Construction World January 2015

PROJECTS AND CONTRACTS

CAPPED PILING for Newtown hotel

The 148-room hotel forms part of the Newtown Junction mixed-use development, the biggest multi- use development in the Johan- nesburg CBD since the construction of the > Gauteng Piling recently provided the foundation piles for a new City Lodge Hotel being built in Newtown.

first place, we had to contend with excep- tionally limited access, particularly at the start of the contract, caused by building operations on other encroaching facilities that form part of Newtown Junction. “Then we had to address redundant sewer and stormwater services, for which the concrete pipes were sandwiched between concrete slabs about 250 mm thick. These services required rectangular concrete capping beams, joining sets of two piles which were installed to straddle the existing services where we could not drill through them,” Maas explains. Capping beams for piles aim at trans- ferring loads from closely spaced columns or walls into a row of piles. To install pile capping, pile heads are stripped to expose the steel reinforcement to be projected into the pile cap. Steel reinforcement is then placed at the desired location and a large concrete block is formed to distribute loads over the capped piles. Gauteng Piling employed two rigs for the City Lodge piling: a Williams LDH digger and Soilmec RTAS which can drill into rock of 4 to 5 MPa. A third Williams rig was on standby. Since the arrival of its first piling machine in Johannesburg in July 1996, Gauteng Piling has developed into one of the foremost piling contractors in South Africa. The company has to date completed over 1 500 projects and its current fleet consists of 20 auger machines, two cranes, two bore rigs, six Grundo hammers, and two lateral support machines. The Newton Junction was familiar terri- tory for Gauteng Piling as the company had a few months prior to the City Lodge contract, provided the piling for extensions to the Market Theatre complex. Under the leadership of Hennie Bester, past president of Master Builders Associ- ation North, Gauteng Piling also provided more than 500 piles for the construction of southern African’s largest single-phase retail centre, Mall of Africa. Other recent contracts handled by Gauteng Piling include the piling for the large-scaled Value Logistics warehouse in Kempton Park, the Fire & Ice Hotel in Pretoria, The Grove Shopping Centre in Pretoria, and the Bon Accord Police Station, also in Pretoria. The company also handled the piling requirements for a new FAW auto dealer- ship in Croydon in Ekurhuleni, as well as the I’langa Mall in Mbombela (Nelspruit).

Carlton Centre in the 1970s. The 8 000 m 2 hotel is being built by Archstone Construc- tion of Pretoria for the developers, Atterbury Property Developments. Ignatius Maas, Gauteng Piling site man- ager for the project on the corner of Miriam Makeba and Carr streets (adjacent to the Market Theatre), says the contract called for the provision of 64 piles with an average depth of 10 metres for the seven-storey hotel scheduled to open next year. “The piling contract provided some unusual challenges and requirements. In the

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Gauteng Piling providing the foundations for the new City Lodge Hotel in Newtown Junction.

CONSTRUCTION WORLD JANUARY 2015