Under the building

Being asked to photograph the progress as the new Science block is built at the school has given me an excellent opportunity to see at first hand how a building of this sort is designed and constructed.

My last blip from the site showed concrete being poured for one of the last piles. Today I saw the next stage of construction. They have dug a trench around one row of piles (at the edge of the building), exposing the top part of the reinforced concrete. The next stage (already started on the 4th, 5th and 6th piles you can see in this image) is to knock out the top part of the concrete down to a certain level, exposing the reinforcing bars. They can then lower a cage of reinforcing bars between these piles, linking with the exposed reinforcements from the piles, and pour concrete into this cage to tie the piles together (at least, I that's how I understood the explanation given to me by the site manager). Perhaps next week I shall see the start of this.

These piles sit under the building, so I can claim to have met today's challenge: "Under".