Client
Cornerstone Property Group
Location
Danks Street, Waterloo
Role
Structural and civil engineer
Waterloo in Sydney’s inner city was chiefly known as a rough-and-ready suburb dominated by its housing commission tower blocks.
Waterloo was one of NSW’s top 20 most socially disadvantaged areas. Danks Street has been transformed into an arts hub and gourmet haven attracting people from all over.
Woolacotts Consulting Engineers has been playing a part in this urban revitalisation with its role on the Casba project on Danks Street.
The development features 66 units in three six storey residential towers, complemented with two levels of car parking and retail at street level.
Basement shoring systems
Due to ground conditions of loose, water charged sand and the presence of adjacent
buildings, we explored shoring systems such as secant pile walls, diaphragm walls, steel sheet
piling/shotcrete and ‘cutter soil mix’ walls.
Secant pile walls were adopted as the optimal shoring system.
Structural flooring systems
To accommodate the poor ground
conditions, the building was founded on 600 thick conventional reinforced raft slab with stiffening piles to control long-term differential settlement.
Conventionally reinforced beam and slab system was adopted for the car
parking levels.
For the transfer levels and residential floors pre-stressing was adopted to minimise the depth of the structure.
Retail area
The layout of retail area was affected by several different potential anchor tenants during construction. We provided a structural solution to enable the builder continue the construction work at the ground floor and allowed flexibility for future alteration.
Woolacotts effort was also attributed to the integrated solution for stormwater management plan. We provided a solution to position the on-site detention and rainwater tank to suit both Council’s requirement and developer’s need to relocate the tank to provide extra coolroom space for future retail tenants.