We issue the loading plan: vertical load, overturning moment, shear at the base plate, the holding-down bolt layout, plate thickness and grout specification. That is everything a structural engineer needs and nothing they do not.
We do not design the foundation, and we will not, because bearing capacity is a site question. We cannot know from here whether a site is made ground, whether there is a services corridor two metres down, or whether the water table sits above the required founding depth. The project engineer designs the pad or piles against the ground investigation.
The delay happens when neither party thinks the foundation is theirs. A sculpture arrives on a low-loader with a crane booked and no pad poured, or a pad is poured to an assumed loading that turns out to be a third of what is needed. We now issue the loading plan at developed design stage rather than with the shipping documents, specifically to prevent this.
Some numbers for calibration. A nine-metre cantilevered stainless piece generated 610 kilonewton-metres at base and required a 4.2 by 4.2 by 1.8 metre reinforced pad. A five-metre marble obelisk at 6.2 tonnes needed a 3.0 metre square pad on 600-millimetre bored piles because of made ground. An eleven-metre composite piece over a station box needed no new foundation at all — it spread onto four existing structural grid points, which is exactly why it was specified in composite.
One more thing worth agreeing early: who owns the reinstatement. Crane access across a lawn, a plaza or a finished forecourt needs load-spreading mats and a reinstatement plan, and it is cheaper to price that in week two than to argue about it in week thirty.
