Sarbinowo
Multi-family building in Sarbinowo — walls, floor slabs and stairs
A multi-family building in precast concrete in the seaside village of Sarbinowo, built through the autumn and winter. We supplied the loadbearing walls, semi-precast lattice-girder floor slabs and precast concrete stairs. The flights were set as soon as each floor slab was laid, which gave the trades a permanent route between levels. Erection ran storey by storey, with the floors sheeted over for concreting in low temperatures.
Those sheets are worth pausing on, because they show where the technology ends. Precast concrete moves most of the wet trades into the plant, but not all of them — with a lattice-girder floor, the structural topping stays on site: a layer poured in place that bonds the planks into a single structure. And that layer obeys exactly the same physics as any other concrete: below a few degrees the set slows down, in frost the water in the mix freezes, and the structure that failed to form because of it does not rebuild itself after the thaw.
- Year of completion:
- 2023
- Use:
- Multi-family buildings
- Location:
- Sarbinowo
Scope of work
Winter concreting is therefore carried out with protection — a covering that limits the loss of the heat given off as the concrete sets, sometimes with heating or admixtures as well. This is normal practice, but it takes planning and it costs money.
Setting the stair flights immediately after each floor slab has a further justification in winter. Getting about on ladders and scaffolds is awkward at the best of times, but with ice it becomes a real hazard — and the trades use that route a dozen or more times a day, often with materials in their hands. A finished flight with its landing, set together with the structure, takes that problem off the site at the very moment the storey comes into being.
To be fair about it: in Sarbinowo, precast reduced the winter wet work to a single layer instead of the whole structure. The walls, floors and stairs arrived finished, so the weather bore on the topping and the joints alone, rather than on every storey from scratch. The building was closed before the season — which on the coast, where the season is the source of income, is the right measure of success for this project.
Scope of work: precast concrete loadbearing walls, lattice-girder floor slabs, stair flights, transport and erection.
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