12-06-2006
14/11/2006
Segmental retaining walls from Anchor Wall Systems, [Anchor], have helped reduce cost of construction and speed build time of the new student accommodation blocks at Queens University's, Elms Village site at Malone Road, Belfast.
The brown-field, city centre development replaces a collection of 1960’s tower blocks and is being built to provide an attractive village type environment to house over 1500 university students.
Poor ground conditions and challenging site topography meant that new building-levels for many of the 29 accommodation blocks had to be created by introducing bold terracing, enclosed within a series of engineered retaining walls.
Conventional in-situ retaining walls would have needed temporary sheet piling to protect the working area during construction together with substantial concrete foundations, both of which would add to costs and slow down the building schedule.
As the retaining walls had to be designed and installed as the site progressed and the old accommodation blocks were being demolished, the need for a flexible system that would cope with curves and slopes was paramount.
The Anchor Vertica system specified by Belfast Architects, Robinson and Patterson, solved these problems because of its speed of installation and the way the concrete facing blocks work with the back fill material to create a stable, reinforced earth structure, without the need for complex formwork and shuttering.
Anchor Vertica is a dry built, segmental retaining wall system made up of concrete facing blocks that work together with geogrids and compacted back-fill to form a highly efficient, engineered retaining wall. The Anchor system does not require concrete foundations so temporary shuttering is not needed to retain the excavation while the concrete footings of conventional walls are allowed to cure.
This speed of installation meant that the underlying “Malone” sands – a feature of the Elms Village site – could be excavated and the wall installed before the ground weakened and collapsed. Vertica
Walls of 10m in length and 2m high were built in a little as two hours – a fraction of the time needed to install an in-situ concrete wall and at significantly reduced cost.
Steve Burke of Main Contractors, O’Hare & McGovern, who installed the walls commented, “It’s a fantastic system and the ability to get the walling into tight spaces with complex curves makes it a real winner” He added, “You can install an Anchor Wall 3m high and 30m long in three to four days when a reinforced concrete wall would take three to four weeks”
The Anchor system also showed its positive environmental credentials in the scheme. Much of the excavated sands could be reused as structural back-fill to the retaining walls so spoil removal and the vehicle journeys that go with it were reduced and imported stone was kept to a minimum.
Construction of the current phases of the development at Queens University’s Elms Village began in 2002 and will continue until 2007. The use of Anchor, segmental retaining walls has allowed additional accommodation blocks to be included on the site so making maximum use of available building space yet still retaining the open, village type environment required by the client.
