The economic monitoring in foreign periodicals devoted to the subject of the construction industry is developed approximately 10-12x annually and provides information on the European construction market and its integration with the international market. It devotes attention to both overall summaries, development trends and tendencies in the market in individual countries, comparisons between these, selected commissioned works, their technical design, method of financing, the qualifications and education of those working in the field, etc. The article presents a summary of the European construction market in connection with the global world markets.

The construction industry will undoubtedly be one of the areas in the national economy that will most strongly feel the influence of the entry of the Czech Republic into the EU, both in the narrow sense of the impact technical and safety demands on construction manufacturing and in the broad sense of other factors connected with the possibilities of taking advantage of the free movement of employees and of labour in the construction industry, and the recognition of professional qualifications, safety and health protection at work, the acquisition of construction lots and how they are handled further, environmental protection in construction manufacturing, the relevant tax legislation, and even housing policy.

Of fundamental importance in this area is that a considerable portion of the relevant Czech legal norms and regulations have already been more or less successfully brought into alignment with EU norms and standards, so the effectiveness of the harmonised national legal amendments is already essentially tied only to the actual data of the Czech Republic's accession to the EU. It is however in this respect necessary to be prepared for the existence of a possible transition period, which as part of the accession treaty was negotiated in the case of the Czech Republic and has a direct impact on the construction industry (restricted acquisition of property intended for so-called secondary housing, reduced VAT tariffs in construction work on buildings and sites serving as housing, and some temporary exemptions from environmental obligations), and transition periods negotiated by some current member states vis-a-vis the Czech Republic (in the area of the free movement of labour).

It is no accident that brick materials have been used in various modifications for roughly 5000 years. Modern construction materials usually stand out owing to one or two highly evaluated properties, whereas brick offers an ideally balanced combination of the majority of those most necessary. The properties of modern brick products are optimised in order to be able to fulfil at once all of today's most varied, often contradicting and at the same time mutually impacting demands in construction.

The reason for reinforcing masonry is either to prevent the emergence of any large cracks, when reinforcements are inserted primarily only constructionally, i.e. without stress analysis, or to increase the load-bearing capacity of the cross-section, which is strained by eccentric pressure with large eccentricity, bending, or pulling; in these cases the reinforcements are usually designed with a stress analysis. The reason for inserting the reinforcements into the bed-joints of the masonry can be the need to decrease or even entirely exclude the number of necessary dilation joints in the case of long walls. In this article examples are presented of the most frequent applications of reinforcements in the bed-joints of masonry elements, where reinforcing in a considerable way increases the load-bearing capacity of the masonry element.

Structural modifications serving to reduce the amount of moisture in masonry or preventively restricting the permeation of water into the structure can be made a part of the original structures or there are methods of adding these measures to them. These include: " Various types of air cavities and small channels " Surface air and perpendicular hydroinsulation " Systems of ventilating and heating the buildings.

If during surveys of the buildings any measures are come across it is necessary to assess it from the perspective of the contemporary (new) requirements for the use of the building and in the case of supplementary repairs also from the perspective of conservation.