Building illusions
An office on one of Utrecht’s canals approached me with this question: “I can see how low the water in the canal is. I would like to deepen my existing basement, with the foundations at canal level. That should be possible, because then I won’t have any groundwater problems, right?”
Unfortunately, my client had forgotten that the canal is lined with poorly permeable clay.
It is therefore uncertain whether the groundwater level is the same as the water level in the canal.
Deepening the basement would therefore have required many expensive additional structural measures.
One illusion poorer, my client then decided against deepening his basement.