Since the late 1800s, when cast iron columns were first used in a textile mill in Great Britain, the metal building industry has experienced continual progress over the past couple of hundred years in both technology and in cost savings.

The use of premium quality metal as a primary building material emerged largely due to its fire-resistant characteristic. Towards the end of the 19th century, some of the early buildings in the United States were erected with metal frames and beams. It may surprise you to learn that it was about this time that the earliest pre-fabricated metal structures were produced.

As the car industry was poised to explode on the American scene at the turn of the 20th century, the use of steel or metal for construction was mostly limited to garages. Initially built with a combination of wood and metal, the Butler Company was the first to replace this popular vehicle storage building with an all-metal configuration to reduce the risk of fire and to reduce building costs.

In the early 1900s, the Austin Company in Ohio first applied pre-engineering to the fabrication of metal framing. Star Building Systems expanded the technology in the 1920s when they began supplying cheap metal driller buildings to oil firms on the Oklahoma plains.

The military further advanced the steel building industry during World War II, when airplane hangars were constructed entirely of metal. At that time, Quonset huts became the ubiquitous building choice for all military bases, thanks to the fact that they required only a few workers and common tools to assemble. The military favored these distinctive arched rooftop huts for use as motor pools and personnel quarters. Their use as storage structures then spread to civilian rural communities. The Quonset hut may have been ugly, but its reasonable price outweighed aesthetic factors.

Following WWII, pre-fabricated metal building sales reps stressed the rapid assembly and bargain prices of the structures and sales soared. They pretty much ignored design considerations, and the appearance of these structures was not as crucial to buyers as the protection afforded to the inhabitants and/or contents. This next generation of pre-engineered steel structures contained an unattractive standard roof pitch of four on twelve. Because these uninviting buildings were built with lower quality materials, they didn’t hold up well, and so they were eventually left to rust and disintegrate across the American landscape. People lost faith in the steel building industry, and stopped buying the buildings.

Finally, in the mid-1950 the MBMA (Metal Building Manufacturers’ Association) was established. Higher standards and building techniques were introduced, and steel building manufacturers began to concentrate on the aesthetic appeal of the buildings. Today’s steel buildings are attractive, durable and economical alternatives to conventionally built structures.