Belfast West and Allenvale Schools

Helping deliver new school infrastructure that supports a growing Christchurch community through collaborative structural engineering and smart design decisions.

Client: Leighs Construction
Location: Christchurch
Services: Structural engineeringGeotechnical engineeringCivil engineering
Status: Completed in 2022

The Brief

To support future growth, the Ministry of Education embarked on a project to divide the existing Belfast School into two sites. This included developing a new Belfast West School campus for Year 5 to Year 8 students and a purpose-built facility for Allenvale School to support students with complex needs.

Leighs Construction was awarded the design and build contract, and we were engaged by Leighs to provide structural, geotechnical and civil engineering, as well as construction monitoring services.

What We Did

Working with the design team, we assisted in developing the master planning, preliminary, developed and detailed design stages as required by the Ministry of Education and contributed to the Design Review Panel consultations.

At each stage of design and construction, we considered costs, engaging in discussions with both Leighs and the Ministry of Education to make informed decisions about the material to use and the construction methods.

To accelerate construction, the building consent was divided into three stages: foundations, superstructure and fit-out. This necessitated developing the structural design ahead of the final architectural plan, fostering a close working relationship with the architect and service engineers to enable alignment between disciplines and their impact on the structure.

Key Deliverables

We designed and monitored the construction of two single-storey buildings and an administration/hall building at the Belfast West/Allenvale school site.

The buildings feature steel portal frames and concrete slab foundations, supported on approximately 3,200 m of steel screw piles.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) and REVIT were used for structural modelling and structural and architectural coordination – facilitating the review of structural, architectural and service designs and identifying and resolving any potential clashes between elements.