3D printing a building with 756 windows | Hacker News Reader

3D printing a building with 756 windows

jero.zone

39 pointsjer0me8 comments

> 3D printing a building Model with 756 windows

That said, very good job and writeup.

> This then-novel construction technique allowed the building to go up at a record speed of one floor per week; a billboard on-site proudly recorded the time each floor took.

The Empire State Building is 102 floors (not including the 200 foot pinacle on top) and was completed in about 78 weeks (including interior finishing), so I'm not sure the math works out here.

The CBR building is 9 floors and took about twice as long as the Empire State Building to build.

A few companies in China compete over building construction times. Examples include a 57 story tower built in 19 days and a 15 story hotel in 48 hours. These are just assembled from pre-fab components, so it might be 3 years of prep followed by a few days of assembly. I think the end goal is prestige.

I'm partial to LiftBuild's method of building the central tower first, and then constructing each floor at ground level and hoisting it up the tower and into place. The bulk of construction is done on the ground, faster building with less rigging and safety requirements. I think they averaged 10 days per floor on their last build.

https://www.liftbuild.com/

The Empire State Building was a legendarily fast build, I don't think being slower than it means this is bad. For example, the One World Trade Center took 4 weeks per floor.

Indeed it doesn't mean it's slow, I was just questioning the "record" part.

"Furthermore, the glass was embedded into the cement modules in the factory"

Then what happens if any of the glass needs to be replaced due to breakage? Sounds like a short-sighted design choice.

It looks like the glass is fully accessible: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/CBR_Buil...

The sentence you quoted continues:

> protecting the floors from the elements and allowing work to progress on the interior as floors above were still under construction.

so it seems the main benefit was that the construction could be pipelined better as the already in place glass helped shelter the interior.

Loved the write up-wish I had access to a space like this when I was at university!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com