World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days | Hacker News Reader

World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days

news.cnet.com

92 pointsbitcartel67 comments

This should be interesting to watch, as others have noted on the 30 story building they did it is both 'boring' since the floors are mostly identical, and largely built off site and then simply erected. I'm sure The Register will call it the "worlds fastest erection" :-).

At the MIT affordable housing design competition there were some entrants that had similar features. (pre-fab sections, erected on site relatively rapidly) By pre-wiring/plumbing the walls and floors you cut out a lot of things that slow people down. Having watched Hotels get built in Las Vegas really rapidly (for them, which is 18 months, ground breaking to opening night) you could see there are lots of things that can be disrupted. Staging carpet for example, when you start carpeting its rolls and rolls and rolls of carpet, lifted by crane to various floors, and later cut to order. If you install the floor with all the carpeting already installed at the factory you've managed to parallelize floor construction and finishing. That is a huge savings.

This building will house 31,400 people, (@ 11M sq ft that is like 350 sq ft per person so not really roomy) But an interesting way to throw together shelter. Building these things for Haiti could do wonders for that country, assuming they don't burn down.

I don't know if building cheap housing really solves any problems however. C.f., the famous housing "projects" in Chicago. You can replace those with any low-income housing project anywhere in the world and see the same effects. You might put roofs over people's heads but you create a new set of problems by throwing all of those marginally functional people together. I imagine increasing population density would just amplify those problems.

This building is supposed to have a mix of low and high income housing (how does that work?) as well as schools and other social services. Given that space in China is not at a premium I don't think you can call this anything but a social experiment. Maybe if it works they can export it to HK where it might actually be useful. (Though it does conjure images of a sort of neo-Walled City.)

Given that this type of construction produces boring, utilitarian space I don't understand why they're not using it for offices. I imagine this would be much more tolerable as office space and the footprint / usable space ratio would make sense for commercial districts.

I think it may be worth considering that the discipline and follow-the-herd mentality of Chinese people is a lot different than those of Americans who would qualify for "the projects" style housing.

You may not have intended it that way, but I do find this comment to be rather racist. The stereotype that the Chinese are "follow the herd" is both untrue and damaging. Us Chinese have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the West, what with stereotypes of a hive mind and mindless obedience to authority, and this doesn't help.

I definitely didn't mean it that way but if thought it was "racism" you should read up on what racism is. To call out the differences between two cultures is not racism. Having said that, Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame. That's much less the case here in the US and that is what I was pointing out.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'". Why is that?

You may wish to follow your own advice there. Calling out the differences between cultures is a fundamental part of racism - "we're better than them and their funny ways". Yes, it can be done in a non-racist way, but the way you've phrased it is just plain wrong.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20...

I recently started thinking about this the other way - that it's actually more racist to accuse someone making statements about group differences of attributing them to race - rather than culture.

It's a fact that the way people are raised has a huge influence on how conformist they are as adults; in a conversation about the average level of conformity between two different cultures, someone who comes along and brings race into it is the one who is lowering the tone.

Culture is important and heritable, let's just talk about that!

What?

It sounds like you've really misunderstood my comment(s).

I'm saying that you have a peverse understanding of what racism is, and that you should 'read up on racism'.

Your first paragraph is saying that calling out differences in two cultures isn't racist. This isn't true. Yes it can be done differently, but if you start talking about 'fried chicken and watermelon' (as an example), you're talking about the difference between two cultures, yours and the stereotyped one you're referring to.

The second paragraph was a straight-out derailment:"oh, if you're really against racism, why aren't you against this other kind?", the subtext being that the speaker is biased or selfish because they didn't evenly address the other potentially racist stuff.

Seriously, if you're going to be correcting others on 'what racism is', you do need to spend some more time reading up on it. There's a few subtleties that have bypassed you, from your comment above.

> Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame

Regardless, 'follow-the-herd' doesn't neccesarily follow from it. You seem to have very simplistic views of 'asians', who make up many different cultures and people. This kind of generalization is usually a prerequisite of racism - it makes it possible to broadly criticize an entire group of people because of their race and ethnicity.

What a joke.

the reason your comment about Americans is not racist is because you are not talking about Chinese People and American People at all. you are talking about Chinese People and People of Low Income who Live In America. you used a qualifier for the latter, but not the former. when you don't include a qualifier, the implicit one becomes "all".

yes, i realize changing your wording does not change your argument. but no one seems to be saying that you are a racist person or have a racist argument. they simply seem to be saying you said a racist thing.

and this is why delicacy is important when dealing with race. not just for sensitive audiences, but literal ones as well. ironically, if you take this perspective, "it's racist" actually seems less emotionally provoked than "it's not racist".

One aspect is priority: How much important house styling is for you? May be some cultures have low priority for it.

So far the herd mentality is concerned, being different than others just because everyone is trying to be different (identity crisis?), is the same herd mentality.

In the UK, we tend to mix the social housing with private housing. Seems to work - everywhere is uniformly shitty :)

There are places where social housing works. In the Netherlands social housing is often quite pleasant, especially if it is centrally/well located. A difference might be that there is much more of it in the Netherlands, so the middle-classes also often live there (especially early in their careers).

Assuming that a family will have 3 or 4 people, 1050 sq ft to 1400 sq ft isn't bad at all in any big city in Asia. In Bangalore for instance, such an apartment would cost around $200k in a decent location.

Working on an app a while back, I watched people constructing a building outside of my office window. Watching hundreds of people working together, they got that thing up in around six months.

I looked at how far we had gotten on the software we were working on in the same time period. It was, frankly, disheartening.

They already had the blueprints. I'm sure it took them a lot longer than 6 months of work for the building to be finished.

Ah but in buildings you adding plumbing is just a matter of putting in pipes, in software adding plumbing involves known unknowns and unknown unknowns :-) On the flip side though it is possible to write really bad software really really quickly.

If you were in New Zealand I'd ask you to get back in a year after it has rained a bit. Leaky building syndrome - cheap, fast, crap buildings that get toxic mold and fall apart. But if the building is any good, then yes, I can see that watching it would be disheartening.

All you saw was the part where they compiled the building. All the good stuff had already happened. In construction, the guys with the hard-hats are the compiler/linker. If you saw how long they spent bribing (or whatever it happens to be called locally) and permission seeking before the first shovel went in, you'd feel a whole lot better.

Like others have said, all the process you observed was equivalent to when you "build" your code (pun intended). And the compiler probably took a lot less than 6 months of time to build your code ;)

In one of his talks Alan Kay compares software development with civil engineering, claiming the former is still at the level of pyramid building.

There are certainly similarities, but civil engineering when compared to software engineering methodologies is closer to waterfall. And waterfall isn't the most efficient way to turn out software.

Whilst putting up a building at speed is a great marvel, it should be noted that what holds this kind of prefabrication back is not generally technological innovation but the reality that transporting prefabricated components to site is often more expensive than just building them in place. If this ever really gets built and isn't one giant PR excercise ('tallest building' proposals have a long history as such), it will require a huge factory space of temporary workers not far from the base of the building basically doing all the usual building tasks and won't be any cheaper than a traditional slow concrete construction which requires long times to dry (unless they are hiding something more fundamentally important than the headline from us).

I was under the impression it was mostly regulation holding prefabrication back (presumably less of an issue in china). Here in the UK many (admittedly somewhat low-quality) prefabs were built immediately after the war to replace lost housing, and it was seen as the way forward - then they suddenly became illegal once they were no longer such an obvious necessity.

A 220 floor building is a hugely complex engineering feat to pull off which will have little in common with the 30 floor hotel that Broad previously manufactured and erected. The difference cannot be overstated; from the structural elements needed to support something approaching 3000 feet (including the sheer loads from wind) to the highly specialised services required (lifts, water, drainage, fire services, power distribution etc.). On top of this there are the technicalities and logistics of manufacturing and assembling something this big and tall in such a short time. There will be a lot of specialist and custom engineering involved.

So what is the point? If Broad's mission is manufacture cost effective, easy to erect and energy efficient tower blocks then the 220/F monster seems an unlikely direction to take. The average tower block in any but the most crowded city is unlikely to much over 30 floors. And from a cost and energy efficiency standpoint there are diminishing returns on very tall buildings anyway.

All in all I think this is more of a publicity stunt than a reality.

Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry. There's so much regulation and risk-assignment involved in construction that only the biggest players can afford to bid and execute on a medium-large project. The result is little innovation, lengthy project completion times and high costs.

Forget the construction companies for a moment - the amount of training and accreditation required for a tradesman (e.g. electrician) is unheard of anywhere else in the world. My friend has three different Working at Heights tickets, and the various state licenses have cost him a small fortune.

If we could shift much of the fabrication to local factories/warehouses where working at height and weather exposure can be reduced or eliminated, we might be able to encourage more competition and speed up production times.

>Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry.

Agreed (though why smaller?). Do you know people who might be interested in looking into this?

Smaller, relative to this megastructure, because its a new fabrication process - better to see how it performs on a smaller-scale both in terms of desirability (is it pretty - will people happily work/live in it) and structural integrity. Plus there needs to be demand for huge amounts space.

I know people from the engineering side of things who would be interested.

I also know people who may be interested. I put my email in my profile, if you want to look into this, send me a note.

The more impressive headline will be "World's tallest skyscraper constructed in just 90 days." The Burj Khalifa took five and a half years to complete. Even completing this new building in twice the predicted time will be remarkable.

It seems to me that many (most?) rooms in that building will not have windows and most of those that do have windows will not have windows that open. So this building might as well be underground.

I bet not. Rather than just building a big "square", the image depicts a shape that provides a lot of outside surface area for windows. A significant part of the internal non-window space will be elevators.

But you could be right.

Awesome feature by Wired about the man behind this: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable-buildi...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574100

China also has entire empty cities, some newly constructed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19049254

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/

So one has to ask why.

Simple: Changsha is not an empty city.

I always assumed the stories about empty cities were like street interviews. Pick what fits the target narrative and toss the rest, even if the rest contradicts the narrative.

There is a lot of truth the empty city/empty building story, mostly just classic overbuilding. Its just not the issue in Changsha, which is a booming city coming into its own right now (though they may be overbuilding). I've only been there once about 10 years ago, but I go to Hunan relatively often. Its not like Inner Mongolia where you could just build an empty city on the plains. The area is heavily populated.

It's always good to hear straight from people who aren't a continent or more removed from the subject. Where's a good place to look if I want to find out more about the real estate situation around China?

I'm not sure, China is a big place and many local factors apply.

Natural resources in the west and northwest dominate, which is why there are ghost boom towns (people looking to do something with that money). Shanghai/Guangzhou are financial centers and become incredibly expensive, Beijing is the center of government but will always trail Shanghai. The south is dense but not that much arable land (compared to say India, China is mostly mountains). Yunnan (out west) has great weather and ethnic diversity; you'd think Kunming could eventually become China's San Francisco but capital and skillz are all concentrated in the east.

You could probably pick a city or region and analyze it to death.

Because city and local officials make huge profits with these development. Remember, land is owned by the government. And no one is accountable for failed investment. Cheapest materials are used, getting done fast is important because the developer wants to get out of it as quickly as possible. It fits the prevalent theme in China right now: get rich quick and leave the country fast.

> using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a giant Lego set

What terrible writing.

Isn't this the same group that had one of their '90-day' buildings collapse not long ago?

Can you provide a source to your claim?

A variety of buildings have collapsed in China in recent years. Here's one good example with great pictures. I don't know if it's the same company or not.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling-tow...

And that's not a 90 day pre-fab building. IIRC, they had a dodgy underground carpark, which subsided. It had nothing to do with the actual building.

Also, the pre-fabs they are starting to build have a lot of steel, which is easy to engineer. Concrete can be more difficult to get right, especially when you don't trust the suppliers (bamboo rebar anyone?).

Looks like a crap piling job to me... I must say my first reaction to the OP story was "how long will the foundations take?"

But concrete buildings are so common in China because they can be assembled with low-level migrant workers. The move to steel typically requires much higher-level expertise, and so only the tallest buildings get that treatment. But with prefab, this is interesting, they might be able to continue using low-level migrant workers in the factory and during assembly?

I'm not sure exactly which incident you're referring to as there have been several of these stories coming out of China in the last few years, but as far as I know none are associated with Broad Group. They pride themselves on being safer than other Chinese builders because of the tests they can perform on fabricated pieces– obviously that's what they'd want you to think regardless, but from what I've read it certainly seems to be the case. Chinese construction on average isn't great, and they appear to have their own process down pat even if it misses out on some more exciting design features.

Edit: Is this (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/asia/collapse-of-new...) what you're referring to? It's a bridge obviously, and not related to these builders but it was fairly high profile because it hadn't even been open for a full year.

That's not a building, that's an arcology.

Note that the article says "90 days to finish" or "90 days to complete", NOT "90 days to build".

The site prep work like foundations for a supertall skyscraper are easily glossed over but are very important.

This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing.

WTF is with the phallus symbol race for biggest buildings around the world.

How about a contest for the least warmongering nation with the most free, productive people?

Denmark? Norway? Costa Rica?

That would be much harder to evaluate. Measuring tall things is pretty straightforward.

Same as how other countries build other phallic symbols (rockets); although i think buildings are rather dumb.

By definition that contest would be doomed because the contestants would not want to outcompete each other (or they would provoke others to make them more hostile).

I'm noticing this trend in numerous projects. Clients expect so much in 90 days. Sigh.

Pretty impressive if they can do it.

I almost had a heart attack when I saw that picture of it in Chicago. It would be such a monstrosity and a real blemish to the the subtlety of the current skyline. Fortunately, that's just CNet being creative and this is far, far away from Chicago.

Can someone summarize how they manage to do this?

I once read that it involved that they sell a product rather than a service. I don't know where I read that but I'm curious why this doesn't apply more often to other products?

did anyone else notice that the two pictures show different buildings?

What could possibly go wrong?

Is there enough demand for office space in Changsa to support this structure?

Apparently the housing market there is doing better than much of China's real estate market, but that isn't saying much. The growth of inland cities like Changsa has traditionally been slower than the coastal giants (pretty intuitive) but now with further central government investment, an increased infrastructure the growth is really picking up. The real problem with this building though is that there are increasing costs the larger a building gets from increased maintenance, climate control systems, etc. and it doesn't scale linearly with size. The question here is whether to have one monolithic building or several large buildings. I'd imagine the latter is the better bet, but the cost savings from the modular build may largely outweigh this.

A lot of it has to do with face though. Hunan/Changsha get lots of face projects because they are the home of Mao. Changsha itself is at best a second tier city and not really even on the level as Wuhan or (definitely) Guangzhou that it lies between.

Looking at the designs, the building looks like it will be an eye soar pretty quickly, on par with the Ryugyong.

I call B.S. on this

Actually not BS, see the Broad Group's web site and their timelapse of the 'demo' project [1]. They don't count the time to put in the foundation and drive the pilings, just the erection part. That part consists entirely of lifting pre-fabricated sections in place, connecting pipes and wires, welding to the rest of the building and moving on to the next one.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY&noredirect=1

I've seen that already, and yes, it's impressive, but watch and see, this isn't going to be built in 90 days, or next year. Probably never.

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