The engineer Wilem Frischmann, now aged 87 and still working, was not yet 30 when he designed the structure of Centre Point, a 1960s high-rise office building in central London.
His method was to drill close-packed piled foundations into the ground.
Inspecting the holes himself, he got stuck in one and had to spend the night there until it was discovered how to get him out.
From Rowan Moore’s article in The Observer.
A Bad Guide 
# His method was to drill close-packed piled foundations into the ground #
A brilliant idea ! What had other architects been doing, piling up boxes of marshmallows ?
I missed a bit out. Everyone said you couldn’t put high-rise buildings on clay, like in London, you had to set the foundations on rock like the ground in Chicago or in parts of Manhattan. Of course we’ve been using piles to stop structures from sinking ever since … I don’t really know, but Venice was built on pilings so over a millennium, I suppose. It’s been a very clever idea for a while now.
I once had a book with”cutaway” drawings of the substructures of cities, such as sewage systems, subways. It had a drawing of a giant cathedral seeming to float in the air on long wooden stilts (piles), all the earth below having been “cut away”. I think this is how cathedrals such as the Big One in Cologne are built.
No one ever explains how the piles were put in place except to mention the word piledriver, whatever that looked like. The big one in Cologne is very special and nice. I hope they don’t turn it into housing.
I’ve gotten the impression from a documentary or two (based by Ancient Medieval Drawings ?) that large rocks were hauled upwards and then dropped on the piles, over and over. Only yesterday Ralf and I passed a Bagger whose shovel was being used to ram smallish profile beams into the ground.
Based on.