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Once complete, Australia 108 will be the tallest residential building in the southern hemisphere. Designed by award-winning architects Fender Katsalidis, the 317m structure will feature more than 1,100 apartments over 100 levels.

Our Role

Geotech was engaged to design and construct all foundation piles for the tower, including core retention and jet grouting works. The key challenges posed by the site included some of Melbourne’s most complex stratigraphy with a high-level volcanic flow across the City Road side of the site overlying Yarra Delta marine deposits to depths of around 20m (Coode Island Silt), and Melbourne Formation bedrock at depths of around 35m.

A two-storey heritage-listed façade extending along the City Road frontage posed constructability issues in this congested part of Southbank.

From a design point of view, the earthquake modelling and wind modelling of the tower proved to be a highly complex process.

With the complex geology of the site and extreme loads from the structure, Geotech’s designers needed to draw upon a range of foundation techniques to give the client an economical solution that also provided program certainty.

Geotech’s foundation solution included a mixture of CFA piles founded in the Moray Street Gravels, bored piles under polymer fluid founded in the Melbourne Formation bedrock (the largest of which were 2.1m diameter x 45m), secant piles around the core, and jet grouting of the base of the core.

Disciplines covered

• Bored piles under Polymer Fluid
• Continuous Flight Auger (CFA) piles
• Secant Piles
• Jet Grouting
• PDA Testing