I live in an area where there are a lot of multifamily apartments under construction. In the early stage of construction, the entire construction site seems to be made of reinforced concrete, except the elevator which is made of cinder blocks. Why isn’t that made of poured concrete too, and why do they seem to build the elevator shafts before everything else?
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Are these low rise apartments where the cinder block elevator cores stick about 5 stories above the concrete podium? If so the final building is going to be timber or light gauge metal framing and they’re using concrete masonry shear walls around the elevators.
The advantage of CMU is it requires less equipment than concrete – concrete walls like these need formwork to form the walls, which is a whole operation and very expensive, out of proportion to the scale of these buildings.
So they use CMU walls as you have no formwork, no concrete pumping stations, no messing around with concrete truck delivery times, reduced inspection requirements, and can put the walls up much faster and more cheaply overall.
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