Bachy Soletanche Shows Off İts Piling Work At Birmingham Cube Site

It’s quite rare for Bachy Soletanche Limited to properly show off its work, but at one site in Birmingham the firm’s £1.7M piling work has certainly seen some exposure. In fact BuildAbility’s ‘The Cube’ site excavation is so large that it was fast becoming Birmingham’s newest tourist attraction.

Bachy Soletanche designed and delivered a contiguous piled retaining wall around the perimeter of the site for the project. The piles were to support the surrounding buildings, roads and canal so that the site could be excavated up to 19m in depth. Using the large diameter auger (LDA) piling technique, Bachy Soletanche installed 226, 900mm diameter piles at 1050mm spacings. These were drilled up to a depth of 24m.

Other piling works included a minipile wall consisting of 24, 273mm diameter minipile installations for a car lift in the southwest corner of the site and another 54 minipiles to the west of the site alongside the LDA piles to add further support to the adjacent building. Thirty king post piles were also constructed to provide foundations for a ramp running down the centre of the site. Each king post pile was formed in a 900mm diameter pile, with a 400mm square steel column concreted into the toe of the pile.

Bachy Soletanche also installed to construct 12 temporary anchors to hold back the retaining piles on the east side of the site.