Construction of the Schindler House in West Hollywood, California, using the tilt-up process (1922). (Courtesy R.M. Schindler Collection, Architecture and Design Collection, Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara.)
Concrete is always being rediscovered. And then, somehow, it gets forgotten again.
With some 5 billion cubic yards produced in 2024 alone, the gray stuff is the most widely fabricated substance on earth. Yet owing to certain well-publicized failings—viz, its oversized carbon footprint—the material has long had something of a bad rap.
It comes as a perpetual revelation, then, whenever some new aspect of it heaves into view. In the early aughts, the exhibition “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete” at the National Building Museum showcased a number of promising developments in the field (colored concrete, bendable concrete, semitranslucent concrete); since then, while the architecture world has frequently heard of, and occasionally witnessed, some of these advances, none of them have become truly normalized. As the curators of the now 21-year-old show prophetically wrote at the time, concrete is “a material whose existence lies in the future.”
But what if the real promise of concrete lies not in some far-off innovation, but in something that’s been sitting right in front of us all along? “It’s been having an impact for a while. Architects are just late to the party,” says Mitch Bloomquist, executive director of the Tilt-Up Concrete Association, an Iowa-based advocacy group that represents some 500 contractors, manufacturers, and other industry leaders involved in the titular technique.
More than a century old, the tilt-up approach is simultaneously a niche corner of the construction trade and one of the most widely deployed systems for building in cement and aggregate. And now, if the method’s boosters are right, designers might finally be getting wise to its potential. “Tilt-up,” Bloomquist says, “is having a moment.”
Tilt-up’s prime advantage is its straightforwardness—a quality that begins with its name, which describes the process pretty neatly. Speaking broadly, almost every concrete building in the world comes in one of three varieties. The first is prefabricated concrete, in which the material is mass-produced in a factory and subsequently lugged to the construction site; the second, pour-in-place, entails erecting large vertical formworks, filling them with liquid concrete, and removing them once the concrete is ready. The third is tilt-up, in which liquid concrete is poured flat onto the building slab, and then (as one might guess) hoisted upright by cranes or other mechanical equipment once dry. “One day it’s down, and the next it’s up,” says Dallas-based architect Gary Cunningham, who has extensive experience with the technique. “It’s instant gratification.”
The reasons why tilt-up’s time has (arguably) come are fairly simple. “It’s a system of construction which, within its parameters, saves money and time,” says Jeffrey Brown, founder of Houston-based Powers Brown Architects, another enthusiast. Taking as an example a hypothetical 180,000-square-foot mid-rise office building in his native Texas, Brown estimates that the pour-and-pull approach can reduce construction timelines by as much as six to eight weeks as compared to other methods.
The consequent savings on labor costs, financing, and other expenses is impressive, and only becomes more so with the passing years, as the solid building envelope requires little maintenance. And the implications for other essential building types seem obvious: At a time of soaring home costs in the United States—with a housing deficit that now stands around 4 million, exacerbated by recent disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year—any idea for faster, cheaper construction appears worth entertaining.
The Schindler House in West Hollywood. (Photo: Tag Christof. Courtesy the MAK Center for Art and Architecture)
If the possibilities of tilt-up have been somewhat neglected by mainstream architects, it is not for want of pedigree. The origins of the building system are connected to the very taproot of progressive design in the United States: It was first pioneered shortly after the turn of the 20th century by Midwestern inventor Robert Aiken; after a series of successful projects for both military and civilian clients, he launched an enterprise that spread to Southern California, where the approach was taken up by architect (and former Frank Lloyd Wright compatriot) Irving Gill in a series of projects for the coastal community of La Jolla.
In part through the Wrightian connection, tilt-up came to the attention of Austrian-born, Los Angeles–based visionary Rudolf Schindler, who deployed it in his landmark 1922 house for himself and his then wife on Kings Road in Hollywood. In those heady early days of SoCal Modernism, tilted walls appeared to have arrived at precisely the right instant to make serious inroads with avant-garde architects.
And then, curiously, they didn’t. “It quickly spread, but it got this big stigma,” Bloomquist, from the Tilt-Up Concrete Association, says. Since the end of the Second World War, tilt-up has been largely confined to a few specific typologies: storage facilities, megastore retailers, data centers. Wherever builders have been called upon to create something low, long, and without too much articulation, they have turned to tilt-up to do the job.
While this has sustained a thriving ecosystem of specialists (many of whom now comprise the rank and file of T.C.A.’s membership), the effect has been to more or less efface tilt-up’s more radical origins, and to persuade many otherwise forward-thinking designers that the approach is somehow déclassé. “Architects look down on it,” says Brown, the Houston architect, adding that “trade-association language” that often surrounds tilt-up has further alienated some would-be adopters.
Their prejudice has never really been fair. Adding to its distinguished early history, tilt-up has appeared in a number of very high-design projects in recent years. When he first conceived of his much lauded 1997 Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, New York–based AIA Gold Medal winner Steven Holl did not have tilt-up in mind. Described by the architect as “seven bottles of light in a stone box,” the concrete design proved more expensive than the budget would have allowed for if done using poured-in-place concrete. “A contractor suggested tilt-up, and I said, ‘Yes, let’s try it,’” Holl says.
Thrilled with the results, he turned to the method again for his sharp, elemental Planar House in Arizona, completed in 2005. Similarly impressive aesthetic achievements have been marked by the likes of Sir David Chipperfield, in his East Building at the St. Louis Art Museum (2013), as well as by Los Angeles–based Johnston Marklee, in the firm’s Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios (2019)–and if all those still adhere to the smooth-walled, rectangular-silhouetted stereotype of tilt-up construction, more dynamic geometries are also feasible. Pablo Moyano Fernández, an associate professor of architecture at Washington University, has experimented with pouring concrete directly into curved and irregular moulds dug right into the ground. “You can get not a flat panel, but a shape,” he says.
All of this demonstrates the immense promise of this always effective, yet strangely overlooked way of working in concrete. But to bring tilt-up to bear on today’s housing problem is still a daunting proposition.
“Everybody wants to use it in housing,” says Brown. “I’m skeptical.” While relatively narrow building sites, such as suburban residential lots, can be made to accommodate the necessary lifting mechanisms, it can also be a tight fit—a source of potential alarm for neighbors, regulators, and builders already inclined toward “a hyperparanoid culture,” Cunningham, the Dallas architect, puts it, in which many are “afraid of doing something different.”
More vexing still, the unfamiliarity of the technique is especially pronounced in certain regions of the United States. While common in the South and Southwest, tilt-up buildings are far thinner on the ground in places like the Eastern Seaboard, making it harder to see tilt-up as a potential deus ex big box for housing nationwide. In markets dominated by large multifamily buildings, its utility is especially dubious, given the understandable height limitations (around nine stories, typically) of pouring down, yanking up, and then linking up huge concrete slabs.
Finally, there is the ecological question. On the score of resiliency, Moyano notes the particular strength of tilt-up structures against “wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes.” Yet even with the efficiency of on-site pouring, the embodied-carbon rating of a concrete building is still only as good as the concrete itself.
That problem still awaits resolution, just as it did two decades ago, leaving plenty of room for another of concrete’s cyclical revivals. Could tilt-up be the next coming of concrete as America’s wonder material? Yes, it could. But it may also be, quite literally, a heavy lift.