The relationships of superstructure, foundation and ground
Ground: duo to the building of structure, acertain range of soil's stress state changes, which is calledground.
Foundation: infrastructure of building contactswith the ground.
The building consists of two parts, thesuperstructure and foundation.

1.superstructure
2.foundation
3.ground
Soil is the most useful materialused in buildings. The wide ground is
vThebasement of the project construction.
vTheground of the buildings.
vTheenvironment of the underground buildings.
vBackfillmaterial of the earthen structures.
So biased understandingof soil's project properties can lead togiant failure.
(1)The leaning reason of the PisaTower.
The half of foundation locates on the soft clay, half of foundation locates on the sand and pebbles,the tower lean due to secondary consolidation.
Tower is 56.7m high. For nearly acentury, the tower has tilted to about 5m,the slope reached 8 degrees.
In1990, the tower stopped opening. According to the annual settlement on the south side of 1.4 mm, calculation showed the tower may collapse to 2003 or 2004.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
(2)Foundationfailure accident of Canada Transcona barn

Canada Transcona barn consists of 65 cylindrical silos, which are 31m high. The bottom surface is 59.4m long, under which is 2m thick reinforcedconcrete raft foundation. The selfweight of the barn is 0.2 million kN. When 0.27 millionkN grain was mounted, it was found the barn was obviously unstable, The west of barn was sinking 8.8m in 24hours, the elevation of the eastern end rised 1.5m, the overall tilt is 26o53'.
After the investigation and analysis, itwas found that there was a more than 10 meters thicksoft clay stratumunder the foundation. The ultimatebearing capacity of the ground was 251kPa, while the basal pressure of the barnwas more than 300kPa, which caused the whole sliding of the foundation. A partof the soil under the foundation extruded laterally, the eastern end of theground uplifted.

(3) ShanghaiExhibition Center


There is a thick soft substratum under a hard shell layer. The hard shell layer isonly 2-3m thick, so the stress diffusion function is low.
Forsuch a big area foundation, the foundation safety is mainly controlled by softsubstratum , but there was no stress diffusion research on foundation at that time.



(4) A residential building in Shanghai


4.5m depth foundation pit was excavated on the south of the building. And the soilwas stacked 10m high up the north side of the building. The weight of stackedsoil generated lateral pressure which was bigger than the resistance of piles.So the building toppled. This accidentwas caused by the wrong process of construction.
(5) Sand liquefaction


(6) Landslide



