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