Danielle Bowling reports on an apartment building in Victoria which used AFS’ Logicwall for external and internal load-bearing walls.
Seventy-one Riversdale Road in Hawthorn, VIC, consists of 86 studios, 19 one- bedroom units and four two-bedroom units, all designed for student accommodation and spanning over two four-storey buildings. After being approached by Architectural Framing Systems (AFS), building company Galvin Construction decided to test its LogicWall product, using approximately 4,000 sqm throughout the entire property.
“We were contacted by AFS with an expression of interest and we looked at it, did our research and found that it’s probably worth trying out on a project. Since then, we’ve actually used it on about four or five other projects and I’m currently using it on another project in Essendon, which includes 26 apartments,” says project manager, Adrian Jung.
AFS LogicWall is a permanent formwork structural concrete walling system for external and internal walls. Made of lightweight panels, it is created by bonding hard-wearing, reinforced fibre cement sheets to galvanised steel stud frames.
It comes in four different wall thicknesses ranging from 120 mm to 262 mm, with the 150 mm and 162 mm walls being used for the student accommodation units.
At the $9.7 million Riversdale Road project, it was used for external and internal load-bearing walls, lift and stair shafts and basement retaining walls.
AFS LogicWall panels are hand erected on-site then filled with concrete and finished with joint setting, skim coat and/or painting systems directly onto the fibre cement sheeting. Once poured, the walls are load-bearing and fire and sound rated.
Access was an issue on the site — which is located on an old residential block — so AFS LogicWall’s movability was particularly beneficial. Unlike precast systems, which would have required a heavy-duty crane to lift and transport them to the back of the site, LogicWall was simply lifted onto the front of the site, moved manually around it and then manhandled into place.
“We didn't have access from either side, we only had access from the front ... and we couldn't use precast because we had to reach quite deep into the block,” says Jung.
“When you've got restricted access it's probably one of the more efficient products. The installation is quite good. It's nice and quick. It requires minimal handling other than manhandling and it doesn't require a lot of access materials like cranage. It's very efficient in its installation process.”
“There are quite a lot of similarities between AFS and precast, because once AFS is poured and finished, it is basically a precast concrete wall with two cement sheets on either side, so it basically becomes the same finished product,” says Jung. “There’s probably a small cost saving when using AFS on a restricted site, but it’s more for the access — that’s when it comes into its own — rather than the pricing.”
Jung believes that by using AFS LogicWall instead of precast walls, not only did the building team reduce crane set-up and cranage time, but they also saved approximately one week’s worth of time. “You don’t need a very big crane for AFS because you just lift them up in 1 tonne packs, whereas with precasts, to reach the back of the site, you need a larger crane, which means more crane time,” he says.
The only thing that slowed the process down, Jung says, was the fact that when using AFS LogicWall, concrete had to be poured into the system in two stages.
“You can’t pour all the way up the wall in one go. You have to pour half way up the wall and then come back and pour the other half once the concrete has gone off a little bit, because otherwise there’s too much pressure at the bottom and there’s the potential to have a blow-out at the bottom of the wall.”
