Housing is a basic need of human beings and explorations related to housing construction technologies, methods, materials, cost and quality have always been important issues capturing attention of both the constructors and buyers. A long-time objective of the house building industry has been to provide high quality, low-cost homes for quick assembly with a minimum of on-site labour.

In the context of India, at the time of independence, the traditional and most common type of building construction was load-bearing type of structure using brick or stone masonry. With the advancement in concrete technology, the load bearing masonry was replaced by R.C.C. framed construction. The walls continued to be made using brick masonry. Use of structural steel in framed construction was limited to commercial structures and in specials cases, mostly due to the high cost of construction. Use of bricks in the wall was gradually replaced by concrete blocks (both solid and hollow) and more recently Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) blocks. Use of Aluminium formwork (commonly known as Mivan form) created a structure which uses concrete both as a structural frame and in walls. The Mivan technology has gained popularity in high rise construction which permits a large number of repetitive uses of the costly formwork.