Fremont Apartments - Portland, OR

Andersen Construction reached out to us with an idea to build a building, on the water, next to the Fremont Bridge.

The project had high column loads and initially, we started looking at drilled shafts and providing budgets for that solution.

But in Portland, the latest seismic code changes meant deeper reinforcement cages into the column - which drove up the cost significantly. For this project, a driven foundation worked out to be the best solution economically and engineering-wise. This design-build project, in coordination with GeoDesign was a 100% turnkey for our client including deep soil mixing for ground improvement, soldier pile walls, and driven pile.

We are using large diameter 24” piles with very large capacities up to 1900 kips, which is very large for a 24” driven pile in Portland. Watch the video to learn more about the project!

One of the challenges that we’ve seen with the Fremont project is on a river and the geology is changing based on the river’s movements. It has been a huge challenge to quantify the depth of the gravel, we are 120’ into the ground before we hit some gravel with decent capacities. With a driven pile solution, the depths are varying based on what the ground conditions are. So that’s one of the big challenges we’ve dealt with there.

Working next to the river, we had to do a deep soil mixed soil buttress for ground improvement to provide liquefaction protection for the building. That was a solution that we provided for them on the first phase of the project. The second phase was drilled earth retention on 2 walls with grouted tiebacks that go underneath the road. And that provided the excavation so that we could go down and start the driven pile operation.

This is 100% turnkey from Pacific Foundation. The buttress that was designed for the deep soil mixed columns was a design/build solution by Pacific Foundation in coordination with GeoDesign. Our work on this project included: