I have a plastic building kit of a concrete tilt-up wall style building that I want to use on my layout that is under construction and I want to be fairly accurate in the era concrete tilt-up buildings were used.
So for you architects out there my question is: Were concrete tilt-up buildings fairly common back in the late sixties?
I’ve done some research on the web and that construction technology goes back to the late 1800’s but I really don’t remember ever seeing buildings constructed in that fashion until the 1980’s.
I worked for an Architect in 1968. One day we went out and looked some commercial/warehouse buildings under construction in the Sacramento CA area. All were tilt-ups.
Precast concrete wall panels appeared in the late 1950s and grew slowly in use during the 1960s. Generally in the 1960s they were cast at the construction site and tilted up, and were not common because they were expensive, and used primarily for assembly buildings (churches, schools, universities, concert halls, etc.) to provide aesthetic appearance while still meeting fire and structural codes. Precast wall panels enabled fancy exposed aggregate or textured surfaces, which are very difficult to achieve with cast-in-place vertical forms.
In the 1970s there was sufficient market acceptance – and costs of labor for competing methods had priced them out of the picture – for concrete wall panels to become widespread for industrial and warehouse structures. My father’s firm designed and constructed the first industrial structure using all precast walls and roof in Denver in 1973, and subsequently built several million square feet of light industrial/warehouse space using 100% precast, prestressed, for the structure above ground level.
Until the late 1960s, you would not see much, if any, precast concrete industrial buildings, and then you would find it only in certain regions of the U.S. Reinforced masonry or cast-in-place concrete was vastly more common at that time. Different regions of the U.S. adopt different construction methods and materials at different times, depending on variations in codes, costs, culture, tradition, and experience. Some areas of the U.S. have gone whole-hog for concrete buildings whereas in other areas concrete is viewed as declasse. Generally areas of the U.S. that have been settled longer are more wedded to their traditional materials and methods than areas where everyone is a newcomer and there is no tradition.
Fortunately I’m modeling a small area in Seattle so I’m hoping I can get away with a precast style industrial building in 1968 - 1969. I want to use a particular building kit that I have to create a seafood processing plant and it is a precast concrete style building. I suppose that there is some give and take in modeling and a recent change I made to incorporate a small On30 industrial line into my standard 2-rail O-scale didn’t have an actual prototype anyway.
typed “history of tilt up construction” in the search block on msn and this was the 1st hit.
It appears that you have about 65-70 years of tilt up trial and error before your era. You can always say “this processing plant was the first precast tilit-up structure of this configuration”!!!
Hey CL thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen that particular one and it was pretty informative. So I guess my plans are now ‘cemented’ in place and I’ll be OK with the first concrete tilt-up building of its kind in Seattle in 1968!