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Soft-Soil Foundation in New Jersey Avoids Piles
A Bayonne waterfront project uses a tub foundation to stabilize construction on soft ground. Also, designs are set for a new 12-story tower that will wrap around a century-old Park Slope building.
Tub Foundation Design Addresses Soil Settlement
The construction of a golf clubhouse over a former landfill in Bayonne, N.J., has sparked a foundation design that limits environmental and structural hazards associated with building on soft soils and avoids disturbing buried waste.
Empire Golf Management of Pomona, N.Y., is building the clubhouse, slated for completion by year’s end, for its $100 million-plus Bayonne Golf Club, which opened over the summer. The course is on a 470-acre tract alongside New York Harbor that includes a 38-acre municipal landfill and 97-acre industrial dump, both closed and capped.
Anticipating the likelihood that the building would sink in the soft soils, McLaren Engineering Group of West Nyack, N.Y., the structural engineer, designed a “concrete-hull boat” foundation, replacing the need for piles, the traditional technique.
“The alternative was to drive 130-ft. piles to hold this small building,” said Mal McLaren, president of the firm. “And driving these piles would create environmental hazards” of disturbing the buried landfill contents and releasing toxins or gases outside of the normal exhaust system.
While the fill contents are fairly predictable in the first 40 to 50 ft., “the early days of this fill were uncontrolled,” McLaren said. “We have a two-story concrete box. This way, if there is any twisting or turning of the soil, the box would act like a ship.”
The project team poured 15 ft. of soil load on top of the club house site over a period of six months in order to pack the ground and measure the settlement rate. The team then excavated the basement, further stiffening the soil. The clubhouse is expected to sink 8 in. during its useful life. It is slated to open in spring 2008.
Park Slope Design Skirts History
The design for a 12-story condominium building will wrap around – and attempt to preserve – a century-old four-story corner building in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.
 The design for the $15 million glass and masonry building at 410 Fourth Ave., under development by Wheaton Associates of New York, calls for two halves joined by linked massing to create an L-shaped structure with entrances coming out both on Fourth Avenue and 7th Street.
Designed by Meltzer/Mandl Architects of New York, the building will have 59 one-, two-, and three-bedroom condominiums ranging in size from 680 to 1,300 sq. ft. and featuring full-height window walls and open kitchens. Some apartments will have balconies, and the building will offer a common roof deck and courtyard.
HE2 Project Development of Rockville Centre, N.Y., is the construction manager on the project, which breaks ground later this month following demolition of the Danken Auto Supply store on the site. Completion is slated for April 2008.
Koolhaas Designs Cornell U. Hall
The newest student hall at Cornell University’s College of Architecture in Ithaca, N.Y., will be designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
The $40 million building will include studios, a library, presentation and exhibition areas, and an auditorium spread in a flexible configuration over 43,000 sq. ft. Cornell started planning the building following a $10 million gift from New York developer Paul Milstein in 1999.
Koolhaas’s team will work through January on the final designs, and the university expects to get city site-plan and environmental approvals in time for a groundbreaking next year.
Koolhaas, who studied architecture at Cornell in the 1970s, is also designing 111 First Street, a $450 million condominium project in Jersey City, N.J.
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