New York's Newest Skyscraper Is 32 Floors of Prefab Apartments | Hacker News Reader

New York's Newest Skyscraper Is 32 Floors of Prefab Apartments

fastcoexist.com

65 pointsnols26 comments

Maybe this works because they're building apartments so tiny they can be carried on a truck.

There's a more successful concept - prefab bathrooms and modular kitchens. See "ameripod.com" (bathrooms). This reduces on-site labor on the parts of the building that are labor-intensive. It's much cheaper to build a bathroom in a factory, install it as a unit, and plug it in. In a factory, you can hold tolerances and all the parts fit. Bathrooms are a convenient size for trucking purposes, too. Moving standard-width loads is cheap and routine.

Making the exterior walls part of the module means more exterior seams. Building shells aren't expensive. Steelwork and exterior walls go up fast. Building steel and concrete boxes is a solved problem. Most of the time and money go into interior details.

They failed to mention that this project is close to two years behind.

The modular construction project has been such an abject failure that the other two building projects on the site have broken ground with conventional steel frame construction.

A comment on the article page links to a description of how construction stalled on recriminations of flawed designs and construction problems:

http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.ca/2014/09/in-dispute-ov...

It's true - and work resumed shortly after that. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/11/8556...

I live across of it, and I have to say it has the grace you'd expect of a 60's housing project in the eastern bloc. The rendering is quite flattering.

I also live a couple blocks from it and the only upside is that it'll eventually block the rusty looking Barclays Center from view. I'd gladly take the old Freddy's back.

Ah, Freddy's. Let's raise a glass to Bruce Ratner and the glories of eminent domain.

I really enjoy the rich tones of the facade: http://www.rew-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Barclay...

Does rust automatically turn people off because of cultural connotations? It's self-finishing, already appears established, and doesn't require maintenance.

Is it cultural? I feel like rust is a fairly universal signal for decay.

Decay is not necessarily a bad thing. I like the aesthetics of rust.

Rust doesn't require maintenance? It will keep going until the underlying steel is all gone - not really something you can just let go.

As opposed to aluminum oxide which is self limiting - it only forms a thin layer, then stops.

Barclay is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_steel

I like the material, particularly when it's juxtaposed with nature, but its use on the Barclays Center doesn't do it for me. There's nothing around the structure that relieves it.

> it has the grace you'd expect of a 60's housing project in the eastern bloc

Maybe because I'm now writing this comment from inside a 70's housing project in the (former) eastern bloc, but lately (meaning the last 2-3 years) I've seen a re-appraisal of the eastern bloc esthetics.

Apart from these two FB pages (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socialist-modernism/337958596... and https://www.facebook.com/thecommunisttenant) there are countless Instagram accounts where one can find really interesting photos of the (mostly brutalist) eastern bloc buildings from that era.

For western brutalism, there are also photo-blogs like: http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/

IMO the b/w photography this blog uses does flatter the buildings a bit; in full color in person they don't have quite the same feel.

"Brutalism - for people who like living in unfinished construction sites covered in seeping water damage"

I cheer a little on the inside whenever I see a brutalist building being torn down. There's so very few buildings of the type that are worth anything, and so many of the type that barely last a generation before needing repairs that amount to new construction cost.

For background, here's some info on Walt Disney World's Contemporary Resort (1971) that was built with a similar technique:

http://www.yesterland.com/contemporary.html

"Imagine a future where..."

I guess everything old is new again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

From around the same time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Palacio_del_Rio

I'm on a phone so didn't fig into the differences which must be huge but china has built a few large projects using prefab techniques and keep breaking time to complete records. Example http://inhabitat.com/200-chinese-workers-erect-a-30-storey-p...

Main difference as far as I can see is the NYC structure is made up of pre-assembled room-size room-size units, whereas the Chinese hotel is more conventional beams, panels and cladding but pre-cut to specific sizes (and presumably also for the interior finish)

The Chinese seem to be trying to prove a point with their speed, though they do have a considerable advantage when it comes to costs and lack of regulations to adhere too though, probably aren't building to the [unusual] level of tolerances specified for the US project.

(my dad was doing this back in the days when 9 storeys was "possibly the tallest of its type in the world", and under a year for a building that size was really fast. Which really wasn't all that long ago.)

Serious question, what makes this the "newest" skyscraper? There are various buildings that are more and less complete than this one.

Journalistic flair?

My Dad has worked in the modular construction industry since before I was born and it's quite an interesting method.

It allows things to be done at the same time, so whilst the groundwork and any preparation is being done on site, the modules for the building can be being built in a factory.

It's a fairly popular method in the UK, whether it's constructed entirely modularly or using modular parts like bathroom pods (prefabricated bathrooms).

The uses are fairly varied too, it's been used for hotel bathrooms, prison cells, McDonalds restaurants, sections of Tesco supermarkets, petrol station shops, hospitals and schools. I've probably missed a few, but you get the idea.

It's very weird to step into a bathroom pod when it's at the end of the production line and hooked up to water and electricity for testing. When you shut the door, you'd have no idea that you were in a factory (besides the noise) .

A giant project like this just opened in LA, One Santa Fe

http://www.onesantafeliving.com/

The place looks huge from a distance because it's so long

https://www.google.com/search?q=one+santa+fe+apartments&tbm=...

But, I went in to look at the apartments and they're boring as hell which is sad because they're in the LA Arts District which is full of amazing lofts (similar to SF's SOMA District).

I got a laugh out of this:

> the kind of line assembly popularized by Henry Ford's T-Birds

Henry Ford never saw the T-bird (Thunderbird): he died eight years before it was released. Of course the author meant the Model T, but that such an error about a major milestone in American history slipped through editing is pretty amazing--like crediting William Boeing with the invention of the airplane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com