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Tilt-up Construction History |  |
An Old Idea for General Contractors, With New Innovations
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| Workers
help to guide a large mobile crane as it lifts a tilt-up panel into place on this
Fort Worth, Texas warehouse building project. |
| The basic principle behind tilt-up
construction - constructing walls horizontally, on the ground, and then lifting
them into place - is not a new idea. Evidence exists that some buildings constructed
during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages used this approach. More recently,
American settlers in the 1800s gathered for "barn raisings" where they
constructed the wood walls for their buildings and tipped them up into place.
The 20th century marked the true beginnings of modern tilt-up
construction. The development of concrete reinforced with rebar in the early 1900s
allows builders to create tilt-up commercial structures as we think of them today:
One- to two-story structures built with walls comparable in width to those created
with other methods of construction. Even with this innovation,
tilt-up construction did not gain wide acceptance until after World War II, when
the mobile crane was first developed. The mobile crane allowed builders far greater
ability to lift the massive panels into place, regardless where the job site happened
to be. At about this time, ready-mix concrete was introduced to the industry,
making tilt-up an even more viable alternative. These new
technologies occurred at precisely the right time. The late 1940s brought about
a post-war boom in the construction of manufacturing and industrial facilities
across the United States. Innovation, timing, and the need for large, warehouse-styled
buildings opened the door for tilt-up construction. The three factors combined
to encourage general contractors to embrace tilt-up as an economical means of
delivering quality projects that meet even the most demanding specifications and
schedules. Over the years, industry experts have continued
to refine and enhance the tilt-up process, allowing general contractors and design-build
construction managers to drive greater capabilities and creativity in its use.
In 1986 the Tilt-up Concrete Association (TCA) was created to establish processes
and standards to ensure continued growth in quality and acceptance for this method
of construction. Tilt-up has since been used in buildings
as large as 1.7 million square feet, with individual panels reaching as high as
91 feet and weighing 150 tons. The TCA reports that 15% of all industrial buildings
in the U.S. were created using tilt-up construction. It is growing at an annual
rate of almost 20% and is used in over 650 million square feet of new building
construction each year. In Texas and other sunbelt states, tilt-up accounts for
as much as 75% of new one-story commercial building construction. Builders in
Mexico, Canada and Australia are also using tilt-up construction on an increasingly
frequent basis. Return to
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