Recommended Practice for Soft Ground Site Characterization: Arthur Casagrande Lecture

A soft ground condition exists whenever construction loads a cohesive foundation soil beyond its preconsolidation stress, as often occurs with saturated clays and silts having SPT blow counts that are near zero. The paper recommends testing programs, testing methods and data interpretation techniques for developing design parameters for settlement and stability analyses. It hopes to move the state-of-practice closer to the state-of-the-art and thus is intended for geotechnical practitioners and teachers rather than researchers. Components of site characterization covered include site stratigraphy...