Parking facilities often mark the heart of towns, cities, and communities. If there’s a clean, safe place to park, locals and tourists will visit, shop, move, and so on. It might just be somebody’s first impression of a neighborhood they’re looking into. Parking has the potential to directly impact the value of both residential and commercial properties.
When it comes to building parking garages - whether standalone or a mixed-use complex - safety, traffic flow, design, usage flexibility, and durability are several of the highly critical and determining factors for design and construction. The main goal for parking structure project teams is to design spaces that fit into the surrounding area while providing parking capacity and meeting community needs.
Building a Precast Concrete Garage
- Improved Pre-Construction Planning: Precast concrete allows advanced planning that reduces design errors. Project teams can work closely in the pre-construction phase to streamline the design process and make value engineering decisions. Design assist contracts are becoming more common, enabling precasters to provide early input into value engineering, facilitating expedited schedules, and reducing precast costs.
- Reliable Solution: Precast concrete is less susceptible to supply chain issues that cause fluctuating costs of competing building materials such as wood and steel. The unstable supply chain and labor shortages that afflict these other building materials are moving contractors to seek alternate designs to provide value and have driven the market to understand the advantages of precast.
- Enhanced Quality: PCI Develops, maintains, and disseminates the Body of Knowledge to design, fabricate, and erect precast concrete structures and systems. Precast concrete panels constructed offsite in PCI-certified production facilities are of superior quality to those cast onsite. This is due to the uniform fabrication process possible at a separate casting facility and stringent quality control and quality assurance methods.
Precast Parking Garage Details
Precast concrete is the premier building system for parking structures. Precast is a high-performance material that integrates easily with other systems and provides the versatility, efficiency, and resiliency needed to meet multi-hazard requirements and long-term demands associated with parking structures.
Versatility
Precast concrete provides an array of aesthetic options, whether your parking structure needs to blend in with the surrounding environment or stand out from the crowd. Precast concrete can be used alongside other structural components, such as structural steel to create hybrid mixed-use structures. Typically, precast concrete is used at the base of the structure for the parking garage, while structural framing builds out the above retail, office, or residential space.
Villanova University wanted to transform the landscape of its campus with a five-level precast parking garage. In building the Villanova Pike Field Parking Garage, precast accelerated the team’s timeline and achieved key design requirements for the structure to blend in with the university’s historic collegiate gothic aesthetic. Learn more.
Efficiency
Precast concrete arrives on site ready for installation and doesn’t require protection from rain, sun, snow, wind, or extreme temperatures. Precast is also one of the fastest building systems available. It’s typically erected with a crane and relatively small crew, allowing for construction within a small footprint that minimizes disruption to the surrounding area.
Liberty University faced a growing student body and limited space to accommodate everyday travel needs. To overcome logistical challenges, precast was chosen as the primary building material for the new garage, and a design-assist approach was taken to ensure the structure met the needs of residential and commuter students as well as staff and visitors. Learn more.
Resilience
Precast concrete is inherently resilient and provides excellent protection against high winds, storm surge, and flying debris, among many other high-performance attributes. It is often used in FEMA shelters, residential, institutional, public, government, and other structures providing protection and resiliency.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School required additional parking facilities for students and faculty to accommodate its growing student body and the local community. Among several requirements, the parking garage needed to support modern amenities like electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. Resilience isn’t limited to physical strength but also the ability to support and protect evolving technologies. Learn more.
Your Next Project
Precast concrete parking garages are superior. For more information, check out our parking structure FAQ for answers to questions about bay sizes, maximum lengths, floor-to-floor heights, and more. We can help you successfully design and plan a precast parking garage project while connecting you with Mid Atlantic’s leading designers, producers, architects, engineers, and more.
Keep our precast businesses in mind for your next precast concrete garage project. Find helpful design tools, project resources, and detailed information on working with precast in our comprehensive Solutions Center.
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