Tilt-up Construction:
A General Contractor's Approach to Innovative Commercial Building Construction
 Have
you ever driven past a construction site and seen massive cranes lifting huge
panels of concrete in the air? Have you watched with amazement as a new commercial
building seems to spring into place, almost overnight? What you have witnessed
is tilt-up construction, an innovative method for building office buildings, retail
centers, warehouses, distribution centers, call centers, manufacturing facilities
and other commercial / industrial structures with amazing speed, safety, and cost
benefits. So what is the difference between tilt-up
and other types of construction? In traditional forms of wall construction,
the walls can be built with CMU blocks or blocks faced with brick. For some types
of buildings, the exterior wall is made up of structural steel columns with heavy
gauge metal studs covered with gyp sheathing, which is then faced with brick or
stucco. Regardless which traditional approach is used, building the exterior walls
is a time-consuming, multi-stepped process. A tilt-up building's walls are created
horizontally in large slabs of concrete called panels. The panels are then lifted,
or tilted up, into position around the building's slab. This means the tilt-up
structure's exterior wall is virtually finished when it is tilted into place.
Tilt-up construction (also called tiltwall or tilt wall construction) has
a long history, but its widespread use is a relatively new phenomenon. In spite
of this, tilt-up construction is fast becoming the method of choice for constructing
modern warehouses, call centers, distribution centers, retail stores, office and
storage buildings and other types of industrial and commercial facilities
Return
to Articles Index
| 
