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Tilt-up Construction - the Complete Article

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 tiltwall 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, tiltwall 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.

Tilt-up Construction: An Old Idea With New Innovations
 
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 tiltwall 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 tiltwall 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 tiltwall 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.

Tiltwall 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 tiltwall construction on an increasingly frequent basis.