Located in Addington adjacent to the Tower Junction retail development and the car park of the Christchurch Railway Station, the heritage listed building is a decommissioned water tower built in 1883 from concrete that originally serviced the Addington Railway Workshops.

Working in concert with the project team to protect the Heritage values of the tower we were engaged by the Christchurch City Council to provide structural advice starting with securing the building after the 2011 earthquake and going on to assessing the building’s seismic strength and developing repair works to restore the building to the strength it was prior to the earthquakes.

The seismic assessment was complicated by the poor ground conditions (the tower had settled unevenly during construction, a 1964 survey found the top of the tower was displaced by 190mm from the centreline) requiring assessment of the rocking action of the tower. The design made use of BIM modelling to calculate building mass and centre of gravity.