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Diagnostech Works with Remedial Building Services to Replace External Green Cladding on Woolworths Head Office
In 2020, Remedial Building Services (RBS) reached out to Diagnostech to assist with designing and overseeing all the structural components of their project that involved replacing the external facade cladding on the Woolworths Head Office building located at 1 Woolworths Way, Bella Vista in NSW.
While the building had previously been cladded in various shades of green synonymous with the Woolworths brand, the colour coating had begun to fail and peel away from the cladding panels, meaning it needed to be replaced.
Here’s how Diagnostech approached this project together with RBS.
Situation
Each of the four buildings that make up the Woolworths Head Office had previously been cladded with four different shades of green in a particular layout to reflect the iconic Woolworths branding that Australians are now very familiar with.
Unfortunately, over time, the green coating had begun to fail prematurely and come away from the cladding panels. This meant that all the external cladding on the building had to be replaced to help maintain not only the integrity of the panels but also the building design.
Having won the contract to replace the cladding, Remedial Building Services, engaged Diagnostech to help take care of all the structural and facade engineering design components of this enormous project.
Goals
The overarching goal of this project was to remove all of the existing external wall cladding panels and replace them with new panels that could be guaranteed to retain their colour over the long term. This meant designing a solution that would ensure the colour coating on the new cladding panels would not fade or fail again.
Challenges
Several significant challenges presented themselves throughout this year-long project.
First and foremost, as this was the site of Woolworths’ national head office, it meant that all four buildings had to remain operational throughout the entire project.
Essentially, there would be four buildings worth of employees to work around as Diagnostech and RBS replaced more than 6000 sqm of external wall cladding.
What’s more, while the majority of the existing cladding was made up of fibre cement panelling, there was some aluminium composite panel (ACP) cladding used in the initial build. Given that this is a combustible material, it had to be removed and replaced with a non-combustible alternative.
Each panel also had to be measured so the new ones could be cut to precision.
This was no easy task, as it wasn’t feasible to get up on the building and measure each panel individually.
The final challenge was that completing this project was not just a matter of taking one cladding panel off and putting a new one on. Whenever any cladding was removed, the sub-framing underneath had to be assessed to ensure that it was still structurally adequate and compliant.
This only compounded the issue of having the building opened up and exposed to the elements every time a section of cladding was removed.
Solution
As experts in Structural and Facade Engineering, Diagnostech worked with RBS to design a plan that successfully navigated these significant challenges at every phase of the project.
To begin, the project had to take place in progressive stages to ensure that no one part of any building was impacted or left open to the elements for too long.
We also engaged a company that could perform a precision Geospatial Survey and Point Cloud mapping on each building to provide us with an extremely precise 3D model and measurement of every cladding panel. This meant that the new non-combustible panels could be cut and prefabricated before removing the existing panels to minimise exposure.
We also appointed one of our Senior Structural Engineers to be on-site whenever cladding was removed to check every spacing, every fixing and every component of the substructure and walling system so that structural certification could be provided at the completion of the project.
Results
Overall, the final outcome saw all four buildings of the Woolworths Head Office re-cladded once again to display those iconic shades of green.
Since the completion of the project, the colour coatings on the new cladding panels have stood the test of time and the elements. Colour integrity has not beencompromised in any way, and there have been no leaks.
As well as that, the external cladding now contains zero combustible materials right across the entire facade of the building.
This was a great project for Diagnostech to be involved in.
For a job that is so vast in size, it’s always important to ensure that there is someone like us there to design and sign off on all the structural elements that come into play.
