Light Weight Construction Needed

[rational611]

I am a house owner from India. My house is a concrete house with a RCC roof. It has been built without using reinforced concrete columns. So the roof stands on the bricks walls. This year I wanted to extend the house by constructing the first floor. On closer inspection it has been noticed that the walls have developed cracks and the opinion is that they won't support another floor. Now the only way to extend is to demolish the entire house and start from scratch, ie from the ground floor. However I am averse to this. I was wondering if there was any other way to do this, like perhaps using some light weight construction material or by using some other technique.

[Rich]

One option I can think of off the top of my head would be to frame walls on the inside of the concrete walls and support the second floor on that. The downside to this is that your interior rooms will be that much smaller. The upside is that you could do some really neat stuff with the framing - I could see using doug fir and framing niches and openings into the wall really easily. Or maybe it's larger beams and stuff to make the interior look like a timber frame home.. just ideas.