COVER STORY
The school under construction with assistance from UFCC.
A lot of thought went into creating the right environment with a good learning atmosphere.
While many schools operate with recycling programmes in place, the construction of the school building is seldom given adequate thought and planning from an environmental perspective. The school design team recognised this and informally utilised Green Building construction guidelines for the school, which along with the building system realised significant reduction in waste generated. The project comfortably exceeded the 70 % diversion target in the guidelines but the real benefit was in the reduction of the total wastage generated on site. The steel frame structure was produced to size and assembled on site. The design was planned to ensure optimal use of the fibre cement panels with limited wastage with cut outs required for windows. The trimmed material was however re-used on site for borders and for landscaping purposes.
With the droughts in the Western Cape in mind the landscape system that effectively recharged the ground water supply during the rainy months( this amounts to 1200kl / per annum). A well-point was installed for irrigation purposes which would extract roughly 200kl / per annum for the schools landscaping requirements, which is significantly less than the recharged amount.
The school had a very tight budget but through the UCO SolidWall Building System, these costs were kept below what a conventional building system for an equivalent design standard would have costed.
Gate cladded with UCO Superflex Slats.
Significant additional benefits of the UCO SolidWall Building System that were experienced through the project include:
• Additional 7 % square meterage on the same footprint due to the reduced wall thickness while maintaining comparable performance with conventional brickwork.
• Reduced weight of wall reducing the surface bed thickness and cost.
• Significantly reduced risk profile with fewer contractors on site for shorter periods.
• The ability to walk the site once the steel frame was up and do minor lay-out adjustments without impacting progress.
• Significantly reduced waste generation( see environmental section).
16
MARCH- APRIL 2017
AFFORDABLE
SA HOUSING