Starting at 4 storeys and ascending to ten, the £75m project has delivered 1,408 rooms and associated infrastructure and external works. Each room is part of an eight to 12-room cluster with common living and kitchen facilities.
Early work included the partial demolition of St Mark’s Retail Park, off Tritton Road, to create space for the new development.
Piling began in February 2019, and this was not without engineering challenges for the main contractor, Bowman + Kirkland. Once a new sequence of piling was agreed, we embarked on the project with the key aim of making up time, in order to deliver on the initial estimated build time.
We used our own crane team of AP’s, supervisors and slingers to do all of the steel erection and loading up to 10 storeys. Access to the elevations were a mixture of client scaffold and our J-Safe system, this aided logistics and enhanced the ability of the scaffold contractor to stay ahead of the programme.
The first 8 blocks were formulated with the first 2 blocks as four storeys rising as pairs to 6, 8 and 10 before block B(10 storey) and A(4,6,8) completed the site. Installation of the cementitious board followed quickly behind the build and afforded B+K the ability to weathertight the buildings and procure the internal fit out much earlier than programmed.
Construction Details
The steelwork was detailed as part of our BIM model and was delivered as part of the package. We also supplied and installed the precast concrete stairs, reinforcement and concrete whilst also supplying and fitting sheathing board to the external and core walls. Due to the tall and narrow configuration of the blocks, we had to deploy the Vierendeel bridge system at the gable ends, to achieve the required strength and stability. This system was named after Arthur Veirendeel and uses trusses made up of rectangular rather than triangular frames, which are also common in bridges using pinpoints. Our advanced design used this same notion, but turned the concept upside down, in order to work with our framework.
The clusters of student rooms were designed as apartments with an inclusion for larger accessible rooms. They all include their own bathroom pod which was delivered and craned in place in a timely site ready manner to aid the speedy construction process. The single leaf load-bearing walls used 100 x 2.5mm studs at the lower levels reducing to 1.2mm thickness at the upper levels. All walls were X – braced for stability and façade walls were braced around large windows.
The Installation of all elements was carried out with the use of our mobile, self- erecting Cranes located at several available positions with a lifting radius of up to 50m. Concrete was placed on the steel decking by pump and at the peak, a total of 1,500 m2 floor area, was completed in a day using 20 trucks which were running at 20-minute intervals. Each floor was completed between 2-3 weeks allowing for the concrete to gain sufficient strength thus allowing the next set of light steel walls and bathroom pods to be installed as per programme.
Application Benefits
- Multi-block scheme with precise co-ordination and planning
- Cranage and edge protection included within our scope
- Installed during the Covid Pandemic so new challenges overcome
- In-house HRS support solutions for brickwork / windows / cladding / canopies
- Innovative thinking to deal with the tall and narrow configuration by deploying the
‘Vierendeel bridge system’ at the gable ends to achieve the required strength and
stability.
