Author
J N NICHOLS(1) and K F TAN(2)
(1) Department of Construction Science, Texas A&M University, USA
(2) Department of the Materials Science School, South West University of Science and Technology, PRC

Abstract
Saint Andrew’s Church, located in main civic park within the central business district of Newcastle, Australia and dating from the 1890s, was badly damaged in the Newcastle earthquake of 1989. The Church designed by Architect Menken is based on a much older German design with slate roof, timber roof trusses, lime mortar walls and a cement mortar lower bell tower topped by a sandstone upper tower. The building suffered significant damage to the bell tower and the main church. The purpose of this paper is twofold to present the conceptual ideas for the redesign of this building to suit the competing needs of fabric maintenance, Sacred Place, retrofitting to a 0.1g standard and cost. The building works include a prestressed lower tower, a steel space grid for securing the stone tower, and permanent repairs to the main church. These building works are shown in sketches in the paper. The repairs to the tower have been used subsequently in other church towers and represent an efficient and removable system. The permanent repairs to the main church building are irreversible and represent a practice now discouraged within the heritage community. Finally the paper compares and contrasts the alternatives now available, which could be used in place of the permanent repairs constructed in 1990.