A NEWTOWN FOUNDATION Gauteng Piling has provided 64 piles with an average depth of 10 m for the new seven-storey City Lodge hotel in Newtown Junction NEWTOWN CITY LODGE Gauteng Piling has provided 64 piles with an average depth of 10 m for the new seven-storey City Lodge hotel in Newtown Junction
Johannesburg-based piling contractor Gauteng Piling has provided foundation piles for use in the construction of a new City Lodge hotel, in Newtown, Johannesburg.
The 148-room hotel, which is being developed by Atterbury Property Developments, will form part of the Newtown Junction mixed-use development, the biggest multiuse development in the Johannesburg central business district since the construction of the Carlton Centre in the 1970s. The 8 000 m3 hotel is being built by Pretoria-based construction company Archstone Construction.
Gauteng Piling project site manager Ignatius Maas says the contract called for the provision of 64 piles with an average depth of 10 m for the seven-storey hotel, which is scheduled to open this year.
“The piling contract came with some unusual challenges and requirements. In the first place, we had to contend with severely limited access, particularly at the start of the contract, owing to building operations on other encroaching facilities that form part of Newtown Junction.
“We also had to contend with redundant sewer and storm- water services – concrete pipes sandwiched between concrete slabs about 250 mm thick. “These services required rectangular concrete capping beams to join sets of two piles that were installed to straddle the existing services, which we could not drill through,” he explains.
Gauteng Piling also used capping beams when transferring loads from closely spaced columns or walls into a row of piles. To install pile capping, pile heads were stripped to expose the steel reinforcement that needed to be projected into the pile cap. Steel reinforcement was then placed at the desired location and a large concrete block formed to distribute loads evenly over the capped piles.
Gauteng Piling employed two rigs for the City Lodge piling project – a Williams load-haul dozer and a Soilmec RTAS that can drill into rock of between 4 MPa and 5 MPa. The company also had a third Williams rig on standby.
Maas claims that, since the arrival of Gauteng Piling’s first piling machine in Johannesburg in July 1996, the company has developed into one of the fore- most piling contractors in South Africa.
To date, the company has completed more than 1 500 projects. Its current fleet comprises 20 auger machines, two cranes, two bore rigs, six Grundo hammers and two lateral support machines.
Newtown Junction was familiar territory for Gauteng Piling, as the company had provided the piling for extensions to the Market Theatre complex a few months before the company was awarded the City Lodge contract.
Gauteng Piling also provided more than 500 piles for the construction of Southern Africa’s largest single-phase retail centre, Mall of Africa, in Johannesburg.
Other recent contracts awarded to Gauteng Piling include the piling for large-scale logistics company Value Logistics’ Kempton Park headqaurters, the Fire & Ice Hotel, in Pretoria, The Grove Shopping Centre, in Pretoria, and Bon Accord Police Station, also in Pretoria.