AUT AR demolition

Our Auckland Projects & Interiors team demolished a four-storey accommodation block and six single-storey buildings at Auckland University of Technology, clearing the way for a new development.

All the buildings were fully clad in asbestos-containing materials, requiring a carefully staged workflow to remove hazardous materials while maintaining a strong health and safety focus across overlapping works, but the age of the accommodation block made the demolition particularly complex. This compounded with the discovery of an asbestos sealant on the concrete balconies, which could have added considerable additional cost and time. To avoid the need for A-class removal techniques, our team developed a methodology of propping and bracing each balcony from the ground floor up, allowing the balconies to be cut away from the building and craned in situ directly into a skip. This approach delivered a four-week acceleration on conventional removal methods.

The site also carried significant stakeholder requirements, including managing a building site adjacent to a daycare facility on a live university campus, and maintaining access routes to all university facilities. This was coordinated through weekly disruption meetings, where key stakeholders reviewed observations, air monitoring results and upcoming works.

The project concluded with the installation of new infrastructure, electrical and stormwater upgrades, plus the construction of a new linking road between the carparks, future-proofing the area for further development. With the grass now well established, you’d never know there had been buildings on the site.

We achieved an impressive 95.8% waste diversion rate for the project, carefully separating concrete and rebar on site to generate two clean, uncontaminated recycling streams.