Chinese wonder: 57 storey-building completed in 3 weeks

Chinese wonder: 57 storey-building completed in 3 weeks

Saturday, June 27, 2015 11:51 am


A Chinese construction company has accomplished what engineers and architects would consider impossible, by completing a 57-storey structure in three weeks.

Although the building did not begin from scratch—20 floors were ready at the end of 2014, work on the remaining 37 floors in the city of Changsha, south-central China, began in February.

The 57 storey building in Changsha

The 57 storey building in Changsha

Three weeks after, the structure, called Mini Sky City was standing. It has 800 apartments and office space for 4000 workers. The 37 stories were assembled between January 31 and February 17.

The builders are Broad Sustainable Building, a Chinese firm that specializes in prefabricated construction.

By preparing more than 2,700 modules in a factory for four months before site work began, BSB says it was able to assemble the structure at the rate of three stories per day — like a giant vertical jigsaw pieced together from a minutely detailed set of instructions.

A time-lapse video of construction went viral on Chinese websites before finding its way onto many western news sites and broadcast media at the beginning of May.

To put the pace of BSB’s construction into context, it took almost five years to build London’s 37-story Walkie Talkie building which opened in August 2014.

“One hundred percent (of the) parts are factory-made,” Juliet Jiang, BSB’s senior vice president, said of BSB’s methods. “We don’t waste any materials, no one is idle in the workshop or on site. We have very good planning.”

Jiang said that the processes employed by the firm are also far more cost effective, environmentally friendly and lead to less disruption in cities during construction.

BSB is now reportedly keen to put its techniques further to the test by seeking permission to build an 838-meter-tall (2,749 ft) skyscraper in Changsha, a project first announced in 2013.

If built in the stated ambitious 10 month time-frame, the “Sky City” structure would be the tallest building in the world until the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is completed.

The company already boasts of a 15-story hotel assembled in six days and a 30-story hotel in 15 days among its other Chinese achievements.

“What we are doing now is to sell buildings worldwide,” Jiang continued. “We make them in China, ship them (across the globe).”

*Source: CNN


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