GSA North Terrace

Being located on North Terrace, Adelaide’s most prominent boulevard, the new student accommodation building sits amongst a variety of State Heritage listed buildings including the Universities of Adelaide and South Australia, the Old Royal Adelaide Hospital Buildings and Ayers House.

GSA North Terrace is an architecturally appealing and technically complex building. As one of the tallest buildings in Adelaide standing at 118.6 metres in height, the tall, imposing structure is supported by a base consisting of 109 piles each averaging 15m in depth, all connected with a 1.5m contiguous pile cap across the whole site. The pour of the pile cap was conducted during one 12-hour evening/early morning session using 3 pumps, each of them with double truck feed, pouring more than 1,200m³ of concrete.

The architectural facade consists of 700 precast columns that are an integral element not only to support the structural loads of the building, but also to accentuate the contemporary architectural appearance. The glass facade accompanies this vertical building exoskeleton on a second plane up the building with two exceptions, ground level and level 12, where enormous A shaped steel structures supports a combination of glass and cladding facade, being one of the landmarks of the tower.  GSA is the tallest load-bearing precast concrete building in Australia.

Due to the small footprint and extreme height of the building, a tuned liquid mass damper will be installed on the roof to minimise horizontal swaying due to wind or earthquake impact. Another first for construction in South Australia.