Walking through the city, the average passerby will observe and admire the buildings around them, but more often than not, one of the most important yet under-appreciated components of these structures will be left unnoticed: their foundations. Buried underground and often forgotten, a building’s foundations anchor the structure into the ground and allow for it to rise securely above; without them our city would quite literally sink into the earth. And as anyone familiar with foundations can tell you, they are far from easy to design, and can often be very costly, given the unfavourable surprises one might find underground.

Foundations are also a part of the design process that UrbanToronto has never really gone in-depth on before, (sorry), but we are learning about them now from a GTA firm which has been working on tricky foundations for more than a decade. GeoSolv Design/Build Inc. specializes in ground improvement and foundation design in unstable soil conditions, and describe themselves as design-build geotechnical contractors that offer a range of services through all design and construction phases of a project. The company boasts twelve different technologies that can suit a wide variety of poor soil conditions, and provides solutions in soil stabilization, foundation design, and slope stabilization with applications in a variety of structures including building foundations, floor slabs, and retaining walls, among others.

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