Thursday 3 April 2014

Step 1 - Making the foundations - Designing foundations.



Foundations, actually one of the most important parts of the building, for I hope obvious reasons..

There are many choices on which foundation system to use in a building like this and in many cases it can be a difficult decision to make...

To make it a little easier we approach it scientifically and to start this process off The first thing we need to do is assess the quality of the soil that is going to be under the building as this will be taking some of the load of the building.



When you see one of these appear in your neighbourhood, it might just be time to leave for a few months :) It means someone is collecting information for an imminent building project!

The pipes on the floor are for the soil samples which collect in the middle of the pipes as they are driven into the earth.

In our case we took around 10 drill holes all over the site and take core samples of the soil. We drill down around 30 metres from the existing level





Our engineer studies these stratas - If you are wondering the use of these physical geography lessons, here it is...

These are copies of some of our soil reports and you can see what the composition of the soil is underneath the building. Unfortunately no gold, diamonds or oil...

The soil is very different all over the island.


There are many idioms out there related to the building of things on sand, you can see from these reports, that in the real world of building you can quite build a house on sand and be perfectly happy that it will be there for a very, very long time..


From analysis of these soil reports we decided to construct the foundations as a "raft". This is as it sounds, it is a big raft of concrete on which the building rests. This has a number of advantages, but one of the reasons for choosing this system was to minimise the disruption on the workings of the school and our residential neighbour...

A more detailed explanation of these different foundation systems can be found here or if you are short of time take a look at this condensed version......



Go to the next step - Preparing the foundations