I have been following the 'sky city' stuff for a while and it really does read like a fraud. The original attempt to build it wasn't some "missing paperwork" it was a pretty clear that the building would fall over if he built it, and some folks in the structural engineering community made that point to the government and BSB could not show how their assertions were incorrect. I've not seen the complaint but it was related to the wind loading and torque requirements on lower sections.
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.
There's more, but a small personal anecdote: I have a boss with similar, if somewhat more relaxed, thinking. "Why stay in the Shangri-La when a [200 Yuan per night] Motel 168 or HomeInn is perfectly clean, safe and more convenient." or "Have a laptop and a standing desk if you like, it saves more than having you unhappy or leave." or "50 Yuan per day travel bonus, enjoy the local food." It is not penny pinching (the opposite, he'll spend where it is needed), it is a true conviction that things should be done differently (from the status quo).
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.”
Great quotes, the "only one child" quote is only meant for certain countries i guess. In Germany we have a problem with the population growing older and older because young people get less and less kids. That taxes the health care system and skews politics towards the old among other things.
> 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
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."
It is really riduculous that we now start evaluating human life by the amount of carbon emission one generates. Sorry, but that is just nonsense. Wont killing yourself achieve your goals? Also, you should start a non-profit that pays family members if they commit suicide.
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.
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?
I am not arguing against birth control. What I felt wrong about your view was that, you are basing life's worth on carbon emissions. There are better ways of reducing carbon emissions.
>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?
> 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.
Yes this Zhang Yue guy is my new hero. Talking about his new building,
> "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
> There may be a bit of light appearing at the end of the American tunnel ... 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.
It's probably easier to think that way when the effects of pollution are so apparent. When your boogers turn black after a day outside, you can't deny that something is happening.
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.
I appreciate the attitude, but other than that, he is a real control freak. It fascinates me that people on the right often praise entrepreneurs as champions of personal freedom while they are often being very authoritative against their employees.
19 days to -assemble- a 57 storey tower. Four and a half months constructing the modules for assembly.
> 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.
Normally the time it takes to turn clay into brick or timber into lumber is not considered as part of the time of construction. The first order consideration is typically time on site because that's where the owner begins to have liability related to construction activity.
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.
Also don't see much about foundations. It usually takes a long time for a building to get out of the ground, and I don't see how this technique helps the speed of that.
It doesn't speed up foundations, but being able to work on the prefab modules while another team is working on the foundations certainly speeds things up.
My dad used to work on 1 day houses. Essentially the whole house would arrive from the factory and just had to be assembled. In the morning, there was nothing, in the evening, you had a complete house, with windows and doors which could be locked. Still, the foundations took a month to settle properly before the construction could start,but it didn't change the fact that the whole house was actually assembled in a day. You could leave for work in the morning, and arrive in the afternoon to see that your neighbor now has a house where 12 hours before there was just concrete.
A hundred years ago in the U.S. you could order a house from the Sears Modern Home catalog. They had dozens of different models. A kit containing everything you needed to build the house was delivered to the site on trucks, and you could assemble it yourself. The kit came with comprehensive instructions, and assembly points were marked with numbers and arrows.
There is a company out of Oregon that did that with geodesic domes (suitable for homes or offices). You poured a concrete slab or basement to their specs before they showed up, and they would unload a semi and setup the dome in one day with an electrician and plumber hooking up the utilities. I know a place that bought two and was amazed at how quick it went and how well they held up to the winter / summer of the northern plains.
With time and mass production, the module creation time won't matter as much.
Sure, you might need some lead time for the parts to arrive or stock up, but your construction crew can still construct new buildings already in the pipeline.
This is sounding awfully like the lifetime of electronics device production now.
The value here is that the building can be preconstructed, before knocking down the one it's replacing. This way the residents of the current building only have to find a replacement home for 19 days (barring red tape).
The 19 days is to erect the structure, not to make it habitable. Your overall point still makes sense, but it's not like people can move into these buildings as soon as the structure is up.
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.
"Everything done is the U.S. takes more time and costs a lot more money."
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.
Not sure about the WTC but I know for rail, bridge, etc. there can be lots of environmental regulations to deal with in the US. Finding a butterfly in a field can be enough to stop the work while they do environmental assessments to see how it may impact that butterfly species.
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.
Im not saying that this particular tower is unsafe, but in the US we have loads of regulation. Depending on your political view, this can mean either the US is helping to protect citizens or it means that it gets in the way of business/progress.
WOW! I just looked this up using Tin.eye and the imgur link to locate this fiasco and how it happened.
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.
> Each floor would have to be inspected and certified as safe and I don't believe that could be done in under a year.
"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.
If it takes 1-3 days per floor (let's presume this building was built in London and it only took one day per floor) would it not take 57-days then? or do they wait till the building is built and do it all at once?
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.
Great point. Additional note- even with heavy US regulation, US still has its share of engineering disasters. Building code is written in response to such disasters albeit more frequently from non-catastrophic failures. For example, we might see high-strength steel requirements evolve in response to the new Bay Bridge's faulty steel rods.
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.
The new WTC is one of the most bomb-proof buildings in the world. It is also one of the tallest (even if you don't count the spire). Everything in the US takes more time and costs more money when we're doing it better than everyone else.
As far as I know nobody else is interested in building their own WTC.
And when it comes to tall buildings, well, let's say they're as ok as everyone's else.
It's over-engineered unless a big truck bomb goes off next to it, or an airliner hits it, or it's subject to a significant earthquake--in which case it will then hopefully be just-right engineered.
The original WTC towers were already over-engineered. They could not be brought down by a plane hitting them, just like previously a plane hit the Empire State Building and it also did not collapse. That's why they needed the planes plus [redacted] in order to bring the towers down.
You've got the right mindset, but your conspiracy is backwards. The plane that hit the Empire State Building DID cause it to collapse, but the leaders of the media, academia, and construction industries formed a conspiracy to quickly rebuild it and pretend it never happened.
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.
The joke is on us for accepting a story that could be verified by computer simulation, but for which a computer simulation was never written.
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).
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.
I live in the DC area and frequently visit Beijing.
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.
What slows down development in the U.S. is accommodating competing interests in a democratic society. My parents, who live in the area, were among the people who strongly opposed the overland route and wanted a tunnel through Tysons, which would have cost another billion dollars and jeopardized federal funding. That tunnel fight took up a lot of time. There are environmentalists who care a lot more about the impact on the environment than the economic or convenience benefits of the new line. There are folks who remember when Fairfax County was a pretty sleepy place and strongly objected to any line at all. In the U.S. we try to reconcile competing interests as much as possible. In China, pro-development officials steamroll over everyone else.
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.
> 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".
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 visited China for the first time last year. I went to Guangzhou with a friend of mine. My friend from there left to study in the US in 2010, and he could barely recognize his own city with all the new districts and buildings.
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).
>social programs created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind
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.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I am against social programs. On the contrary, I'm a supporter of universal health care in the US. This is the sort of thing I was alluding to when I said "created with the 1930's and 1960's in mind." Anyway, these systems, like our other infrastructure, have not been properly maintained (I quickly wrote an article about one example on my blog a while back (which I haven't updated in forever), should be the first article: http://boldboldness.com/) and should be modernized in some manner.
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.
We have clean air (any many other nice things!) because of regulation. China can do things faster, but pays a very high cost in public health and safety. The US could also build things a lot faster/cheaper if we didn't worry about the consequences.
Regulation isn't a monolithic entity. The regulations that keep our air clean and our structures safe aren't the ones slowing everything down, as far as I can see.
But the general concept of controlling externalized risks through regulation is. That's the lesson here, rather than dissecting individual regulations and causes. And the same process that regulates externalities and allows people affected by the decision a voice in the process (in contrast to a more autocratic decision to do something; people and costs kinda be damned) slows things down, sometimes because of over-regulation or dishonest actors.
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.
I highly doubt the construction of this building went through rigorous environmental impact studies. Or that the contractors were required to dispose of things properly. Or that the building materials were deemed safe (I hear China is great at making drywall!).
10K miles of high speed rail in the U.S. would be great. We desperately need a realistic alternative to air travel.
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.
I am unfamiliar with the paneláky, but I would be surprised if they were built at a comparable speed. While I am aware of large building shells which have been constructed on this sort of timescale, they still required many months/years of fit-out afterwards (plumbing, electricity, fine interior finishing). what is unique about what Broad Group is doing is that they are assembling fully fitted-out modules, which are essentially ready for move-in the day after construction is complete. The only historical analogues I'm aware of are things like Moshe Safde's Habitat 67[1] and some Japanese "metabolist" buildings.[2] But those have been architectural experiments without any real financial viability. What Broad Group is doing is unique in that they are making it commercially viable at scale.
In the article they mentioned the issue of leaks.I read about it in another piece about an American pre-fab building, where it has been a huge problem.
What do you think about that issue ? how can it be solved ?
These paneláky were built at some scale in Czech Republic too. They're a little grim normally, but quite a lot get painted in nice pastel colours so many look quite pretty sometimes. I stayed in one in Brno for a while, the walls are paper thin so I had a very ... intimate knowledge of what my neighbours were up to (our bedrooms were adjacent, as were the bathrooms) and vice versa :)
I don't mind them so much tbh. It's pretty surprising how similar they can be though, I saw that picture and thought "that looks like my girlfriend's parent's place in Prievidza"
They all look similar because they are all constructed from the same pre-fabricated panels, like this Chinese building. The interesting thing to me is seeing the slow change of the designs over time. In Puchov they have about four series of designs. Fifty buildings but all one of the four basic designs.
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.
The description of these buildings reminds me of the 'lifeboat city' eco-doom-meme that was floating around for a while seemingly inspired by Lovelock's idea of 'lifeboat islands' or geographic areas that will weather the coming catastrophe well enough to continue supporting a sustainable society.
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.
American reality, so with a healthy dose of classism, racism, and general political failure.
"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 fascinated by their construction technique, which is nothing but perfection of management. I was eagerly waiting to see the proposed 220 story, 850 m tall building construction in seven months since 2012, but that plan was halted due to continuous rejection by the authorities and the engineering communities.
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.
Development projects stall for many reasons among them are modifications of the developer's pro forma that reduce the viability of a project - interest rates go up, the cost of construction goes up, rents go down, local occupancy rates dip, etc. etc. The technology has the potential for some small incremental change to the real-estate development process, but it doesn't alter the underlying market forces where a housing shortage of 3000 dwellings is identified and twelve developers each throw up a "coming in 2017" signboard on some piece of land for an 1800 dwelling project. It's not enough to be out front of the pack with construction, what really matters is business intelligence.
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.
Can't these kinds of buildings change the dynamic in real-estate ?
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 ?
Real-estate markets are markets. They seek equilibrium. When a building is delivered, supply increases, demand goes down and a new equilibrium is established. Groups of people who would build apartments have the option of moving in to existing apartments without the impedance of land entitlement, large project financing, or construction timelines. Speed to market presents less risk to developers except when everyone else can get to market just as fast. Then the risk that someone else delivers and the market becomes over-supplied comes back.
Now that is some wishful thinking. Honestly though, I would love to see more towers in SF. As someone who rents a house build in the 50s, it would be worth it for the seismic safety alone. I'm pretty sure the house I live in has NO insulation, single pane glass, and is framed with 2x4s...
SF needs some bigger, better housing and office buildings.
Wow, he's like a Chinese version of Elon Musk (if Elon Musk believed in uniforms, company anthem, and tight social controls over his employees)!
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!
Sometimes I think IT industry is moving slow, because it's so much harder to multiply the efforts with more human power. IT is so much quality over quantity that effects like this would not happen easily.
Although there is no mention of the planning involved in the construction of the building, I think the result is astonishing.
Considering this is prefabricated module assembly it is exactly like today's development work.
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.
I'm so not joking. 100 developers might equal = 10 experienced developers these days. You can't just "put more force into the project and make it for 10 days", because actually the people that you want to hire might be not that easy to find.
A building is == at least in some dimensions == much simpler than contemporary IT. Guilding systems are much more amenable to static analysis than a flight of networked computers and the rate of dynamic change is on the order of tens of seconds even in the worst cases [barring explosion or brittle failure].
With these prefab buildings, if you have built one, you have built them all. With software that works quite differently. Unless of course you consider "copying" to be equal to "building", in which case, software is moving even faster!
Pretty cool but I hope they don't overlook the importance of aesthetics. It's worth spending extra time and money to make a building look unique and fitting for the location it is in. A city filled with identical mass-produced skyscrapers will not be pleasant once the novelty wears off.
Early on in the article I wondered about how steel was going to be CO2-efficient, given the amount of coal involved in its production; but then I see it's as a replacement for concrete, which is much worse.
As a one off cost, for a building that stands for so long and house that many, is it really a relevant question, compared to what the house and its inhabitants will use during its lifetime?
Yeah, but in general any skyscraper will end up being a relatively CO2-efficient way to house people. The heating/cooling savings of the shared all are huge and then there's the shorter transport distances for denser development.
This really is amazing, but do we really need to keep building super-dense areas?
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.
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.