Live data from Hacker News

China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

designtaxi.com

81–90 of 99 posts

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#81
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some credit has to be given to the Chinese for innovating in this area as well; it's not just safety/quality corner-cutting, though there might be some of that. The article notes the much longer time it took Dubai to build its similarly sized building, and Dubai is not exactly known for worker-friendly labor laws or European/American levels of workplace-safety regulations.

The difference in the quality of the Chinese quick-buildings (i.e., "quildings") and the Dubai buildings is the difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini. The Chinese quildings are cheap because they lack any sort of extravagance. In contrast, the Chinese structures which do feature prominant decorative features (i.e., the Bird's Nest or CSTV HQ), took almost as long to build as they would have anywhere else.…

>>difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini. The toyota's started as a cheap but low low quality car , then they became a high quality car, with a good price.

Who's to say it won't happen here ?

And in any case , i read that the Chinese buildings are very cheap to build. For many people that's much more important(as long s reliability and functionality is maintened) in an apartment.

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of the questions I was wondering about. I recently looked at a new factory in the bay area of prefab houses ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmpRRoNqsDI)and one of their claims is they can put up a house in 7 days. But of course it isn't that they start with dirt and 7 days later there is a house, there is a time to build the foundation, and the house is built in a factory, but once the foundation is rea…

> "Concrete can take 4 weeks to get to 90% strength [1], so if you didn't do the prefab route you would have to spend more than 90 days just waiting for the lower levels to cure so that you could build the upper levels." Concrete made with Type III portland cement achieves most of its strength within seven days (concrete made with normal (Type I) cement reaches its design strength in 28 days). When one needs signific…

The general rule of thumb is 75% of 28-day strength in 7 days. Most concrete mixtures reach their design strength well before 28 days due to the fact that any particular batch of concrete will be mixed such that its 28-day strength is higher than the design strength by a few 10s of %s. This is due to the fact that failing a compressive strength test for any one test or any 3 averaged consecutive tests (guidelines are set forth for failure criteria in ACI) requires remedial action in general.

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#84
post #5

Obviously, most of this is prefab...so I wonder how much time was spent building all the individual pieces before the official ground breaking? With 220 floors and 104 elevators...that's more than 2 floors and 1 elevator a day. I imagine just the fitting/assembling in place process per floor is enough to fill up a third of a day on its own...so is this basically a huge vertical jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces have…

Prefab is typically something you can easily multithread, in this case since it's a benchmark you could go all-out and just run 55 floor threads, that would give you 4 floors constructed in 90 days, which is rather slow for a 24/7 manufacturing line.

Every construction endeavor is a puzzle. The fitting assembling in place process per floor is not relevant either, as that can be multithreaded too.

The only thing that is going to limit throughput in this case is mostly the cranes, and you can safely assume there'll be more than one and it shouldn't take more than two hours on average to safely put one floor into place - that gives you a throughput of 12 floors a day per crane, not a bottleneck (except cranes have to be moved up all the time, so they don't have 100% uptime - again as you have multiple cranes this may simply end up as 2 fulltime crane equivalents for 4 cranes, but still not a bottleneck).

In the end, even it it takes one team 20 days to make one floor, and another team 20 days to attach/finish the floor, including windows and all, you still have 50 days left for foundations, moving cranes around, etc.

Think multithread and work splitting, it'll all look far more realistic - and even beatable - then.

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#85
post #65
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly there was a time when the USA seemed to be the the leaders of this kind of innovation. We're leaders of a different kind now. The video for the 15 story hotel they built super quickly seems to show an innovative design that is also very high quality-- probably higher quality than alternatives. The construction is impressively earth quake resistant. The air purification system, if I understood what was happe…

> the 15 story hotel It's not as pretty as you think. http://zjj.house.sina.com.cn/zhuanti/yuandajiemi/index.html scroll down to the bottom. http://zjj.house.sina.com.cn/images/U4528P915T3D125F161DT201... This is the 15 story hotel entrance. Can you imagine?

The video is of a 30 story hotel built in 15 days. Your links are to a 15 story hotel built in 6 days. I agree the entrance is plain, but maybe that was a design decision for that particular building. Overall the design is consistent, probably due to the modular construction.

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#86
post #81
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in the quality of the Chinese quick-buildings (i.e., "quildings") and the Dubai buildings is the difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini. The Chinese quildings are cheap because they lack any sort of extravagance. In contrast, the Chinese structures which do feature prominant decorative features (i.e., the Bird's Nest or CSTV HQ), took almost as long to build as they would have anywhere else.…

>>difference between a Ford Pinto and a Lamborghini. The toyota's started as a cheap but low low quality car , then they became a high quality car, with a good price. Who's to say it won't happen here ? And in any case , i read that the Chinese buildings are very cheap to build. For many people that's much more important(as long s reliability and functionality is maintened) in an apartment.

From the Western perspective, Chinese regulations and processes have a long way to go. When was the last time a brand new building in the US or Europe simply collapsed before topping out? In China it was 2009:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5685963...

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#87

My bias wants to make some remark about unions and/or regulations inhibiting construction innovation in the US, but I have no idea if that's actually true... is there progress being made in the US (faster construction? more prefab? etc) or does China's progress simply come with quality sacrifices that are pretty unacceptable in the US?

I believe China has significantly more union members than the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-China_Federation_of_Trade_U...

There are no real unions in China, these organizations are all part of the Party. If you run any organized civil group in China with more than 100 members, you can be sure to be invited for a "talk" to the local Party headquarters, and depending on your willingness to cooperate, that visit may end very negativly for you. The one thing the Party is really afraid of are people organizing themselves.

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#89
post #88
post #75

China doing something innovative! Queue the slew of pro-West/Anti-china comments. sigh

Not really, some company is only annoucing that they are planing to do something that sounds innovative. Tiny difference.

Well despite proving my point.

What isn't innovative about this project?

Re: China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the classic example of 'build a big building to look good, but so poorly that it will never really be usable' is the North Korean Ryugong Hotel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel We are in another age now though. I'm not sure anyone will quite reach the same levels of stupidity.

That building is totally bizarre.

it looks like the space battleship from Galaga.
Post reply on HN