Project Overview

For more than 60 years, the Spartanburg County Courthouse served residents of Spartanburg, S.C., from its downtown location on Magnolia Street. But as the county and region continued to evolve, the aging courthouse could no longer adequately serve residents, necessitating a modernized facility capable of meeting current and future needs. In addition to satisfying the aesthetic requirements of the project—which called for a building designed in the neoclassical style—the courthouse needed to consolidate activities that were previously located in separate county and municipal facilities. With these goals in mind, Spartanburg County officials turned to precast concrete, partnering with Tindall Corporation and architect McMillan Pazdan Smith to construct a striking courthouse aligned with the needs of the community.

Law, Order, and Precast Concrete

To construct the new 350,000-ft² Spartanburg County Courthouse, Tindall Corporation manufactured more than 1100 precast concrete products. This included 180 pieces to make 14 full-round entasis columns adorned with Romanesque-patterned bases and capitals, 154 monolithic corner cornices of varying sizes, and 715 architectural wall panels featuring projecting window surrounds. Leveraging precast concrete allowed the project team to replicate intricate classical details quickly and efficiently, contributing to considerable time savings compared with traditional stone construction methods.

Manufacturing the vast array of intricate precast concrete products designated for the project required a significant investment of time and talent from the Tindall Corporation team, who constructed 76 different molds for the work. Various products and techniques were used to build the molds, including elastomeric “rubber,” fiberglass, wood, Sonotube, and resin-coated concrete. The project’s vertical erection sequence demanded that most of the molds be completed before production even began, requiring intense coordination among both the eight skilled artisans crafting the molds and the wider team. Lower-level components of the courthouse were formed with a hand-chiseled, “rusticated” stone-based formliner to provide a true form finish. Locating the project’s master mold presented a significant challenge, and the team extended their search to outside the United States to find the stones necessary to meet the design requirements.

Using precast concrete in the construction of the new Spartanburg County Courthouse delivered a series of major advantages, enabling the team to meet their goals of durability, classical architectural aesthetics, and cost efficiency. Because the precast concrete panels were manufactured off-site and delivered as needed, the general contractor could compress the schedule for exterior cladding. This, combined with just-in-time delivery, eliminated any need for on-site storage on a compressed project site. And because the precast concrete products installed on the courthouse were designed and manufactured with long-term resilience in mind, the building is projected to serve Spartanburg County for more than a century, aligning with the project team’s vision of enduring architecture. In the end, the new courthouse isn’t just functional, it’s a landmark facility where design and performance meet community need, all thanks to the versatility and power of precast concrete.

Mason Nichols is a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based writer and editor who has covered the precast concrete industry since 2013.