Christchurch Hospital Car Park

We built an eight-level car parking building with 463 parking spaces on the corner of St Asaph Street and Hagley Avenue, just a stone’s throw away from Christchurch Hospital.

The building incorporates 14 suspended concrete slabs over seven split floors, with an asphalt ground floor. There are 15 flights of stairs and two lifts servicing the building, and two vehicle ramps on each level. We installed steel to 27 metres, protecting the exposed perimeter beams by welding the studs off-site prior to painting them. This offered better corrosion protection than the standard practice of omitting an area of paint to allow on-site installation of shear studs.

There’s a lot going on underneath the car park, with a foundation system of 1.2 metre-deep beams connected to 121 screw piles embedded into the Riccarton gravels at a depth of up to 26.5 metres. We leveraged our national coverage to source a reputable replacement when the nominated piling contractor pulled out and there was no capacity in the local market.

We diverted the oxygen main serving the hospital laboratories to accommodate the piles, with the new line positioned three-and-a-half metres below ground level, two metres below the water table, and crossing a major power supply. We worked closely with Te Whatu Ora, Ngāi Tahu Property and Lewis Bradford to develop a seismically rated design for the realignment, sequenced between the pile installation and foundation excavations to minimise programme disruption.

Now known as Tū Waka-Waipapa, the building provides much-needed additional car parking, covered bike parking and vehicle charging facilities for staff and visitors to the hospital campus.