Live data from Hacker News

19 days to build a 57-storey tower

bbc.co.uk

31–40 of 118 posts

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#31

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. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constru…

Still amazing if you ask me...

Yup and when it's scaled up there would be warehouses full of parts waiting to be shipped at a moments notice.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#32
post #28
post #10

> “The biggest problem we face in the world right now isn't terrorism or world war. It's climate change,” he says. I really like seeing this quote from a Chinese business man.

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…

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.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#33
post #3

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.

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!

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#35

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. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constru…

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.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#36

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. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constru…

Still amazing if you ask me...

I'm not denying that - the whole process is good stuff.

But I'm suggesting that "assembled in 19 days" is more accurate than "built in 19 days".

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#37
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, we own one in Slovakia. :) Pretty badly built but compared to the ones in Moscow the Slovak ones are huge. https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-eGxBiuFCFsU/Sd89UGTbtCI/A...

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.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#38

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 traditio…

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.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#39
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.

Re: 19 days to build a 57-storey tower

#40
post #3

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.

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].
Post reply on HN