China Will Build the Tallest Building In the World in Just 90 Days (Updated)
According to its engineers, this will be the tallest skyscraper in the world by the end of March of 2013. Its name is Sky City, and its 2,749 feet (838 meters) distributed in 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, by the Xiangjiang river. Ninety days!
It's not a joke. According to the construction company, the skyscraper will be built in just 90 days at the unbelievable rate of five floors per day.
It's hard to believe, but they claim the building has been designed by some of the engineers who previously worked at the Burj Khalifa. It is also the same firm that built a full 30-story hotel in 15 days—which yes, is still standing and in perfect working condition.
Foundation work is beginning at the end of the month, once the Chinese authorities give the final go ahead to the project.
Pre-fab magic
They will be able to achieve this impossibly fast construction rate by using a prefabricated modular technology developed by Broad Sustainable Building, a company that has built 20 tall structures in China so far, including the that 30-story hotel.
Since they built that hotel, the company has been perfecting their technology, which they are now claiming will turn their project into the world's tallest skyscraper in just three months. That's a whooping five floors per day, which seems just absurd. According to Construction Week Online, the company is very serious about it. The senior VP of the Broad Group, Juliet Jiang, has publicly said that they "will go on as planned with the completion of five storeys a day."
Record numbers
Unlike the Burj Khalifa, the tower will be mostly habitable. Its final height will be 2,749 feet high (838 meters). Compared that to the Burj's 2,719 feet (829 meters), which include the spire at the top resulting in a total of 163 floors.
Sky City will use an astonishing 220,000 tons of steel. The structure will be able to house 31,400 people of both "high and low income communities". The company says that the residential area will use 83-percent of the building, while the rest will be offices, schools, hospitals, shops and restaurants. People will move up and down using 104 high speed elevators.
The record figures don't stop there: in addition to the 90-day construction time—as opposed to the 210 days initially reported by the Chinese media—the company claims it will cost $1,500 per square meter as opposed to the Burj's $15,000 per square meter, all thanks to the prefab technology.
They also claim it will be able to sustain earthquakes of a 9.0 magnitude and be resistant to fire for "up to three hours," as well as be extremely energy efficient thanks to thermal insulation, four-panned windows and different air conditioning techniques that were already used in their previous constructions.
Who's taking bets on it being only somewhat less empty than the Burj Khalifa?
May 2003 - "Mission Accomplished"
June 2005 - "The mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight"
-- G W Bush, freelance writer for The Daily Show.
Zaelath wrote:Who's taking bets on it being only somewhat less empty than the Burj Khalifa?
I thought I read somewhere recently that the burj khalifa was like 80% populated. China has towns/cities all over that are being built up when there isn't demand for the space. It's been going on for years. I wonder how the government hasn't closed the loophole all those cities had Vern using to do this and then get bailed out.
Zaelath wrote:Who's taking bets on it being only somewhat less empty than the Burj Khalifa?
I thought I read somewhere recently that the burj khalifa was like 80% populated. China has towns/cities all over that are being built up when there isn't demand for the space. It's been going on for years. I wonder how the government hasn't closed the loophole all those cities had Vern using to do this and then get bailed out.
Hard to find accurate figures on it, but the emptiness of Dubai buildings "is known".
Apparently the Saudis are building this thing in China anyway, so doesn't matter to the Chinese if they already have vast ghost towns, they're not paying anyway.
May 2003 - "Mission Accomplished"
June 2005 - "The mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight"
-- G W Bush, freelance writer for The Daily Show.
As an aside, I see this type of 'improvement in speed' as affecting construction workers pretty hard. If you can get a project done in a tenth of the time it used to take, you're getting a tenth of the pay you used to get. So you can build an entire city in a month, then what?
construction jobs just get moved over to pre-fab jobs. a lot of that shit is automated, but then that just gets shifted over to robot makers and engineers to keep that shit running.
there are actually more jobs now per-capita than there was in the post-industrial era. this is partly because instant communications and IT actually create more work than it gets rid of. sure, an IRS auditor can click a couple of buttons and bring up someone's entire claim history on their monitor as opposed to calling a file clerk and waiting 30 minutes. but 8 file clerks that worked for a regional office probably got replaced by 15 IT guys and a multi million dollar server cluster.