Book excerpt: The "Red Book" presents a background to conventional foundation analysis and design. The text is not intended to replace the much more comprehensive 'standard' textbooks, but rather to support and augment these in a few important areas, supplying methods applicable to practical cases handled daily by practising engineers and providing the basic soil mechanics background to those methods. It concentrates on the static design for stationary foundation conditions. Although the topic is far from exhaustively treated, it does intend to present most of the basic material needed for a practising engineer involved in routine geotechnical design, as well as provide the tools for an engineering student to approach and solve common geotechnical design problems.