Screw Piles & Stilts

Why it matters

A conventional foundation is the most violent act in a building's life: excavate the living ground, pour the most carbon-intensive material we make, and commit the land forever. Nothing grows back through a concrete slab. Screw piles refuse the whole transaction. Steel helixes turn into the ground like screws into wood, touch it at a few points measured in square centimetres, carry the building above the surface. One day they reverse out, leaving meadow. No concrete, no cure time, no excavation, installation in days. Such a foundation goes in on slopes, wet ground, and sites a mixer truck will never reach. The raised gap underneath stays live space: beneath a building that decided to be a guest, the land keeps living — plants, water, hedgehogs.

Role in 001's holistic picture

Stilts are Light Touch to Landscape made structural — the detail that turns a philosophy into a foundation specification. They pair with timber to complete the concrete-free structural system, and they embody reversibility at the hardest layer: foundations are where buildings usually stop being removable. The ground beneath goes to the living landscape. In Regenerative Architecture's tree metaphor, they are the roots that hold without wounding.

In the world

Screw piles have honest limits a site must respect: loose fills and certain soils, corrosion protection rated in decades, connection detailing a light building on point supports will not forgive if it is sloppy. Within those limits the concrete-free foundation has grown into an industry. The German company Krinner has treated ground screws as a serious alternative to poured footings since 1994. It now offers 62 screw types through sales partners in 37 countries and carries everything from house foundations and containers to road signs and solar farms — no digging, no cure time, and reversible at end of life. A foundation you drive in and one day drive back out has moved from niche to catalogue. And the approach is reaching past professional installers: Diamond Pier in the US sells a precast pier with steel pins driven by hand, code-certified for residential use in all US frost zones. No digging, no poured concrete: five piers in about 75 minutes in the maker's own demonstration. A 2026 certification update adds deep-frost guidance. Not an endorsement of one brand, but evidence: a foundation an ordinary person installs in a weekend is already a shelf product.

How 001 engages with it

House 001 stands on screw piles a metre above its plot — the black box on steel legs that is the lab's visual signature. The years on those piles gave this page the most valuable lesson a foundation can teach: a failure-and-repair story. The grillage tie beams over the pile heads were sized too light and began to flex. A tie between the piles at ground level could have restrained that, and there was none. The soil beneath was deliberately left as it was: preparing it would have meant tearing up the site, the very thing light touch to landscape exists to avoid. In time the house began to settle unevenly. The fix became an engineering story of its own. The settled piles were extended with welded-on tube and the house re-levelled. Trenches were dug along the pile lines and rectangular steel tube welded in, tying the piles into a single frame at ground level. Diagonal brace piles went in only at the most critical points, sparingly: every diagonal eats a piece of the usable space beneath the house. The structure has been stable ever since. Our verdict after years of use is on record too: a metre of clearance proved too little to really use the space beneath. Future designs aim at two. The Hlibivka design makes stilts its central innovation: modules touching ground on under five percent of their footprint, with light tunnels feeding daylight to the plants below and the undercroft left open as habitat. The foundation as an act of restraint.

Maturity: validated. The stilts have carried House 001 through its years — uneven settling, a repair, and stability since. This foundation has lived through its failure and its fix. It is the defining structural move of the Hlibivka concept.

Further reading

• House 001 — the built stilts and their lessons
• Hlibivka Sustainable Complex — under five percent ground contact as a design principle
• Diamond Pier — a code-certified point foundation installed by hand; what no-dig foundations look like as a shelf product
• Krinner — concrete-free ground-screw foundations as a catalogue, from houses to solar farms across 37 countries
• Screw pile (Wikipedia) — the mechanism and the vocabulary
• Stilt house (Wikipedia) — the ancient lineage: houses on legs across the world's cultures, from lake settlements to river deltas