19 days to build a 57-storey tower
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It will be interesting to watch this 'mini' tower and see how it holds up prior to trying something more dramatic.
But structural engineering aside, being able to rapidly assemble a building of significant capacity and a small foot print is a worth while capability to have. It doesn't lend itself to variety (and like an air craft carrier would probably require grid co-ordinates in the hallways to make navigation inside the building possible) but by shortening the time to erect, you eliminate a huge variability in cost which is the time on site/equipment use. Over half of the Bay bridge's cost overruns were associated with storage, inactive equipment and staff, and material cost bids expiring. So being able to do all of the erection in even a straight shot of two or three months would improve the economics tremendously.
I really like seeing this quote from a Chinese business man.
When it encroaches on personal things such as the size of a family (below, from the article's Zhang Yue) I do not like it - work is work and life is life - but there is a deep dislike of the way things are done by the moneyed by a lot of business people (and women are far more represented in this grouping than in large companies operating in China, including multinationals or traditional government backed companies) than a lot of people outside China are aware of.
Further quotes:
> “Don't buy things you only use once, such as newspapers.”
> “Grow your own vegetables.”
> “Most importantly, have only one child, to allow the population of the world to return to a level it can bear.”
> Another company handbook urges staff to brush their teeth twice a day, and to share cars.
> His hair is greying. Dyeing your hair is bad for the environment, he says.
> I have to set an example. My staff imitate me, and they then influence those around them. That's how we influence society.”
Not having a child is the most environmentally responsible act one can do. For each child you don't have, you offset tens of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions, millions of gallons of water used, tons of trash produced, etc.
I've been kicking around starting a non-profit that pays people not to have children, with the funding coming from carbon credits.
"By first year itself an American toddler would have generated more Carbon dioxide emission than an average person in Tanzania will generate in a life time."
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/14/g68/...
http://www.greencontributor.com/index.php/human-foot-print.h...
Should we continue to overwhelm a physical system we require to survive? I don't advocate killing people whatsoever; I advocate incentivizing people to have less children (or no children, if they prefer). What's wrong with that?
>There's a difference between firing someone in a company and simply removing the position through attrition when someone leaves. This is no different than the later.
The difference is that in your company, you know you dont need the position. How do you know that a couple wants to have a kid or not?
I don't! That's why I'm not forcing them to choose! Want to have kids? Awesome. Don't want to have kids? Here's a check. Thanks for not having a kid (or kids).
I didn't boil down a human being to just carbon emissions. I included the millions of gallons of water they'd use over their life, and the trash they create. I didn't not include a comprehensive list of what an average human consumes in their life, but I have now included it below. Spend the ~5 minutes reading it to see the impact. There is no "human footprint" metric that quantifies all of the energy and entropy a human contributes to Earth's biome during their existence, so its not an easy/quick idea to get across.
http://www.greencontributor.com/index.php/human-foot-print.h...
On the other hand, if you live in a country where pollution controls have turned it largely invisible, and the worst pollution you experience is smelling a bit of diesel exhaust when you got too close to a bus, it's probably a lot easier to say that human activity is insignificant.
> "It has huge benefits for future generations. If you tear it down 500 years from now it will leave a steel skeleton which is a resource for them, not just a load of rubbish. That’s what this is about."
I can't express how grateful and refreshed I am to hear a builder say such a thing. Especially coming as I am from the U.S., where we seem to specialize in building shit designed for obsolescence without a thought toward maintainability or recycling.
There may be a bit of light appearing at the end of the American tunnel; New York's "B2" building, built by developer Forest City Ratner (FCS), is 32 stories of stacked modular apartments. Hope this catches on
I hope it catches on in San Francisco and Oakland. There was a previous HN thread about B2 (can anyone find it?) and the potential to quickly add thousands of units at a higher density than currently exists would have enormous environmental, humanitarian, and economic benefits for the entire region.
> Broad Sustainable Building spent four and a half months fabricating the building’s 2,736 modules before construction began. The first 20 floors were completed last year, and the remaining 37 were built from 31 January to 17 February this year, Xiao said.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constru...
But I'm suggesting that "assembled in 19 days" is more accurate than "built in 19 days".
How far we have fallen.
By analogy we as outsiders don't count dressing in the dressing room against the 90 minutes of a futbol match despite the Laws of the Game requiring uniforms, boots and shinguards.
This is sounding awfully like the lifetime of electronics device production now.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/may/11/one-world...
Everything done is the U.S. takes more time and costs a lot more money.
Consider, for example, that China has constructed 10,000 miles of high-speed rail in about a decade. We still have 0.0 miles. Yeah, yeah, we don't need 10k but we need more than 0.
Airports, subways, cities, and I imagine roads are being constructed at an incredible pace. This Bill Gates blog gets the point across: http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Concrete-in-China
This is all good for China but the U.S. looks like it will quickly be passed as the largest economy. That may have some repercussions.
Having some regulation in place helps prevent things like: http://i.imgur.com/McgeoNa.jpg
But that doesn't mean that US isn't over regulated.
This event happened in 2009 in Shanghai, China. The location was Block-7 at Lotus Riverside in the Minhang District. The building did not fall due an earthquake but rather due to very poor foundation planning. The coup de grace or death blow came when an underground parking garage was being dug below the building. (Why did not not dig out the garage first?) One worker was killed and no residents had moved in yet. (They want their money back)
Building a sky scrapper in just a few weeks or even months seems pretty rushed and quite ill advised. Each floor would have to be inspected and certified as safe and I don't believe that could be done in under a year.
Here is a page on what went wrong: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2010/02/its-n...
"Nobody" spends that long on modern highrises - the processes are generally well understood and most of the structures are "cookie cutter" designs with solid margins. The ones going up in London now typically takes 1-3 days per floor for the structure.
In Los Angeles you build a floor, it has to be inspected one floor at a time. Then again, London does not have earthquakes but both Shanghai and California do.
The US has had its share of disasters too. We studied these in-depth in civil engineering school, including the design decisions and cost compromises made along the way. Look up Citicorp Tower's tuned mass damper in NYC (disaster pre-empted), Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (killed 114), as well as Berkman Plaza parking garage collapse during construction in Jacksonville, FL (killed 1).
Back to OP, A general rule of thumb in engineering, there's cost, quality, and schedule: pick two. I always scratch my head at celebrating at some huge engineering feat completed in a small fraction of the typical timeframe, because it surely leaves out either value engineering/cost) or quality/safety. Schedule should be optimized, but prioritized?
It's also possible that the Broad's schedule is merely a byproduct of the modular technique. The article doesn't mention cost beyond saying its a problem, and I assume that modular, industrialized construction requires factoring costs in a method similar to airplane accounting, a function of the quantity built.
To be sure, there's room for huge innovation in the construction industry, and I'm excited to see how Broad develops their methods.
I'm not making any value judgements here, but I think it's important to understand and recognize how when dealing with systems this complex, bad coming with good is inevitable. Both approaches have benefits, both have costs.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/government/5111-while...
Edit: In case it's not obvious, they did this because they knew skyscrapers would be essential to the future growth of New York, and they did not want the public to be scared of them.
Also the report written on it only needed to prove that the fuel leaked from the tank. From that point on it was assumed on the report that the destruction we saw was caused simply from the fuel.
That is a hypothesis that is amenable to computer simulation. My sense of humor finds it funny no one has simulated what happened on a computer (well, those who tried have reached different conclusions, which is actually hilarious).
The DC Metro is currently building the Silver Line, an extension out to Dulles airport and a bit beyond. The first segment of the extension, with five stations, was completed last year after five years of construction. The remainder is planned to be complete in 2019 or 2020... assuming there aren't any more delays.
In a similar amount of time, the Beijing subway went from a sad little system with three lines to the second largest system in the world today, with 18 lines and 7 more under construction currently.
Now, Beijing is a substantially larger city, but it's still vastly disproportionate. The contrast between the two metro systems is just shocking.
I don't know what the hell we're doing in the US, but whatever it is, we're doing it wrong. Safety and quality differences aren't adequate to explain it by a long shot.
We've substantially and enormously empowered veto players at all levels: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... , in part due to the influence of Jane Jacobs and her fight against Robert Moses: http://jakeseliger.com/2013/07/03/jane-jacobs-is-everywhere-... .
That being said, there seems to be something about wealthy, industrialized countries that makes local resistance to infrastructure development powerful. Europe and Canada are suffering from the same basic problems.
I ultimately came to the conclusion that the growth in China is real, unlike how it's routinely described in the news in the US. Though I did meet an Irish business owner (who lived there for nearly two decades) who expressed doubt that these buildings would ever be filled to sufficient capacity. Ultimately we don't have access to all of the data which would shed light on China's current affairs.
Regardless, I live in the Boston area now. The MBTA is a complete embarrassment compared to what is in Guangzhou. Even so, the MBTA is purchasing the next supply of Red Line trains (which are several decades old now, and routinely breaking down) from China. It's been planned for several years, yet it's still going to take until 2017 to get these trains rolling in Boston!
Even if the doomsayers are correct and the Chinese economy crashes in the next year or so, it should be noted that (a) this would be a global economic recession and that the US would not be immune to this (since many of the buildings in China are funded by Wall Street speculators), (b) they have the capital to actually help their recovery (as opposed to the bulimic fiscal policy we had in 2008 and still have in the US today, funding billion-dollar military campaigns and social programs created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind, while routinely gutting our own tax revenue), and (c) they'll have already built a modern infrastructure to empower their recovery (instead of the US's aging infrastructure that nobody want to pay to fix).
Its these social programs that help cushion the fall during a recession. Countries without them often are the receiving end of a peasant revolution or coup when the economy goes sour. I'd say this is very much a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, China's affluence doesn't percolate to the rural area and a serious economic downturn would hurt the most vulnerable, which in autocratic states are poor children and the elderly.
>In one study of 1,800 infants in rural Shaanxi province in China’s north-west, 49% were anaemic and 40% were significantly hampered in developing either cognitive or motor skills.
>About one in three Chinese elderly report having poor health, and nearly one in four have consumption levels below the poverty line
I don't mind my tax dollars feeding poor children in rural USA, supporting seniors, etc. These programs made sense in 1930, 1960, today, and in the future.
I'm not under the illusion that the Chinese health care system is better than in the US, and I'm aware that my observations were limited to the city. I was actually able to visit a local hospital in Guangzhou while I was there (interestingly, it was the hospital where the first SARS patient was treated), and I was surprised at how old and chaotic it was compared to the extravagance built in the remainder of the city. Very dark, loud, full of people, and run like a bad DMV in the US. Hopefully when China slows down they'll attempt to focus more on the health of their citizens.
Not to mention, the GDP per capita in the Tysons area is about 8x that of Beijing. We spend a lot more on safety because we have a lot to lose.
I'm a pro-development kind of guy, but the Chinese model of unelected technocrats dictating what gets built isn't the right answer. We should be looking to Western Europe, where development like public transit gets done because there is widespread public support to push things through the democratic process.
Except in our history the major projects that got built were built in exactly this way. Robert Moses[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses] is perhaps the most famous example of this, but we've had many others. The technocrats get either a public official, or a private multi-billionaire and make their vision happen, and damn the consequences.
I'm not familiar with the history of urban development in Europe, but I would not be surprised to see similar figures behind the first few systems before the benefits were obvious to everyone else.
Democracy is really good at forcing the system to take, or pretend to take, competing needs into account, but end of the day in basically every system "he who has the gold makes the rules".
I know a little bit about this because my first job out of engineering college was working at a consultant company doing the drudge work for such an assessment. After 6 months of work, I felt we barely put out anything of value while burning consultant hours. The reports were cookie cutter format from previous contracts with a few facts filled in.
A friend who works for the state transportation engineering agency mentioned finding a native american arrow while expanding a highway triggering another investigation. Then there is eminent domain, noise assessments, impact reviews, etc.
So basically it is not the engineering costs but all the other demands of society that make these a slow and expensive venture.
Unfortunately, Americans simply don't see it as a priority, and we have huge legal and environmental obstacles to building almost anything these days. The new WTC only got built because there was a national consensus that it should be built. There's no national consensus that a high speed rail line should be built, so it probably won't happen in our lifetimes, other than a minimal, barely-fast-enough 20th Century design here and there such as between D.C. and NYC.
On the coasts, bureaucracy and politics are major costs in urban areas, the WTC being the #1 example of how much it can affect construct costs.
"China has constructed 10,000 miles of high-speed rail in about a decade. We still have 0.0 miles."
We have one of the best cargo rail networks in the world. That is what we chose to build. If high-speed rail was going to be profitable as cargo, it would be built (check Texas for an attempt).
On the other subject, China doesn't care what its citizens think beyond keeping them from revolting. They are dictating a policy.
http://i.imgur.com/McgeoNa.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall
Let's not applaud the low regulation and quick and dirty school of construction too hard here.
This kind of stuff reminds me of "car guy" whining about crumple zones, ABS, air bags, etc making modern cars heavier and less efficient than 1960's deathtraps. Yeah, most civilized people prefer a democratic process in regards to the safety of their family in their dwellings. Autocratic and dictatorial tricks are cute, but come at the cost of safety, health, etc. Not to mention the limited ability to petition the autocratic government over these things.
tldr; How is the air in Beijing today?
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism_%28architecture%29
What do you think about that issue ? how can it be solved ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5RgRboBE2Y
I think it took longer than 19 days, but they had more limited space and time to work each day, and (almost certainly) more stringent standards for safety and quality.
While I don't agree with really any of the above doomsaying or wild speculation I am somewhat fond of the idea of packing up the modern anthropic world into self contained bubbles.
This shouldn't, however, be a license to run rampant across the newly freed land with industry or to simply stack these habitats as tightly as possible to increase density. The opposite should be true, provide a clean, comfortable, and efficient location for people to live and do business while freeing up the rest of the land for enjoyment and recreation or sustainable food production.
"Residents cite a lack of maintenance almost from the very beginning, including the regular breakdown of elevators, as being a primary cause of the deterioration of the project. Local authorities cited a lack of funding to pay for the workforce necessary for proper upkeep of the buildings. ... The project's parking and recreation facilities were inadequate; playgrounds were added only after tenants petitioned for their installation. ... Housing projects of similar architectural design were successful in New York, but St. Louis's fragmented political culture and declining urban core contributed to the project's failure."
I am not a civil engineer, so I can't criticize their construction method. But I wonder if it is traditional civil engineering community's prejudice, or fear of being swept away by any revolutionary technology that keeps them opposing this sort of construction technique?
A 220 story building would be an engineering marvel, and at the same time not a threat to civil engineers. The bread and butter for engineers are much smaller buildings, which are less technically challenging and acceptable for new construction techniques to be tested out on. You would expect to see a lot more civil engineering resistance on the smaller targets, not the biggest ones. The biggest issue facing such a monster building is the safety of even going that high, considering wind shear, earthquake risks, etc.
Which is a round about way of suggesting that despite bureaucracy and resistance from entrenched traditions, that real-estate development ideas are much like startups: most run out of money and are worth zero. Unlike startups, the upper bound on profit is low, but their potential persists owing to the real nature of real property - land doesn't go anywhere.
For example , in israel, where the land is usually bought from the state, sometimes groups of private people gather together to build an apartment complex and save a bit of money.But that's a long(and maybe risky) project, so people rarely do so.
But let's say it was a short process - a group gathers, gives the funds , and in month they enter their apartments. I could see this becoming more common, because you can have decent savings .
And assuming that happens - now it's people buying their own land(and build higher structures on it), won't that change the pricing dynamic on land, and the political pressures on the state which sells such land ?
SF needs some bigger, better housing and office buildings.
I don't know that I agree with all of his thinking that the BBC article outlined, e.g. the very strict and intrusive control over employees' lives, but he definitely is creative and unusual, and he thinks big.
Perhaps a "green" tower that accommodates 800 apartments and thousands of offices and other businesses is the way to go; occupies a small physical footprint but delivers a huge amount of useful space in a country where cities are already congested and space is at a premium.
The BBC website by the way is quite interesting. I am not sure I would like all websites to look like that, but it's a creative take on interspersing multimedia with text, and the layering of the second image over the first is brilliant. Awesome!
Although there is no mention of the planning involved in the construction of the building, I think the result is astonishing.
I hope you are joking.
I missed this part of your comment; you're right in this regard, of course.
Even more so as people have created frameworks and libraries that you can use freely to compose your application in much less time than if you had to do it all over again.
Some of these frameworks and libraries simplify the process so much that you CAN throw more human power at it and still get good results.
[1] http://www.thespec.com/news-story/4190319-u-s-steel-natural-...
[2] https://coalactionnetworkaotearoa.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/c...
I don't mean to say this isn't awesome: it is.
But we have lots of unused surface, and generally, building horizontally has lots of advantages: more sunlights for citizens, more room for parks, less congestion/traffic.
I've noticed that places were people live more relaxed and happy lives tend to have less tall buildings, while places with more stressful inhabitants tend to be those with larger tower. More traffic, less green/sun and plenty of other factors are usually strongly related to both.
For other maids, the same cleaning up would take at least an hour.
I was convinced she wasn't doing a good job. All past experience with other maids had shown me that it takes at least one hour to clean the house.
One day, I decided to follow up after she'd done her cleaning. I went over every thing she'd cleaned and checked them for any dirt or grime.
Nothing.
So I decided to follow her as she cleaned. I trailed her like a ghost, carefully noting her every move.
She was cleaning everything very thoroughly. She did not leave a single stone unturned.
My suspicions were only because everyone else was being inefficient.
Lesson learned: don't mistake inefficiency for quality.
-I'm from the future, learn Chinese.