A Shellcrete driveway, poured in panels
Sarasota, Florida
The pour itself — a whole driveway laid out as a grid of freshly placed Shellcrete panels, still in their timber formwork, in front of a raised coastal house. The joint layout is set before any concrete is placed, not cut in afterwards.
The challenge
A driveway is the largest single surface on most properties and the one that cracks. Concrete shrinks as it cures, and it will crack somewhere — the only question is whether that happens where somebody decided it would.
What we did
The joint layout was set out in timber before any concrete arrived. The photographs of this job are the formwork rather than the finish, and that is deliberate: a grid of forms running the full width of the frontage, squared to the garage, with kraft paper taped over the doors behind it.
Setting joints out first rather than sawing them in afterwards is the difference between a joint pattern that is part of the design and a line somebody cut through it later. It also means each panel is poured, levelled and seeded as its own piece, which is how a surface this size stays flat.
The result
The finished frontage reads as a grid of pale slabs rather than as one slab with lines in it. Shell is visible in the mix in the wet panels — the aggregate is in the concrete before anything is broadcast on top, which is what stops the texture disappearing the first time the surface is ground.
If you are comparing contractors for a job like this, ask to see photographs of a pour in progress. The formwork tells you whether the joint layout was designed or improvised. More on how the joints get set out.
This job is on the driveways page.
Services used
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