Saint John building comes together like Lego with heritage-style brick pieces
CBC
For decades it was a popular department store, then it became a derelict building and after that, a giant hole in the ground.
It’s been a long wait for Saint Johners keen to see this prime uptown property on King's Square redeveloped.
Now, a 13-storey apartment building with ground-floor commercial spaces is under construction. And it’s coming together quickly, floor by floor, with large pre-made sections manufactured off-site, trucked to the property on King Street, and hoisted into place by a large crane.
It’s like Lego with heritage-style brick pieces.
“I wanted it to fit in the immediate vicinity,” developer Percy Wilbur said. “We're right next to the City Market, and I wanted to compliment it and make it feel like it belongs there and it's been there for some time. So we went with an old Boston red stone brick with the sandstone window trims and ledges.”
Wilbur is working with Saint John-based Strescon Limited, which is manufacturing pre-cast sections of the facade and interior and delivering them uptown by transport truck.
He says it could speed up construction by six to eight months and cut building costs by as much as 10 per cent.
“We thought about it long and hard, and after doing our research and working with Strescon, we determined it would be best to go with this precast setup,” Wilbur said.
“It gives it a finished look as you're erecting it. The windows are already in place. It's almost weather-tight as you go up [floor by floor]. It was a big bonus for time and cost savings to go with that system.”
It’s a form of construction that’s becoming more popular — manufacturing sections of a house or an apartment building in factories and assembling them on site.
For Rebecca Patterson at Strescon, it’s like the old song, “everything old is new again.”
As far back as the 1970s, the company constructed two east Saint John apartment buildings using pre-cast concrete, and she says the idea is even older than that, dating back to ancient Rome.
“Precast concrete is not new at all,” said Patteron, Strescon’s district manager. “It's innovative in many ways, but it's a grounded process built in Europe, and if you think of things like the Pantheon and the Colosseum, that's precast concrete.”
“For Strescon, it's not new either. Taking total precast into a modern environment in Saint John is something that we're trying to bring back.”
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