China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days | Hacker News Reader

China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

designtaxi.com

145 pointsJumpCrisscross92 comments

It is hard to read this story without thinking about the massive scale of "we just built this building, but we're going to tear it down because it is a deathtrap" demolitions that are happening in Beijing and the other populous cities in China that are still growing at obscene rates: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china-proudly-demolishing-b...

There is a lot of sensationalism in that article. Half the pictured buildings are over ten years old. Only one is less than three years old.

That is not to deny that china has an over investment issue with their state financed industries. But still, in a country of over a billion I do not think it is out of the ordinary to have some development.

They also have the benefit of the rest of the developed world's experience of how to plan cities.

Do they really only plan to use these large buildings for only 10 years and then rebuild? Is this normal for the rest of the world?

It's not particularly abnormal during rapid real-estate development cycles. The scale is unusual, but then again, China is the first country with more than a billion people.

No it isn't, India does as well.

first, not only.

I'd understand if they were demolishing decrepit buildings and building new and better buildings. That doesn't seem the case.

It's plausible that none of what we have learnt so far applies very well to extremely large populations. I still find it strange and super inefficient.

When it comes to efficiency in the real-estate market, efficiency is based on the highest and best use of the particular location. Ownership patterns and the regulatory processes for entitlement are the significant impediments to redevelopment of prime locations. These are less of an issue in China.

To some extent, the web is a useful analogy, we don't blink when a web property is redeveloped - a ten year old website is virtually untenable for commercial ventures. Real-estate is subject to similar forces to those which motivate Google to rewrite their search page.

No tall building (above 3 floors wood frame) would get anywhere close to economic viability if the plan was to only leave it up for 10 years. Think about how many buildings that are within 20 years old that have been demolished in the united states. The number would be insanely low.

Insanely low, but not nonexistent. In a country with a fraction of the population of China.

Say you'd built a skyscraper, and a few years afterwards someone offered you enough money to make out with a hefty profit because real estate is booming and you're occupying a prime location. Would you sell?

Prior to my current role I worked in institutional multifamily brokerage. One of the assets I was selling was 50 years (mid rise) and it still wasn't worth bulldozing since it is less expensive to renovate and rent is highly coorelated to price/sf.

There are no examples of what you are talking about that I can think of. There are cases where short mid-rises are bulldozed for ultra high density, but the math makes it very rare circumstances and none that I know of would be 10 or 20 year old buildings. We are talking 50 year+ buildings.

I do not disagree with that claim, but I also think the economics would change a bit if you could destroy them in a month and build a new one in a week.

China has many large buildings. Of this very large set a few turned out to need demolition.

The article accuses China of paying the morning crew to dig a ditch and the evening crew to fill it up. I dislike communist in-efficiencies just as much as any other capitalist, but I do not think the situation is occurring quite to the severity implied in the parent's article.

Meetoo. Moreover, it is deep in Asian culture to have to rebuild frequently their architecture. I have lived beside the Forbidden City and it is in continuous reworking. I bet not one part of it is older than a couple of decades. But its plan odds very old, predates the foundation of Beijing itself. So having to destroy and rebuild every now and then is quite normal here.

Interested readers might want to check what Simon Leys said on the matter.

I read a book on the history of Burma. It was very common to move the capital, due to the humidity, wood gets old. The emporer's court would rather not have to deal with reconstruction so the solution: start a new palace in a new location, when ready move the population of the city. And they were doing this for hundreds of years.

Cue the clip from LA Story of Steve Martin proudly proclaiming "Some of these buildings are almost twenty-five years old!"

There are lots of videos about China's ghost cities, like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM

Lots... yet everyone quotes that same australian one. That misrepresents a suburb as a 'city'.

How many places in the world have vacant property developments? Do you call them 'ghost cities'?

Of course the classic example of 'build a big building to look good, but so poorly that it will never really be usable' is the North Korean Ryugong Hotel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel

We are in another age now though. I'm not sure anyone will quite reach the same levels of stupidity.

That building is totally bizarre.

it looks like the space battleship from Galaga.

They're actually finishing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel#Construction_re...

There aren't any pictures of the insides however so this might be a classic case of North Korea "Look What It Looks Like On The Outside" that we're supposed to believe.

My bias wants to make some remark about unions and/or regulations inhibiting construction innovation in the US, but I have no idea if that's actually true... is there progress being made in the US (faster construction? more prefab? etc) or does China's progress simply come with quality sacrifices that are pretty unacceptable in the US?

Certainly there was a time when the USA seemed to be the the leaders of this kind of innovation. We're leaders of a different kind now.

The video for the 15 story hotel they built super quickly seems to show an innovative design that is also very high quality-- probably higher quality than alternatives.

The construction is impressively earth quake resistant. The air purification system, if I understood what was happening, was also innovative. The 4 pane glass windows seems cool, and since they are sealed, there's no need to clean the blinds.

Certainly China can bring more cheap labor to a project than the USA can. But this company seems to be re-thinking things in ways that the USA could emulate-- for instance, building floors offsite (including laying down the floor tile) and then trucking them to the site for assembly.

Walt Disney experimented with modular assembly back in the day, and certainly a lot of other US companies have tried it to varying degrees. This company seems to have fully embraced it in a way that the US-- despite having a head start it seems-- has not. Not sure why that is, as offsite construction of major components seems advantageous to me.

> the 15 story hotel

It's not as pretty as you think.

http://zjj.house.sina.com.cn/zhuanti/yuandajiemi/index.html

scroll down to the bottom.

http://zjj.house.sina.com.cn/images/U4528P915T3D125F161DT201...

This is the 15 story hotel entrance. Can you imagine?

The video is of a 30 story hotel built in 15 days. Your links are to a 15 story hotel built in 6 days. I agree the entrance is plain, but maybe that was a design decision for that particular building. Overall the design is consistent, probably due to the modular construction.

While I too would like to make derogatory remarks about unions, regulations, hippies, and the rest of our society that seem to make a living off of inhibiting progress ...

The truth of the matter is that this is bullshit. The "hotel in 2 weeks" story already appeared on HN and was thoroughly discredited. This doesn't seem much more plausible.

In the end, if you want the building to stand for more than a year or two, it will take a certain amount of engineering, effort, and time to do it. The Empire State Building took more than a year to build. That sounds about right for any skyscraper, even with our more advanced tech.

I don't remember a huge amount of discredit on the hotel in two weeks?

I would expect that hotel is still standing strong for years to come; I think China really are the world leaders when it comes to construction these days (I heard somewhere that they're putting up some insane number of coal power-plants every month?!). What I'd really like to see is an entire prefab, skyscraper filled city built in a year.

There were personal accounts of the buildings being uninhabitable. In fact, they're starting to show up in the comments here!

It matters when you start the clock.

At the beginning of the design stage? When the first prefab wall panel starts being built at their factory? When you break ground?

I think some credit has to be given to the Chinese for innovating in this area as well; it's not just safety/quality corner-cutting, though there might be some of that. The article notes the much longer time it took Dubai to build its similarly sized building, and Dubai is not exactly known for worker-friendly labor laws or European/American levels of workplace-safety regulations.

The difference in the quality of the Chinese quick-buildings (i.e., "quildings") and the Dubai buildings is the difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini.

The Chinese quildings are cheap because they lack any sort of extravagance. In contrast, the Chinese structures which do feature prominant decorative features (i.e., the Bird's Nest or CSTV HQ), took almost as long to build as they would have anywhere else.

The Dubai buildings take a long time because they are built to exacting standards using the most opulent, expensive materials the Royal Family can buy. Everything is done to spec, and it shows.

>>difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini. The toyota's started as a cheap but low low quality car , then they became a high quality car, with a good price.

Who's to say it won't happen here ?

And in any case , i read that the Chinese buildings are very cheap to build. For many people that's much more important(as long s reliability and functionality is maintened) in an apartment.

From the Western perspective, Chinese regulations and processes have a long way to go. When was the last time a brand new building in the US or Europe simply collapsed before topping out? In China it was 2009:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5685963...

I believe China has significantly more union members than the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-China_Federation_of_Trade_U...

That's only if you consider the ACFTU a union in any meaningful sense of the word. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions doesn't.

There are no real unions in China, these organizations are all part of the Party. If you run any organized civil group in China with more than 100 members, you can be sure to be invited for a "talk" to the local Party headquarters, and depending on your willingness to cooperate, that visit may end very negativly for you. The one thing the Party is really afraid of are people organizing themselves.

"In America you go to party. In China, party come to you!"

(post Soviet and all)

If you want some explanation that probably fits with your biases, this might be responsible for some part :)

Warren Buffet, 2009 http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2009ltr.pdf

The second reason that manufactured housing is troubled is specific to the industry: the punitive differential in mortgage rates between factory-built homes and site-built homes. Before you read further, let me underscore the obvious: Berkshire has a dog in this fight, and you should therefore assess the commentary that follows with special care. That warning made, however, let me explain why the rate differential causes problems for both large numbers of lower-income Americans and Clayton.

The residential mortgage market is shaped by government rules that are expressed by FHA, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Their lending standards are all-powerful because the mortgages they insure can typically be securitized and turned into what, in effect, is an obligation of the U.S. government. Currently buyers of conventional site-built homes who qualify for these guarantees can obtain a 30-year loan at about 5 1⁄4%. In addition, these are mortgages that have recently been purchased in massive amounts by the Federal Reserve, an action that also helped to keep rates at bargain-basement levels.

In contrast, very few factory-built homes qualify for agency-insured mortgages. Therefore, a meritorious buyer of a factory-built home must pay about 9% on his loan. For the all-cash buyer, Clayton’s homes offer terrific value. If the buyer needs mortgage financing, however – and, of course, most buyers do – the difference in financing costs too often negates the attractive price of a factory-built home.

We have tried to qualify more of our customers’ loans for treatment similar to those available on the site-built product. So far we have had only token success

Obviously, most of this is prefab...so I wonder how much time was spent building all the individual pieces before the official ground breaking?

With 220 floors and 104 elevators...that's more than 2 floors and 1 elevator a day. I imagine just the fitting/assembling in place process per floor is enough to fill up a third of a day on its own...so is this basically a huge vertical jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces have been made and just need to be moved onto site?

Their wikipedia page said 7 months in total, with a 90-day on-site construction time.

There's always a lead time. But the pace at which prefabricated items can be built in a factory is significantly greater than that at which items can be site built. The constraints on an urban site are a significant logistical problem - site fabrication requires lots of different trades arriving through city traffic at the same time because there isn't much space in which materials may be staged. Every trade adds to the traffic through which other trades must transport their materials.

Conversely, prefabricated units can be built virtually anywhere and shipped economically over long distances...i.e. fabrication can occur at a factory in a rural location and assemblies can be moved by rail or barge.

Do you think it's practical to ship the pieces from china to the u.s. or europe ?

That is common practice already.

any links related?

http://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/prefab-shipping-cont...

They are doing that with the Bay Bridge:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/business/global/26bridge.h...

I worked on a Low Income Housing Tax Credit project where the developer had granite countertops and solid wood cabinets shipped from China for roughly the same cost as standard economy cabinets and commodity laminate countertops.

What made it practical was the specifics of LIHTC funding. A significant amount of the funds had to be spent upfront on materials and/or labor or it would have been lost. This made the long lead time beneficial because early stages of construction such as clearing and grubbing are relatively inexpensive whereas finishes are relatively expensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Income_Housing_Tax_Credit

That was one of the questions I was wondering about. I recently looked at a new factory in the bay area of prefab houses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmpRRoNqsDI)and one of their claims is they can put up a house in 7 days. But of course it isn't that they start with dirt and 7 days later there is a house, there is a time to build the foundation, and the house is built in a factory, but once the foundation is ready and the house manufactured, it only takes 7 days to install and unfold it. Which is still pretty cool.

So one way this headline could be strictly true is if all of the floors of the building were fabricated off site, once they were ready the company might be able to assemble the final building, in a prepared foundation, in 90 days. That is the only interpretation I can think of that works.

Concrete can take 4 weeks to get to 90% strength [1], so if you didn't do the prefab route you would have to spend more than 90 days just waiting for the lower levels to cure so that you could build the upper levels.

I am interested in what they are trying to do though, it sounds like an interesting challenge.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Curing

>"Concrete can take 4 weeks to get to 90% strength [1], so if you didn't do the prefab route you would have to spend more than 90 days just waiting for the lower levels to cure so that you could build the upper levels."

Concrete made with Type III portland cement achieves most of its strength within seven days (concrete made with normal (Type I) cement reaches its design strength in 28 days).

When one needs significant strength more quickly, the mix can be adjusted to provide a higher ultimate strength than is required for the intended loads during the normal life of the building and accelerants added . This results in adequate capacity for construction to continue in as little as a few hours.

The general rule of thumb is 75% of 28-day strength in 7 days. Most concrete mixtures reach their design strength well before 28 days due to the fact that any particular batch of concrete will be mixed such that its 28-day strength is higher than the design strength by a few 10s of %s. This is due to the fact that failing a compressive strength test for any one test or any 3 averaged consecutive tests (guidelines are set forth for failure criteria in ACI) requires remedial action in general.

Looking at the profile, it is much more stout than Burj Khalifa which should make the engineering significantly less complex due to the inherent stiffness.

On the other hand, much of the building's interior spaces will have little access to daylight due to the large size of the floor plates - at 1,000,000 m^2 it is has more than three times the area of Burj Khalifa.

That's a good point. You have to wonder if they considered innovating in that area as well. Perhaps a system that diffuses light through the ceiling of each floor? That would be quite impressive.

The innovations are primarily logistical not technological and in the end, lights in the ceiling are lights in the ceiling, not windows with a view of the weather or the city lights.

It seems like it would be more accurate to say "assembled" in 90 days. These things are pretty much pre-built off-site and just need to be plugged and stacked.

It's very impressive and I look forward to seeing some greater modification (away form the standard boxy look) toward more expressiveness and personality --similar to the turning torso building --which looks like it could be modular as well.

I’m reminded of the classic triple constraint ‘cheap, fast, good’. They’re promising cheap and fast…

Exactly. I'd be interested in some follow up with that 30-story building they previously built. What's the final quality -- months later?

I'm skeptical, but with enough pre-planning and enough people, I think it is possible to build a quality building in this way.

It's possible, but China doesn't exactly have a good record regarding this, as their experience with the recent Sichuan earthquake proved. I'd definitely be wary of living in this building. Sure, on paper, I'm sure the building is structurally sound. But who know how many corners were cut during the process of construction to meet schedule pressure?

Rush to build the tallest structure in the world? What could possibly go wrong?

This thing has all the makings of the soon to be longest freestanding structure in the world.

The modular, factory-produced nature of the construction here makes a given level of quality a lot faster and cheaper. They can automate production of things that ordinarily would need to be constructed on site, they can do easier quality control, and they can devote more engineering effort to modules that get used many times.

(Note that this only applies to the parts that they can actually factory-build. For example, it doesn't apply to the concrete work for the foundations.)

Just as a point of reference, this building will be taller than both of the fallen WTC buildings stacked on top each another (sans the spire).

Yeah, the Burj is itself mind bogglingly tall, this new one is only 10m taller.

I'm wondering when we're gonna see the first true Mile High tower? We're 1/3 the way there!

We're actually over 1/2 way there.

1 mile = 1609.344 metres Burj Khalifa = 828 metres

If it's only 10 cm taller, that sounds like within the margin of error of where you measure. Not that I have any idea what the standard "building height" measurement entails.

IT will be 10meters taller, not 10 centimeters.

oops

We can measure the distance to the moon accurately enough to determine it is getting 3.8 cm furhter from the earth each year, I'm pretty sure 10cm is well outside the margin of error for measurements of something as simple as a building.

Not disagreeing with you, but I wonder how much the Burj expands and contracts every day.

Certainly much less than 10 meters

Once you know what to measure, that is true. However, in 'tallest of the world' attempts, there typically is quite a bit of uncertainty about where spires (included in height measurement) end and antennae (not part of the building) begin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_s...).

Wow, this will be impressive if they can pull it off. The fact that BSB was able to construct a 15 story hotel in 15 days proves that it is indeed possible. Pre-fabricated construction is definitely the future, I love how the pieces seem to just snap securely onto the frame.

There will be sceptics, but China is probably the only real country innovating in the construction sector. That hotel is 9 magnitude earthquake resistant. It's a rare 100 year event that an earthquake ever gets past 5.6/6 on the Richter scale (the 2011 Japanese earthquake was a 9).

Seeing articles like this make me excited for the future.

I wonder how much of this will go unused. The "largest mall in the world" was build in China in 2005 and has remained 99% vacant. Having the "tallest building in the world" is an even bigger feather in their cap, but it won't be very impressive if no one actually uses it.

The Empire State Building didn't reach profitability until about two decades after its completion. Nevertheless, it has remained impressive from the time of its completion through today.

Centre Point in London ("just" 34 floors) was left totally empty for the better part of a decade after construction because rising property prices combined with the owners desire to let the whole building to a single tenant made them consider it beneficial to just wait it out until they could find a suitable tenant... Commercial property development can be pretty weird.

The Empire State Building completed construction right before the Great Depression. The Great Depression was followed by WWII. The ESB became profitable as soon as the US economy picked up.

In contrast, the Chinese Great Mall has been essentially vacant despite China's decade-long boom cycle. If they can't fill up the mall during a period of double-digit economic expansion, they never will.

> It took more than five years to build the 828-meter ‘Burj Khalifa’ in Dubai—the current world’s tallest building.

> ...projected cost at US$628 million — as compared with the US$1.5 billion Burj Khalifa.

Seems like the only thing the Burj Khalifa has going for it is that it, well, already exists. This is a pretty big advantage though. Anyone can talk big before construction delays, government regulations, and other interference come into play.

If the Skyscraper Index is predictive this is not a good sign for China's economic growth. ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index

The building project has NOT been approved yet. It's indeed in investigation phase where debates and argumentations are conducting.

The firm that behinds the building is called "Broad Group", it's world's leading absorbing chiller type of central air conditioning manufacturer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Group

Here is the latest accurate version in Chinese. Run it through Google Translate to see it. http://news.sohu.com/20120619/n346011745.shtml

"According to BSB chief executive officer, Zhang Yue, he said that the company is confident that the government will give the go ahead for this project."

I wonder if this building project, which the submitted link says has not even received government approval, will go the way of high-speed rail in China: first, a lot of gee-whiz headlines; second, deadly failures. Shoddy construction of buildings led to considerable loss of life during recent earthquakes in China.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-06-06-china-construc...

(2008 Sichuan earthquake)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/deadly-earthquake...

(2012 Qinghai earthquake)

I've been reading the Chinese press in the original Chinese for a long time, so I tend to read between the lines when I see news out of China.

But you don't read between the lines with USA Today, and The Australian?

"Unbiased press" = oxymoron

As if Chinese building practices (and QC generally) weren't bad enough, I am definitely never going inside

Yep. Reminds me of how they proudly built a much faster bullet train. Did they really think the Japanese and French were holding back on speed because they were bad engineers?

The claims of environmentalism seem laughable. Surely the cost in terms of increased material requirements, wasted space due to 104 elevators, etc. makes this building a bad choice w.r.t. the environment compared to constructing, say, 10 buildings of 1/10th the size?

China doing something innovative!

Queue the slew of pro-West/Anti-china comments.

sigh

For future reference -- "cue".

Not really, some company is only annoucing that they are planing to do something that sounds innovative.

Tiny difference.

Well despite proving my point.

What isn't innovative about this project?

Dubai (& Abu Dhabi) will not be happy about this. I guess they thought they would have the record for a while.

If this were fark someone would reply with some kind of comment about the threat typically posed to skyscrapers by persons of middle-eastern origin.

But yeah, I wouldn't wanna be on a high floor of this thing.

I always liked this picture. It shows how strange the judging of building heights can be: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/S0IflWYaadI/AAAAAAAAGH...

What's with the building height brinksmanship? Someone needs to totally outdo what's been done. Mile High Tower.

You should change the GET parameter utm_source to Hacker_News.

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