Scays Architectural Technology: foundation

Wednesday, 3 February 2016

Walter Segal Foundations

Building the Walter Segal Way, takes you into a minimal foundation design. Its simplicity itself, yet works as well as a strip foundation, and the steeper sites lap up the method.

So whats involved, simply a paving flag sitting on the earth, with perhaps a small circular concrete pile below, the paving flag following the contour of the natural land.

The load from the timber structure loading direct onto the paving flag at its centre.

The AJ Article has this in depth, which I will send or give a link out for, if for research, and the films particularly the Grand Design film explains this in a little more detail.

The impact on the land from the house is minimal.

The video below bottom helps to understand it all, its not great and uses concrete posts rather than paving flags, but you get the basic principal, but I downloaded a sketchup file of a very good 3D Sketchup model part finished, and made the video immediately below.and the jpg to the left, I think it shows the construction better.

It's so hard, how to teach the basics of Foundations in less than an hour, so this presentation set is my stab at introducing the subject. There is a load more to teach, so this is meant as the opening salvo.

I have one on Piling, water tables and an intro into Walter Segal, and his pad foundations, plus more on the Building Regs Part A, and more on the effect of trees.

Its also a chance to see if I can import my presentation into Blogger from google Docs using the link code. Which I am please to say seems to work well. One of the benefits of using Google Slides, is that as I see more info on the subject, I can add it to the slide set, and my students will see it, as the link as in this case is direct to my account.

I am also using this as a test to post date this blog, so although your seeing Wednesday, I wrote it late Tuesday afternoon.