Charles Pankow, a Navy veteran of the World War II Pacific theater and Purdue University-educated engineer known for using advanced concrete casting and erection methods to expedite construction, died in January at the age of 80. He was chairman of Charles Pankow Builders, an Altadena, Calif., company founded in 1963 that has grown to into a national commercial-construction player.

Pankow's technical and hands-on knowledge of concrete practice placed him at the forefront of design/build project delivery methods. With little coincidence, he was an American Concrete Institute past president (1980), Design/Build Institute of America co-founder, and American Society of Civil Engineers member. In 1957, he organized ACI's first local chapter (Southern California) in the U.S.

Throughout his career Pankow sought to engineer and erect a better mousetrap — and the concrete industry was the beneficiary. His eye for detailing and connections yielded economical concrete alternatives to projects that had traditionally been specified in structural steel. Among his most widely commercialized innovations is the Precast Hybrid Moment Resistant Frame, which incorporates plant- or site-fabricated precast members and a special slab-to-column detail for structures in moderate to high seismic zones. Outside the construction press, the time and cost-saving frame technology caught the attention of mainstream periodicals no less than The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine.

The frame's premiere application is The Paramount (680 Mission Apartments) development in San Francisco, which at 39 stories is the West Coast's tallest precast concrete structure. Pankow Builders served as general contractor on the project, supplying it with product from a Corcoran, Calif., subsidiary, Mid-State Precast, opened in 1998. Other major jobs with accelerated schedules based on Pankow Builders-devised precast methods include the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District Headquarters (1998) and Pearl I and Pearl II Residential Towers (1976) in Hawaii.

In addition to involvement with the American Concrete Institute, Charlie Pankow was a co-founder of the ACI-affiliated Strategic Development Council, comprising leading individuals, organizations and companies behind concrete engineering, production and practice. His achievements in concrete and construction led to the creation of an annual program, Charles Pankow Award for Innovation, under the ASCE's Civil Engineering Research Foundation.