Fast and effective footing influenced by Mother Nature:

              These days pile foundations of all kind are becoming common and are widely used in all sorts of land situations. There are wide varieties of other foundation techniques too, but still these techniques fall short under certain situations and the amount/expense on unconventional foundations and footings are also enormous. But even after all these; there are constant treats of foundation failures faced by new buildings. But if you look closely nature herself answers all your queries related to foundation and footing. The roots of trees and plants hold a huge archive of information’s in this direction.

                For example let’s take the case of normal concrete piles and it looks something like this:

This can be compared to a tap root system as shown here:

But the thing is not all the plants have same kind of root system. Plants or trees adapt to situations and for different conditions the root structure is different and has different depths, spread and lengths. But nevertheless, they all perform the same function and they are all strong for the purpose. Hence the foundation can also be modified in to something completely different following the instances of fibrous or prop roots which looks something like this: 

 

The footing if developed from this might look something like this:

Here the arrow represents the downward force and the footings are an enhanced version of anchor grip for screws and bolts. In the example shown above the casing or the foot grip can be taped or hammered to the ground and should be allowed to settle on its on load to an extent.

Then the structure can later on mounted of fitted or built on top of this. Here foundation and the super structure are two different independent components which are connected allowing a certain extent of freedom between them.

Apart from this there can be a lot of other designs that can be drawn from these root patterns, and in case of buildings that might also face a threat of uprooting owing to windy situations, the same design can also be used like this:

In case of tall building a combination of both will prove more effective, like shown here:

The casing shows in all the illustrations are detailed out in one of my previous blogs. In all the cases the casing opens up after installation mechanically or on filling in of cement or other material.The material choice and their surface treatment should also be decided after a careful study of the land situations.