PART 1: PRECAST PANELLING EMBELLISHES NEW HQ BUILDING FAÇADE IN PAARL

Panel installation required a high degree of accuracy in casting and placement.

Written by David Beer on behalf of Concrete Manufacturers Association. This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

Textured precast concrete panelling has been used to dress the street-facing façade of new headquarter premises of fruit export company, Delecta Fruit. Completed in 2022 and fronting onto Paarl’s Main St, the 1 700m² building comprises two office floors and a parking basement.

Concrete Manufacturers Association member, Cape Concrete, produced 15 panels for the project. They were cast with granite aggregate and bush-hammered for a textured finish.

“Delecta decided on a textured precast concrete façade due to the manner in which this finish and a traditional lime-washed finish, as seen on the Cape Dutch buildings in the area, interact with sunlight,” said the building’s architect, Gideon Malherbe of Malherbe Rust Architects. “Moreover, the colour of the concrete and the aggregate were chosen on the basis of their similarity to Paarl Granite.

“The building is located on what was one of the last undeveloped plots along Main Road and the site falls within the Paarl Central Special Character Protected Area Overlay zone. This, and the fact that some foundation walls of a building older than 60 years were visible above ground level, meant that the new structure’s design had to be vetted by provincial and municipal heritage authorities. We were fortunate that the site falls toward the back of the property and this enabled us to install basement parking and still maintain a small street-facing façade.

“As part of our objective to break up the mass of the facade, the main set of panels appears to float across the upper-floor facade. This illusion is achieved through a ribbon of windows and aluminium cladding which runs below the main set of panels. The wall below the ribbon window is covered in a thick plaster band detail which references the plaster work of some of the older buildings on Main Street.

“Cape Concrete’s dedication to the quality and consistency of the scabbled finish delivered a very pleasing result,” said Malherbe.

Eleven panels were installed on the top-floor façade and four were used to cover a two-sided section of the ground-floor façade. The upper-level panels span 5.3m (height) by 2.6m (width) and are 115mm thick with a 300mm thickened beam section at the top of the panel. Abutting a 230mm brick wall, the panels provide an additional layer of thermal insulation for what is a west-facing elevation.

The ground floor panels measure 2.37m (height) and up to 5.37m (width) and cover three walls of a small annex adjacent to the entrance of the building.

Continued in Part 2…