Northumberlandia: Reinforced Soil Structures Used in the Largest Human Landform

摘要

Northumberlandia is the world's largest human form sculpted into the landscape, designed by the renowned landscape architect and artist Charles Jencks. The woman earth sculpture is lying at the entrance of a coal surface mine in Northumberland, north of England. Northumberlandia is 400m long and 34m height at her highest point. It takes about 20 minutes to walk the 1,162 metre-long path around the landform. In total 1.5 million tonnes of soil and clay from the surface mine were used to create this sculpture. To construct the most difficult parts of the sculpture such as the chin, nose, nostrils and eye brows, Reinforced Soil Slopes with geogrids and gabion walls were used because of their flexibility and efficiency. Compacted weathered mudstone with no cohesive material was used as reinforced soil and compacted mudstone was used as foundation material. The finished slopes were protected with permanent erosion control blankets to ensure a vegetated face.