One of South Africa’s staple brands recently called on contractor, Group Five, to produce an impressive signage feature at a new site’s entrance. The contractor was familiar with the use of Lafarge South Africa’s innovative self-compacting concrete Agilia Vertical and approached the company to provide a solution.

Lafarge recently repositioned its global brand to highlight its commitment to use its technical strength to help provide solutions for building better cities. This commitment reflects the huge trend to urbanisation in the world and the need to develop better connected cities that have more housing, are more compact, more durable and more beautiful, to create desirable environments for everyone to live in.

Partnering with the specialist scaffolding and formwork company, Peri, they to builtmoulds for a 3.6 m wide by 4 m high entrance signage wall. This was achieved by using a rubber foam template glued to Vario formwork. Agilia^® Vertical concrete was chosen because its exceptional fluidity enables it to fill all corners and areas in complex formwork or moulds effortlessly, without the need for vibration. Agilia^® also remains homogeneous and produces excellent, durable off-shutter finishes, a key requirement of this project.

“The advantage of using Agilia^® Vertical was that we were able to fill the formwork successfully, using bottom-up pumping technology in one lift. It avoids the tonal variations that inevitably occur in multiple lifts,” says Shabir Ebrahim, Lafarge South Africa’s Key Accounts Manager – Durban. “With our long-standing relationship with Group Five, we were pleased to be able to help them with a solution for the signage task. It was a demonstration of the value we place on our relationships with all players in the construction chain. The outcome was a client that is extremely satisfied with the impressive signage end result.”