When - Wednesday 25 March 2015
The University of Auckland Faculty of Science is currently undergoing a $290 million redevelopment. The latest addition to the Faculty is a new twelve storey tower, located on the corner of Symonds Street and Wellesley Street East on the University’s Central City Campus. The new structure is located on the site of an existing three storey building and utilises the existing building grid set-out and foundations.
The 24,000m2 building will be predominantly used for teaching spaces and mixed office use, with post-graduate and under-graduate research labs.
The new structure is a steel braced frame building utilising Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs). To maximise the building floor area, an integrated structure-services solution was required. To maximise the structural depth available, services were reticulated through 800mm deep cellular beams with 500mm diameter penetrations at regular centres. Beams span 13.4m and 14.8m to provide column-free open learning spaces below. A viscoelastic damping layer has been imported from the UK to provide isolation for footfall induced vibration and add additional damping to the floor system to mitigate the vibration effects that would otherwise be present in long-span steel beams.
Demolition of the existing Science Centre building began mid-2013, and construction is due for completion at the start of the 2016 academic year.
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