A load-bearing panel system for two-storey commercial construction — where the wall carries the building, and the frame is reduced to what the engineer actually needs.
Construction costs are additive because construction is additive. Every function a building needs is bought as its own scope — a frame to carry it, sheathing to close it, a substrate to finish it — and each scope carries its own trade, its own sequence and its own week on the schedule. More capability means more scopes, and more scopes mean more cost. The two move together, which is why cutting the budget on a commercial building almost always means giving the building less.
Corvea is built on the proposition that this is an artefact of how buildings are assembled rather than a law of what they cost. Where one element carries the load, closes the envelope and takes the finish, the functions consolidate and the scopes that used to deliver them separately come off the job. Cost leaves the project because the system does more, not because the building is given less.
And none of it asks the industry to retool. Panels are set by crews working with the equipment, the sequencing and the judgement they already have. The capability sits in the system, not in a skillset the market has to go out and acquire first.
The structural package is the first thing committed on a commercial centre and the last thing the developer controls.
It is priced before the drawings are finished, deposited before the slab is poured, detailed in someone else's shop queue, and delivered on a date set by a mill nobody on your team has ever spoken to.
Everything downstream is waiting on it. Erection cannot start until steel lands. The envelope cannot close until erection tops out. Interior trades cannot mobilise until the envelope closes. One slipped delivery moves rent commencement by a quarter — and the carry on the construction loan does not pause while you wait.
The frame is also never one line item. It is the shop drawings, the fabrication, the freight, the crane, the erector's crew, the protection that follows the steel, and then a second trade behind all of it to build the walls the frame does not build.
A frame is drawn around the whole building because the walls are assumed to carry nothing.
One element carries the load, closes the envelope, and is already standing when the next trade arrives.
CorPanel™ Standard and CorPanel™ Reinforced are load-bearing wall panel systems. The panel is not cladding hung on a frame, and it is not infill set between columns. It carries.
That changes what a frame is for. Where the walls carry the floor and roof loads, the structural skeleton has far less left to do — and what remains is what the engineer specifies at your details rather than what the drawing convention assumes: a point support where a span demands one, a beam over a wide storefront opening, a column where the plan opens up. Placed strategically, and set project by project.
The same system is not limited to the wall plane. Application is set by the engineer across the enclosure — foundation walls, floor underlay, roof underlay, interior partitions and exterior walls — so the structural line and the enclosure line stop being two separate scopes managed by two separate trades.
A building that needs support at four points is a different project from a building that needs a frame.
A professional or retail centre is laid out on a tenant grid before it is laid out on a structural one. Demising walls fall at regular bay intervals because that is how the space leases, and they are built in any event — separation between tenancies is not optional, and the developer pays for those walls whether or not they carry anything.
Those are the lines that carry. The structure follows the leasing plan instead of being drawn across it, and the walls the program already demands are the walls doing the structural work.
Where the plan opens up — storefront frontage, a lobby, a corner unit, a second-floor common area — that is precisely where the engineer places support: a column, or a beam across the opening. Strategically placed, at the points the program actually asks for them.
A project supplied by Corvea's principals. Base track set out on the slab, wall lines stood off it, openings formed in the panel line, enclosure closed out.
Take the frame down to its supports and the effect is not confined to the structural line of the budget.
Panels are a supply item ordered against a schedule, not a fabrication slot queued behind someone else's job. Structure and envelope rise in the same operation, so the building closes as it goes up rather than after it tops out.
And so does everything attached to it — shop drawings, fabrication, freight, crane time, the erection crew, and the framing trade that would otherwise follow behind to build the walls.
Structure, sheathing and wall assembly become a single panel-setting operation carried out by trained and licensed installers. Fewer trades on site, fewer handoffs, fewer sequencing dependencies to hold together.
One setting crew replaces the erection crew and the framing trade that follows it, and at 117 kg per panel — CorPanel™ Standard at 150 mm, ±5 — the wall line is set by hand or by a light pick rather than a rigging operation. On secondary-market sites, where crews travel and are paid to, that difference compounds across every week of the build.
How much frame a building needs is an engineering question with a project-specific answer.
Spans, floor loads, storefront openings, the site, and the code in force where it is built all decide it — on your drawings, by a licensed engineer, under his own seal. That determination is made once, early, and it governs the structural budget for the rest of the job.
On every project, the assembly is reviewed and stamped by the licensed structural engineer of record — or the authorized project engineer — at that project's details, under that engineer's own seal, to the code in force where it is built.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the foundation of liability protection for the developer, the insurer, and the authority having jurisdiction. It also means the panel you specify is the panel an engineer has signed for, on your project, at your details.
Where a developer brings his own engineer, which is most projects, Corvea's engineer of record coordinates with his — from the first section through to the sealed submission.
A composite sandwich panel, dimensionally the same at every thickness offered.
CorPanel™ is a composite wall panel system. The panel comprises calcium-silicate facing boards bonded to both faces of the CorCell™ matrix — a cementitious matrix incorporating expanded polystyrene. It is solid through its full section, with no cavity behind either face.
The frame comes out of a building at design. It cannot come out at the bid table.
Send the concept drawings and the program. The structural approach is set with your engineer before the structural package is ever priced — which is the only point in the schedule where the saving is still available to you.