According to this article, a Chinese construction company will build that world’s tallest building in 90 days. The author of the article itself is highly dubious that it can be done. Personally, I know next to nothing about engineering and building construction, but I agree that the claim on its face seems outlandish.
I would have thought the foundation work would require that timeline to be much longer. Concrete takes a long time to cure.
As for the floors themselves, I can see it being possible, given that a ton of the work is done pre-fab. You’d need a lot of cranes and a crazy system for organizing construction in a safe and efficient manner.
Putting a project of that magnitude in place over such a short time period would take a stunning amount of planning and logistical work. I would follow such a project pretty closely.
If you intentionally parse the article very deliberately, it says that foundation would would begin in 30 days but does not mention if that would count against the 90 days
Sure, why not. It might not be as tall on the 91st day, but buildings are erected to just make a mark on one day, not last a lifetime or anything like that.
That article links to this one, about a previous building built by the same company. The earlier building was a thirty-story hotel built in fifteen days. The point of both builds is, I assume, to demonstrate the company’s technology, in the hope that others will hire them to construct buildings for them.
There are a bunch of Youtube videos of similar projects done by this company (including the one in Dewey Finn’s Gizmodo article). IANAEngineer but there doesn’t seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with their construction methods. They rely heavily on prefabrication, so by the time the modules get to the construction site it’s just a matter of stacking and welding/bolting them in place. My guess is that the total build time if you include the time spent constructing the modules in the factory will be considerably more than 90 days. They probably spend months churning out the pre-fab sections, stacking them up at a railyard next to the factory, then have them delivered to the site and quickly assembled. They probably save a bunch of money by A) doing the bulk of the constructing at ground level in a controlled environment and B) only having to lease cranes and other heavy equipment on-site for a short amount of time.
One point working in their favor is that we all probably have some kind of impression what a “work environment” should look like for the people actually building the structure on site.
I strongly doubt if this image squares with what the reality will be. I wonder how many casualties there will be among the work force while erecting the building… Then again, it’s China; people are still a rather cheap commodity there.
I still don’t think it can be done, and the building structurally sound on days 91, 191, 1091 and 10091 – but hey, it’s still China. What does it matter if the whole thing collapses, with a few thousand people in it, a bit further down the road? :dubious:
I don’t know about that - the work environment shown in the video Dewey Finn linked to seemed pretty normal to me. Certainly better than the conditions that the Empire State building was built under by comparison. And its not as if Dubai is a worker’s paradise.
I also don’t think the Chinese authorities would allow construction to proceed if there’s a significant risk of national embarassment. If Sky City’s built, it’ll be structurally sound. The design looks pretty insipid though.
OK. Obviously that makes it more “reasonable” by default, but seeing as the current tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa took about six years to build, would it not still seem like an practical impossibility? Again, I have little knowledge on these matters, but it would seem to me the the structural soundness of such a project is as best, suspect. We’re not just talking about the height of the building but what it encompasses: a vertical city capable of housing 100,000 people at any one time with every facility known to man included.
It not only blows my mind, but sends it on a futuristic expedition where you could potentially build relatively cheap & highly efficient housing for whole nations in a matter of months. In fact, we could literally have Sky nations in any number of islands/small territories. One building, one nation. :eek:
The whole thing also makes me think of the old adage: “If it sounds too good to be true…”
ETA: Theoretically, is there a limit to how high a building can go? Is our atmosphere the theoretical limit?
Note that if the prefab modules used to build the thirty-story hotel and this new building were constructed in advance, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that this building will be assembled in 90 or 210 days, rather than built in that timeframe.
I just Googled Broad Sustainable Building to find out the status of their “world’s tallest building.” This article from last month mentions a major flaw in their technique. The prefab blocks limit the size of any interior space to just under 13 feet wide.
