Cirque Apartments

Hera Engineering provided structural design services to MJA Studio and Stirling Capital for the Cirque Apartments residential development. The development will consist of two 20-story twin towers, with 231 apartments and three levels of car park. The towers will be the largest residential development south of the Swan River and one of the tallest residential buildings in Perth. The structural system consists of a reinforced concrete core with localised areas of high strength concrete for enhanced stiffness and ductility. The floor system is a post-tensioned flat slab with large spans up to 10m. The iconic corner balconies which project more than 4.5 metres from the building face presented a formidable design challenge. Hera Engineering delivered an elegant solution which maintained the architectural intent and in the same time not increasing cost and constructability. Hera Engineering worked in close collaboration with the developer and MJA Studio during the built form concept design to improve the aerodynamic shape of the towers, by making adjustments to the building profile such as rounded corners. In this way, wind resistance and overturning moments were drastically reduced, resulting in large savings in steel and concrete quantities. Another major challenge of the structural design was to remove an entire row of columns above to express a dramatic column-free zone on the podium. Hera’s solution was to consider the concrete walls in the area as cantilevered ‘deep beams’ and undertake advanced non-linear finite element analysis to design this complex area. A crucial aspect of the success of this project from a construction point-of-view was keep the amount of structural transfers to an absolute minimum. Hera Engineering worked hard during the schematic design phase eliminate the majority of the transfer elements with innovative engineering of vertical elements whilst maintain the architectural vision and functionality of the building.