Meetings at the TBIG offices
Every Tuesday at 10am Joan and David and Damien (MWC)
meet up with the design and construction team at the office in the Grant
Thornton building.
This is an intensive session, usually starting with
reports from Spectrum Engineers, who are designing the strengthening elements
of the project. I find this fascinating.
I have a life-long association with construction – my grandfather was an
architect, my father a builder, and my husband, Ron, built electricity
substations. From the age of 8, I was taught to read floor plans, and my father
used me as a hammer hand! One of my
sons, Alastair, is quantity surveyor and project manager in Hamilton. But seismic strengthening is totally new to
me. It has been a learning experience.
The task is to tie the core of the building, which holds
the lift shaft and fire stairs, to the concrete slabs that make the floors and
ceilings of our homes. It was a very new and original form of construction back
in the mid 1960s. People used to gather in the street to watch it
happening. The National Library holds 22
photos of the process, and the Wellington Library has more.
Getting to the slabs from the fire stairs is relatively
simple, though the idea is to make the disruption as minimal as possible, and
also to minimize the visual impact of the brackets that will be placed under a
number of apartment ceilings. The other side, where the elevators run, is
tricky. For a while it was proposed that one of the lifts should be taken out,
and the shaft scaffolded, which was a really unattractive prospect. Instead, a
system of brackets and anchors has been devised. The mental agility of these engineers is
really impressive.
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