Phoenix Gardens Apartments

Canam Construction chose us to scaffold Phoenix Gardens in 2019 — a 12-storey, 44-metre residential building still occupied by tenants while windows, gutters and cladding were replaced. The building’s unusual shape meant the scaffold went up in 11 separate sections, linked ten floors up and shrink-wrapped for safe, dry access.

The shape of the building drove the engineering. Eleven sections were tied together high up using trusses and cantilevers, then shrink-wrapped at the client’s request to give full, weatherproof access to the top two floors.

Several features needed bespoke solutions. The building sits on a podium above a basement car park, so we used Allround Heavy Duty Propping — its small footprint kept the car park open for heavy deliveries throughout. To avoid propping in the basement, the scaffold on the podium had to be as light as possible; the propping’s engineering let us do that with minimal components. Two large gable sections are fully glazed, so the shrink-wrapped scaffold couldn’t be tied to them — drawing on our experience with large buildings in high-wind zones, we solved it with some out-of-the-box engineering, including horizontal propping off a rooftop deck.

A Geda 1200 material-and-personnel hoist (1,500 kg capacity) was central to erecting and dismantling the scaffold and giving every trade safe access to their work areas with materials. Hoist, Layher equipment and an experienced crew together kept the job on time — and impressed both client and tenants.