for taking up large voids in rough rubble or mosaic patterns.

Solid Masonry Unit
A unit whose net cross-sectional area in every plane parallel to the bearing surface is 75 percent or more of its gross cross-sectional area measured in the same plane. Note that Canadian standards define a solid unit as 100% solid.

Sound Stone
Stone that is free of cracks, fissures, or other physical defects.

Slump Block
A concrete masonry unit produced so that it slumps or sags in irregular fashion before it hardens.

Soapstone
A massive variety of talc with a soapy or greasy feel used for hearths, washtubs, table tops, carved ornaments, chemical laboratories, etc., known for its stain-proof qualities.