The Objective.

The seismic upgrade of the 30 Waring Taylor Street to transform the building into the Generator co-working space.

The project itself came with a number of challenges. The historic façade at 30 Waring Taylor Street meant it couldn’t be altered, as well as the fact that it is positioned on a smaller street between Lambton and Customhouse Quays made the logistics for truck deliveries and cranes difficult. Finally, neighbouring buildings hard against two sides of the building made access difficult and added to the complexity of the work.

Our involvement.

With a number of the existing structural elements of the building needing to be altered to allow the installation of the new seismic works, a large amount of preliminary and temporary works were required to keep the structure safe until the new steelwork was fully installed.

A lot of the work that we did on this building was Architectural Exposed Structural Steel which can be seen when the building is completed. This means that the steel fabrication, particularly welds and bolt plates, needs to be finished to a much higher standard than structural steel that is going to be hidden.

A highlight of this project for us wasn’t related to the seismic upgrade. It was the exposed steel spiral staircase. A bit out of the ordinary for our fabrication team, with the sides made of rolled and curved 10mm plate, it was a challenge that they enjoyed. The staircase is installed and will a real feature of the building when the final paint and finish is done.

The outcome.

The successful completion of the this project saw our work lauded by the Steel Construction New Zealand (SCNZ), with Petone Engineering winning the inaugural SCNZ Awards 2022 under the Seismic Strengthening category.