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The Ruskin House: The main house foundations |
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The building is anchored to the ground through 36 precast concrete piles driven to specified bearing capacity . . . The trick here is making sure to document the neighbor’s house & every tiny crack or sign of settlement prior to starting this work as the potential liabilities are huge . . .
Here we’re cutting off the piles to the elevation on the drawings, the studio backhoe was key here . . . |
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The first marking of the land |
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Right: Back-hoe bucket, designed & built specifically to dig 20” wide footings—facilitated digging the 400+ LF of grade beam excavation in less than 4 days with a crew of 2 people |
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Right: Hydraulic rebar/pipe/bar bender—designed & built specifically for the backhoe to save $ on the 1,000+ “C-shaped” stirrups for the grade-beams (& countless other tasks requiring bending of steel parts)—the task took about 6 hours (bending the 1,000+ bars & saved over $2,000 in shop fabrication cost. The bender took about 10 hours to design & fabricate & was made completely of scraps from the Calvino Studio workshop. |
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Tying the rebar & threading the pipes & conduit was challenging . . . & dense. |
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Being that the project is in a high velocity flood zone, the pool had to be integral with the foundation system—the precast concrete piles & the massive grade beams, so the pool shell had to be formed next & 2 of the integral grade beams had to be done in shot-crete when the pool was shot. |
