China erects 15 story hotel in less than 6 days (video)
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
So my conclusion is that the hard part of building a building is not erecting the steel skeleton and pouring the concrete. It's the foundation and details that take all the time, and the article omits any details about how long that process took for this hotel.
Still, that does not detract from the very impressive performance here. A carpenter from Canada once remarked that if a million guys all swing a hammer once that's a lot of work done. Throwing 200 workers at this likely didn't hurt either, the logistics and the choreography are what impress me most about this.
if you watch the video wait for the covering of the outside, it's like watching a slowed down flood-fill but with real life hardware. In spite of the 'no work injuries' reported some of the stills had me cringe, I'm pretty sure that a building inspector or safety officer on a crew from the US or Canada would have had a heart attack on the spot.
A friend of my parents was building a house. I asked him if he considered prefab, he had no idea what I was talking about.
A friend of mine used to work at Michelle Kaufmann's firm in East Bay, and what would happen is that there is such a low volume of prefab orders that they can't get the costs down enough to justify building prefab. Plus it's not standard "from scratch" construction, etc. It's really sad, and the firm shut down for a while in 2009 (I think they're back now though).
That makes them particularly well suited for prefab, a whole wall segment can be constructed including isolation, ducts, windows / doors etc and hoisted in to place by a crane in one movement. Because the brick is laid in the mould a bricklayer can work on a gantry under a roof instead of in the open air which means year round bricklaying instead of only when it's not freezing or raining (you can't lay brick in pouring rain).
Because the wall segments are made on a guaranteed flat surface a section is always going to be perfectly straight without any measurement at all.
Note that these are full bricks, not the typical 'slices' of brick used to give US houses a brick-like appearance over a wooden interior ('brick siding').
It's all comes down to coordinated mobilization and logistical management. Seven cranes costs a lot of money, around the clock operations cost even more. Construction schedules are prepared to optimize the start of revenue streams with the cost of construction.
That said, it does remind me an awful lot of Total Annihilation when you get about fifty construction vehicles to make things damn near instantly.
The problem with the building that fell was obviously the foundation, which has to be done way in advance anyways.