International and award-winning architectural Firm Morq appointed Hera Engineering as structural consultant on this unique rammed-earth project. Despite being a smaller-scale project than normally accustomed to, this state-of-the-art project and cutting-edge technology presented a new challenge – a prospect that Hera Engineering are always excited by.
Interestingly, there are no Australian Standards for rammed-earth design, which tends to lead consultants to design conservatively. In this project, however, the architectural vision was extremely sophisticated and left no room for a conservative approach. Some particularly unique challenges in the project were:
- Unrestrained 6m height rammed earth walls.
- Suspended deep walls 3m tall spanning up to 5m.
- Rammed-earth slab on ground.
Hera Engineering pushed every conceivable boundary to produce an elegant structural solution, and even worked in close collaboration with the University of Western Australia to undertake tests in order to validate our design.
The design proved to be very successful, no issues were encountered and a high-level of finish was achieved. All major parties – the Client, Architect and Contractor – were all exceedingly pleased with the outcome. Hera Engineering are particularly proud of this ground-breaking project as the techniques that we developed are purely original and it would be rare to find similar designs anywhere in the world.