{"id":35873,"date":"2022-05-02T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2022-05-02T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/?p=35873"},"modified":"2022-04-26T13:08:38","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T20:08:38","slug":"the-ziggurats-of-richmond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/2022\/05\/02\/the-ziggurats-of-richmond\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ziggurats of Richmond"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

They swept away the suburban scenery that once defined much of Richmond and built the ziggurats. Auto shops, blackberry thickets, spas, snooker halls, and even an old Cactus Club were cleared to make way. The structures have sloped walls, are made of giant concrete blocks, and can be over 30 feet tall. Sharing the city with glass condos, their presence has made the downtown into a modern Mesopotamia.<\/p>\n

Each ziggurat isn\u2019t around for long. Just a year, give or take. They\u2019re wrapped in real estate ads that promise \u201cGracious living,\u201d \u201cMarina-side leisure,\u201d \u201cAn iconic gateway community.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one is about to live in these, though. There are no rooms or grand foyers behind the walls. The ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia were thought to house the gods. Richmond\u2019s house big old piles of sand.<\/p>\n

The sand is a solution to a problem for developers in the city: there is no bedrock near the surface to build on.<\/p>\n

\"Modern<\/p>\n

\u201cRichmond is unique in the region because it is an island,\u201d said Kees Lokman, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to make sure that the base of whatever you\u2019re building has sufficient capacity to hold the development.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richmond, which sits mostly on Lulu Island in the delta of the Fraser River, averages one metre above sea level. The question of water is top of mind when it comes to development here; there are 49 kilometres of dikes to protect the city from ocean storm surges, freshet and sea-level rise in the face of climate change.<\/p>\n

Richmond does have bedrock, but it\u2019s over 200 metres<\/a> underground. If you\u2019re looking east of No. 3 Road, which bisects the city from north to south, what you\u2019ll typically find beneath the surface is a half-metre of topsoil, a three-metre layer of clay, then sand and silt below. If you\u2019re looking west of No. 3, you\u2019ll find a seven-metre layer of peat before you hit the clay \u2014 the remnants of ancient logs that came down the Fraser and didn\u2019t make it to open water.<\/p>\n

Take it from Bruce Mathers, the builder of these Richmond step pyramids.<\/p>\n

\u201cRichmond is basically a sponge full of water,\u201d said Mathers, 64. He\u2019s been prepping construction sites in his home city since he was 18.<\/p>\n

That sand and silt under Richmond\u2019s surface is loosely packed<\/a> and holds a lot of water. If an earthquake hits, the shaking will cause those sediments to become like a fluid. They\u2019ll lose their strength and won\u2019t fully support structures, which may lean or settle in response.<\/p>\n

And so, if you want to develop property in Richmond, you have to squeeze the sponge.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the ziggurats come in. The technical term for these structures is a \u201cpreload.\u201d Before construction on any Richmond development can begin, an engineer needs to investigate the soil to determine how high and heavy a preload it requires, and how long the preload needs to sit. Then they call companies like Mathers\u2019 \u2014 with their fleet of bulldozers, excavators, compactors, and dump trucks \u2014 to set it up.<\/p>\n

His team uses concrete \u201clock blocks,\u201d which fit together like 1,900-kilogram pieces of Lego. Sand is unloaded in layers, with a tough plastic mesh called \u201cgeogrid\u201d laid on top. The mesh creates tension, so much that \u201cif you get a 10-foot piece of the stuff, dump half a wheelbarrow on it, you can\u2019t even drag it through the sand,\u201d says Mathers.<\/p>\n

And then, the ziggurat needs to sit. You might spot a one-inch pipe peeking out at the top. That\u2019s the settlement gauge, and it runs through the entire height of the preload down to a sheet of plywood at the very bottom. Mathers checks on them every two weeks to see how the preload is dropping. Richmond sites can take five to eight months for the groundwater to be squeezed out and the soil to be compressed enough to bear the load of a new building.<\/p>\n

\"Geogrid<\/p>\n

In addition to preloading, most buildings over three storeys have pile foundations \u2014 columns driven into the ground to hold up the structure.<\/p>\n

If developers didn\u2019t do this work to densify the soil, the building would sink.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t many other people in Richmond in Mathers\u2019 line of work, and the third generation of the family is now helping out with the company.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a niche thing,\u201d Mathers says. \u201cLock blocks, I own 10,000 of them. It\u2019s hard to compete, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Bruce Mathers\u2019 father Ernie who founded E. Mathers Bulldozing Co.<\/a> in 1956. Ernie got his start working with dredging sand from the Fraser River, clearing the channel for boats. The company still uses river sand today for preloading, though it\u2019s no longer free. The Port of Vancouver has since taken up the business of selling it to concrete makers and companies like Mathers\u2019.<\/p>\n

In Bruce\u2019s father\u2019s day, the tallest structures in the city were the grandstands at the Lansdowne and Brighouse thoroughbred racetracks. When the 1970s come around, some NIMBY residents were so against the idea of highrises that 150 of them once swarmed<\/a> a city council meeting and successfully got a project canceled.<\/p>\n

\"Bruce<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Bruce Mathers has developed a special skill in his 45 years on the job.<\/p>\n

On a recent Monday, he was in East Richmond by the river to check out a preload for a seafood company that\u2019s expanding its warehouse. Starting at a corner of the ziggurat where the sand had been allowed to spill out, he shuffled expertly up the slope to the top in his work boots.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike a mountain goat,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Christopher Cheung is a reporter at The Tyee<\/a>, where this story originally appeared on January 28, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They swept away the suburban scenery that once defined much of Richmond and built the ziggurats. Auto shops, blackberry thickets, spas, snooker halls, and even an old Cactus Club were cleared to make way. The structures have sloped walls, are made of giant concrete blocks, and can be over 30 feet tall. Sharing the cityContinue reading “The Ziggurats of Richmond”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8385,"featured_media":35961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11231,11232,25,26,11235],"tags":[11948,11945,11944,11947,11943,11942,11946,561,11949,2247,11950,11951,214],"class_list":["post-35873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-architecture","category-curiosities","category-features","category-infrastructure","category-neighbourhoods","category-urban-design","tag-bedrock","tag-dikes","tag-dykes","tag-engineering","tag-flood","tag-floodplain","tag-levees","tag-metro-vancouver","tag-preload","tag-richmond","tag-sand","tag-subsidence","tag-vancouver-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ziggurats of Richmond - Spacing Vancouver<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/2022\/05\/02\/the-ziggurats-of-richmond\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Ziggurats of Richmond - Spacing Vancouver\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"They swept away the suburban scenery that once defined much of Richmond and built the ziggurats. 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