shell design

Last year, the project team planning Canterbury High School’s new aquatic center brought in watershaper William Drakeley to discuss the facility’s state-of-the-art competition pool. Before he could start, however, questions about how it should be built involved Drakeley in educating the project team about the distinctions between shotcrete and cast-in-place concrete – and which should be used in creating what was to be a huge, monolithic shell.

Top of the Class

Every so often, our company is confronted by the belief among certain design professionals that, as it is used by the pool industry, shotcrete is simply not viable for use as structural concrete in high-profile watershaping projects. The assumption, I’ve learned, is that the pool industry is filled with contractors and specification writers who know little about the material and therefore tend to produce substandard results. I could argue the merits of the case, but let it suffice to say that the upshot of this widespread belief is that institutions and commercial clients hesitate to use shotcrete and instead prefer cast-in-place concrete, which they perceive as having greater quality and reliability in watershape applications. We at Drakeley Swimming Pool Co. (Bethlehem, Conn.) recently encountered exactly that prejudice: A private high school that was in the process of designing and building a state-of-the-art aquatic center and an