Winners show southern style, northern strength

By ANNE GIBSON Property editor

When Queenstown quantity surveyor Alex Dickson was given the job of project manager on Blanket Bay Lodge, he looked carefully at the American architect's plans.

The first thing he did was to change the specifications for the timber, saving $1 million.

Dickson, a southern man of few words who prides himself on his honesty, wanted to keep the integrity of the design.

But he had doubts about the architect specifying an American log cabin design, which had to be built in Montana, knocked down, shipped to New Zealand and reassembled.

Why not use recycled timber instead, he thought. That would achieve the old look, but save on costs.

The result is a building judged one of the top 36 hotels in the world in the Conde Nast Traveller Hot List 2000.

The job has also just won Dickson the top honour in the James Hardie New Zealand Institute of Building awards, announced yesterday.

As well as winning the main award, he won the prize for the best project between $2 million and $10 million.

Blanket Bay Lodge owner Tom Tusher, a former Levi Strauss chief executive, had chosen American architect Jim McLaughlin, an award-winning designer from Sun Valley, Idaho, for the job at Glenorchy, 40 minutes' drive from Queenstown.

The idea was to make a new building look old.

It was only when McLaughlin visited Queenstown and the local office of Boffa Miskill to handle his resource consent application that he met Dickson.

Dickson was commissioned to work full-time on the job for 18 months, finishing at the end of 1999 for the lodge's opening, timed for millennium celebrations.

His first job was to build a 2km shingle - later sealed - road, connecting the building site with the main road around Lake Wakatipu, from Queenstown to Glenorchy.

Floods in 1999, which devastated Queenstown and surrounding areas, created early havoc for Dickson and his team of builders from Arrowtown's Edge Construction.

When the road was washed out, the builders had to be ferried up the lake to the site daily on a commercial catamaran.

"They couldn't afford to forget anything either," Dickson notes wryly.

A well had to be drilled as a fresh water source, storage tanks were built and a sewage treatment plant made so the infrastructure was in place at the isolated site.

Promising the recycled timber was one thing; getting it was another.

It took Dickson two years to find all the timber he needed for the lodge, combing New Zealand and Australia for demolition matai for the floors, cedar for the ceilings and jarrah and ironbark from Queensland. Second-hand timber was used for trusses, beams and posts.

Then came a $240,000 paint job, with the architect specifying a distressed or aged finish. Two Mexican artists, based in Idaho, showed the locals how to achieve the finish, but it was Dickson who introduced the architect to a powder-based antique plaster finish - "Scrabble" - which could be applied directly to interior wall linings to add to the old look.

The lodge's airconditioning system maintains a moisture content of 55 per cent in the atmosphere to guard against entry of the dry, alpine air which could shrink the interior woodwork and open gaps in walls, floors and ceilings.

But Blanket Bay was not Dickson's best job.

"That was building a Queenstown house in less than 24 hours as a fundraiser for the local Rotary," he recalls, noting that his team finished the challenging home, with its interior H-shaped layout, in just 21 hours.

They raised $100,000 for the local kindergarten: "That's got to be the most exciting thing I've done."

* * *

Piles driven into the sandstone beneath Princes Wharf in Auckland are so deep under the seabed that they extend the equivalent of 14 storeys underground.

The tetrapod piles used to strengthen the 1926 wharf go down 42m at the deepest point - 30m (10 storeys) into the seabed at the end of the wharf, but with rock anchors which extend from the tip of the piles at the deepest point, securing them by a further 12m (4 storeys).

Even at the shallowest point - towards the Quay St end of Princes Wharf - the raking piles beneath the old wharf are driven 15m beneath the seabed and anchors drive down a further 12m.

All up, that is the equivalent of nine levels underground.

Auckland engineer David Turkington, aged 28, was in charge of strengthening the wharf so it could take the load of six new buildings, bringing to the wharf 300 apartments, the Hilton Hotel, carparks, shops and cafes.

The modern development brought an enormous increase in loading on the old wharf, adding 2400 tonnes of structural steel and 9000 sq m of concrete.

Turkington said although the wharf was robust, it had not been built to take the modern structure.

Turkington has just won the young achiever prize in the James Hardie New Zealand Institute of Building awards for the Princes Wharf job for designing 15 new piles to be built beneath the concrete wharf. Turkington, of Buller George Engineers, designed the piles to look like a four-legged man.

Each pile is in four parts, creating a tetrapod shape.

The rock anchors which hold them in place had to be installed through the centre of the piles and embedded into the underlying sandstone to give maximum strength.

Energy dissipaters were sandwiched between the underside of the wharf and the top of each pile cap.

These work like shock absorbers, restoring the wharf's balance during an earthquake.

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