There’s an ESPN commercial where some guy is playing an online game. “I’m moving the dorms to get a new basketball arena, it should be ready by tomorrow”.
Would this be possible IRL? A few total fantasy-land assumptions:
Small college arena, seating maybe 5,000 people.
*The ground where the arena will be is already flat and graded. But nothing is built on it yet.
No limit on workers. Even one person per screw. Let’s say all the construction workers, plumbers, carpenters, etc in NYC are mobilized and show up fully equipped. Material and labor budget is not an issue, nor are unions.
All materials and construction vehicles on site and ready to go (but not on the arena footprint). The contractor says I’d need one crane every 20 feet. I’d need all the girders laid out here, here, and here. I’d need my electricians standing here, here, and here.
It’s all right there as we count down to start:
And 24 hours from my mark… go! Imagine a Tom & Jerry cartoon with a large dust clouds with hammers flying.
With everyone working together and the sheer mass of equipment, could it be ready to go the next day?
Or would there be too many steps where you’d have to wait for the next step? Cement must dry completely, rivets must cool, etc?
The only way I could see it working is if you could use pre-fab concrete that was already made before hand otherwise I don’t think it could be done. The problem I see is that the concrete floors wouldn’t have time to setup in order to build up on them.
Come to think of it even with pre-fab floors, you’d still have the foundation to deal with. I wonder if it’s possible to pour the foundation off site, truck it in and drop it in the ground?
I think someone could design an outdoor arena that could be built in a day (ie. no roof)
You could surround a football field with those old angle iron and wood bench seats that were used at high schools. Get past the concrete problem.
The stadium I played my home games in in high school was 90% earth work, manmade hills with a concrete terrace for the seats. You could replace the concrete with steel maybe drive pilings to anchor the seating. It would be expensive and rusty but would work.
I don’t think so. Certain things require a certain fixed amount of time to do, like putting up scaffolding or pouring concrete, and certain parts of the work would be time-dependent upon other things having happened first. And, as the work increases in complexity and fragility, it decreases the gain from having multiple people working with it. You can have hundreds of people running around with hammers and nailing things to each other, but having hundreds of people running around laying electrical wires would be reckless to the point of being suicidal.
Of course, if they had a chance to make a dry run first, some of these problems could probably be avoided. And if certain parts could be pre-fabricated, it might even be possible.
Sure, except that it’s not a great arena. You won’t have hard level ground to put a floor on, but you could dump a sand/gravel mix that can be compacted to put pre-fab flooring on. You’d have to drive some temporary anchors into the ground for your structure. You could use a pre-fab metal building that can go up very quickly, or even an inflatable structure. But in short order your floor won’t be level, and your anchors won’t stay aligned, making your building unstable.
Maybe you could use temporary anchors to start, and pour concrete anchors that won’t be used until they cure. The floor could supported on a space frame. Concrete pads for the floor supports could be poured first, and then the space frame supported on temporary pads in between while the concrete cures. So the floor and building start with temporary foundations, and after some time are attached to the permanent ones.
You could do all your utilities the same way. Use temporary power distribution and plumbing systems to start with, and install permanent systems later.
So basically you start out in the morning with excavators digging the holes for the permanent foundation parts, which will be a set of concrete posts to anchor the building and floor to eventually. Then you lay some mix down over the ground and compact it. Pre-made concrete pads are put down to hold the pre-fab space frame floor sections which go in next, while concrete is pumped in through booms. Then temporary anchors are pounded or augered into the ground and more concrete pads are placed to support the building walls. While all that’s going, on a team is putting together the arch sections and end panels for a metal quonset style building. As soon as the floor is in a crane starts bringing over the building sections and workers bolt the pieces together. There needs to be one worker on mobile hi-lift devices for each bolt location on the building arches. While that’s happening electricians and plumbers run the temporary utilities under the floor sections. More electricians follow behind the wall construction crew to install overhead lights as the building goes up. Another crew brings up prefab entry stairs and ramps to the front and back of the building. When the building is up, bleacher sections are rolled in, pre-fab restrooms and large portable HVAC units are pulled up the back of the building. Just as the sun is going down the sign is raised in front of the building. Then the plumbing starts leaking, fuses and breakers start blowing, the floor gets shaky, it starts to rain and the building leaks, and a city inspector tells you it has to all be torn down because you didn’t have the right paperwork filed.
For some reason, stadiums are a favorite problem in project management textbooks. I can say with some authority that it could not be done in a day. The biggest problem will involve letting concrete cure.
You may be able to pre-fabricate enough parts to assemble a small stadium, but you’d probably cross the line as to what constitutes “building” something.
Bullfighting arenas are built in one day from premade kits (well, we say they get “installed”); not all, of course, the important ones are brick and concrete as Olé[sup]1[/sup] intended, whereas these provisional ones are wood and metal. These are for locations which can’t be arsed have a permanent one to be used throughtout the year in other events. I know of one place where they once built it ahead of the local fiestas, because they were going to have some pre-fiestas concerts there, then they left it set because they were going to have something else a few weeks later, then… and the “provisional bullring” hadn’t been taken down two years later, because events kept cropping up.
I think we need to cross the lines on the word ‘building’ as both a noun and a verb. We’ll probably get a consensus that you can’t build a great building in one day, but you can put up something that could serve as an arena for a short time.
An entire house in 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 29 seconds.
With enough fore-planning, using specialized quick-setting concrete mixes, and a LOT of people and equipment, I could see a 24 hour indoor arena - Mind you, it’ would be fairly small, and wouldn’t have structural concrete walls, but I see no absolute technological or logistical barrier.
