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Soles, in temporal association with others societies, designed and constructed 300 eco-friendly apartments on seismic isolated plates near L’Aquila in Abruzzo within the “C.A.S.E. Project” that is a plan thought to give new houses to the people having had damaged or destroyed habitations during the earthquake in 6 April 2009.

The Project

These houses were built with innovative technologies, working at a cracking pace (75 days) using concrete prefabrication construction techniques that allow for quick construction, economy and flexibility.
On the front of the buildings there is a full-height porch, while on the back there is a metallic sunbreak system. These components give to each building a high architectural quality, contributing to design a non alienating, eloquent and recognizable urban space.
Other key aspects of these buildings are their environmental sustainability and their easy adaptability to different uses in the future, such as collective residences (students, old people, etc.).

The demonstration concerned a masonry building, with a surface area of 500 m2 and weighing 1500 t. The aim was to jack up the building by over 1 metre, at a rate of 1 cm per hour.

A reinforced concrete platform was built on the ground floor of the building, suited to distributing its weight over a new foundation structure on Soles piles. By installing a system of hydraulic jacks between the platform and the new pile foundation, it was possible to exert the necessary force to lift the entire building without jeopardising its structural integrity.

The site was opened in November 15, 2007, and by April 23, 2008 the building had been jacked up by 1 metre, even though greater heights are possible.

The operation – the subject to technical and scientific events – aroused a great deal of interest with the press, which dedicated a large number of articles to it.

This project is an example of how critical problems of structural settlements can be tackled and remedied by stabilising a building that had even been evacuated by the fire authorities, because of the danger of collapse.

The masonry building, built in 1930 on alluvial soil which had required ground compaction using timber piles beneath the foundations, had sustained subsidence-related damage already in the 1940s. The damage had been remedied by underpinning the part of the foundations affected by the subsidence. The ground-water level fluctuations in the proximity of the river Tiber and anthropic activities had altered the balance between the building and the ground it is built on so that the building structures were collapsing. The engineers called in to stabilise the structure decided on a non-invasive technique that could be applied to the foundations from the inside, in a very short space of time.

The choice of Soles patented technology for the new static-driven foundation piles (with no vibrations, noise or waste materials) made it possible to carry out the works without having to evacuate the building. A reinforced concrete base was built inside the building, connected to the masonry foundation, to create a platform from which the Soles piles were driven down to the more resistant soil layers in order to transfer on them the weight of the building. After the consolidation work, the building is now once again safe to live in and has also significantly improved its real estate value, which had been seriously diminished due to the structural problems described above.