Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 15, 1993                   TAG: 9307150024
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By RUSTY DENNEN THE FREE LANCE-STAR
DATELINE: SPOTSYLVANIA                                LENGTH: Medium

FOR MAKER OF MONOLITHS, THE FUTURE SEEMS SOLID

John C. Graube is vice president of Exposaic Industries of Virginia, which makes precast architectural concrete. Over the next eight months, the building company will churn out 2,252 smooth, cream- and-strawberry-hued monoliths, some weighing nearly 20 tons.

They're bound for Baltimore's Health Care Financing Administration building, a complex planned as five federal office buildings costing $130 million. Exposaic's contract is about $5.5 million, by far its largest job.

What's unusual is that Exposaic is enjoying something of a mini boom while many commercial construction companies are still hung over from the building binge of the 1980s.

The company's 100 workers create about 10 panels a day. They're trucked to Baltimore, unloaded and installed by crane in about 45 minutes.

The monoliths, used for the outside of the building, are no sidewalk-variety concrete. They are high-technological creations that must look good and last practically forever.

The color and texture on the outside of the slabs come from a special 1-inch-thick coating of high-grade colored concrete. One panel, for example, has red granite pigment from Canada, black granite from Louisa County and black sand from Augusta County.

"On one section, we have mineral pigments and an iron oxide imported from Britain," said Graube.

Sandblasting, the final step, creates either a smooth surface or a bumpy one, depending on where the panel will go, he said.

The Baltimore job is one of two federal projects that have sustained the plant in recent months. The company is finishing a smaller contract for the command headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in Northern Virginia. Graube has hired 10 extra people so far to handle the load, and may hire more in the weeks ahead.

"Government jobs - that's all that's out there," he said.

Not that he's complaining.

It took Tom Zerler, Exposaic's sales manager, nearly two years to close the Baltimore deal. Work began last month and should wind up early next year.

"There is still not a lot of money in the work we're getting," Graube said. "But there is work out there. What you have to do is have enough work to cover your overhead and go from there."

Exposaic is one of four plants in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia owned by the Shockey Group of Winchester.

The outlook for the construction business has improved.

McGraw Hill's F.W. Dodge Division, which keeps tabs on commercial construction nationwide, projects flat activity for the rest of this year, but it should pick up 14 percent next year and 8 percent in 1995.

Exposaic has worked on some big-league projects over the years, including Oriole Park at Camden Yards last year. The smooth, white concrete cornices over the arched brick walkways are Exposaic's handiwork. Its first big job, in 1980, was the Mormon Temple off the Capital Beltway in Maryland.

The product has changed a lot since those days, Graube says.

"It used to be just flat, rectangular pieces, like the skin on a cardboard box," he said. But in recent years, architects have come up with more innovative concepts, using color and texture for accent.