Holiday Shopping Precast Concrete

With the end of the holiday season in sight, many of us can recall the hours logged in shopping malls and parking structures over the past few months. Whether you live in Vantaa, Finland and did your holiday shopping at the Myyrmanni Mall, or reside in Saint Louis, Missouri and purchased gifts for loved ones at the recently renovated Westfield Shoppingtown West County and parked in the new three-story garage, your holiday gift giving ventures were made possible by the atheistic beauty and durability of a precast concrete structures.

In the past, concrete was mixed in a large truck, driven to the construction site, and then poured on location. This process is called "cast-in-place" and is chosen less frequently by builders due to the advantages of precast concrete.

With precast concrete, the materials can be prestressed. This is a process where steel strands are embedded within the concrete. The end result is a concrete with a higher load carrying capacity, which is ideal for the longevity of a given project.

Precast concrete is also made in a tightly controlled environment off site. With greater oversight of important factors such as temperature, humidity, quality of material, and workmanship, the uniformity of the precast concrete is near perfect.

Think back to one of your many holiday shopping moments and imagine as the salesperson in your favorite department store rung up a present for your Grandmother in Idaho with a barcode reader. As the credit card reader moved efficiently to complete your transaction and sent you on your way, you might have overlooked the concrete jungle that surrounded and protected your holiday shopping experience.

Within the industry some still consider this technology avant-garde, but more and more are seeing precast concrete as the way of the future. In England, famous for its great open air shopping and streets offering as much history as fine goods, large scale shopping centers and malls are being built along side retail developments that mirror the intimate shopping setting of pedestrian only, open air shopping. There remains one commonality between these two diverse ways of building: precast concrete. Cities such as Cardiff, Bristol, Bath and Liverpool have already built with precast concrete and have followed the lead of redevelopments such as Manchester's New Cathedral Street and Birmingham's Bullring. Both were fine examples of the use of precast concrete in regeneration project.

The next time you find yourself staring at one of the cash register systems ready to purchase a gift for one of the younger members of your family, think of the lego aisle of the store as the barcode scanner registers the price of the gift. In its most basic terms, precast concrete construction is an assemblage of large pieces of precast concrete to form a given structure. Just as children build great castles from lego blocks, shopping malls are constructed by skilled builders and contractors in a similar manner.