Case Study on the Foundation Design of Super High-rise Buildings

Construction of super high-rise buildings has increased rapidly over the past 20 years, especially being concentrated in Asia such as China, UAE, and South Korea.These growing demands for super high-rise buildings are presenting new challenges to structural and geotechnical engineers, and foundation designers are required to use more-sophisticated analysis and design methods considering bearing capacity and settlement of foundations, wind-and seismically-induced loads, appropriate safety factors, and so on.This case study introduces characteristics of very tall buildings affecting foundation design and outlines a typical design procedure.Foundation types of top 21 high-rise buildings in South Korea are listed, and piled-raft foundations of three world-renowned buildings are presented.It is anticipated that this case study will provide design information on the domestic super high-rise building foundations and be used as the reference materials for designing an initial concept model or a numerical simulation model.