That's incredible. Prefab components can offer a lot from a sustainability point of view. On the other hand I wonder if building faster is what China needs!
I admire their ability to organize and manage mega-projects. It would be interesting to know how much this cost and how many firms in China can do this.
question is; when are we going to catch up with the building technologies that are widely used around the world?
i feel like we are falling behind as we did with building good quality small cars in 70's..
maybe they used Modular Elevator Manufacturing's pre-fab elevators which come integrated into their own shafts that show up on-site on the back of a truck
I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express this weekend. It was *barely* functional as a place of public accommodation. The corridor widths, stair construction, ceiling heights, etc. were all basically just to code and no more. The materials were super-efficient: carpet run vertically up the wall to make a baseboard, for example, so no additional trade had to come in to do base. Pre-hung doors, pre-fab showers, pre-assembled every damn thing that could be.
It was about as appalling a material experience as I've ever suffered. Honestly, the public restroom in Moscow I visited in the 90s - the one with a concrete floor with holes in it for toilets and unpainted metal partition walls with no doors - was a better environment than this hotel.
I can't imagine a 15 story building built in 6 days is any better than my Holdiay Inn Express, and probably is much, much worse.
Our problem is not technology, it is procedural morass - from the smallest widget to the largest construction project. Which translates to $,$,$ for nothing but an artificial sense of security. We can thank proactive lawyering and good old American paranoia... and of course the insurance industry- which feeds on both behaviors.
That building is horrid looking...the last thing we need is proliferation of this type of structure (oh wait, thats already happening all over China...)
I'm all for prefab off site and quick non-disruptive assembly, but not mass repetition and the cheap dumb materiality that comes with low low budgets on the types of "pre-fab" projects exemplified by the above.
Sure the developer saved a load of cash just now, but this building wont last...so sooner rather than later it will all end up in the landfill.
it could be designers' job to make them "visually just beautiful", if bothersome. there are dumpster bins lined up on every street waiting to take demoed kitchens to landfill everyday.
these components on this building might have better chance of morphing into something equally useful. a system like this with expansion and contraction capabilities is nothing to be afraid of.
It's the labor and logistics that must have been expensive (compared to other 15-story apartment buildings in that part of China), though: five or six picks going, and everybody working all night. I assume they were racing to prove a point.
The safety record is very impressive, but I imagine that if anybody might have, say, broken an arm, he would just have been given a long vacation (or a *very* long vacation?) in order to conceal the injury.
Still, setting the erection of a building as a kind of fun 'challenge' under semi-public scrutiny is a nice model (like barn raising, I guess?)... compared to the web of intrigue it seems to typically be (between contractor, subs, client, bank, architect, etc.).
12 Comments
That's incredible. Prefab components can offer a lot from a sustainability point of view. On the other hand I wonder if building faster is what China needs!
Almost biblical. "And on the seventh day, they rested."
I hope they spent more than 6 days on soil tests.
Anyone else notice the lack of an elevator core? 15-story walk-up sounds a bit rough...
I admire their ability to organize and manage mega-projects. It would be interesting to know how much this cost and how many firms in China can do this.
question is; when are we going to catch up with the building technologies that are widely used around the world?
i feel like we are falling behind as we did with building good quality small cars in 70's..
@ geimanj,
maybe they used Modular Elevator Manufacturing's pre-fab elevators which come integrated into their own shafts that show up on-site on the back of a truck
Via Core77 here
I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express this weekend. It was *barely* functional as a place of public accommodation. The corridor widths, stair construction, ceiling heights, etc. were all basically just to code and no more. The materials were super-efficient: carpet run vertically up the wall to make a baseboard, for example, so no additional trade had to come in to do base. Pre-hung doors, pre-fab showers, pre-assembled every damn thing that could be.
It was about as appalling a material experience as I've ever suffered. Honestly, the public restroom in Moscow I visited in the 90s - the one with a concrete floor with holes in it for toilets and unpainted metal partition walls with no doors - was a better environment than this hotel.
I can't imagine a 15 story building built in 6 days is any better than my Holdiay Inn Express, and probably is much, much worse.
Our problem is not technology, it is procedural morass - from the smallest widget to the largest construction project. Which translates to $,$,$ for nothing but an artificial sense of security. We can thank proactive lawyering and good old American paranoia... and of course the insurance industry- which feeds on both behaviors.
That building is horrid looking...the last thing we need is proliferation of this type of structure (oh wait, thats already happening all over China...)
I'm all for prefab off site and quick non-disruptive assembly, but not mass repetition and the cheap dumb materiality that comes with low low budgets on the types of "pre-fab" projects exemplified by the above.
Sure the developer saved a load of cash just now, but this building wont last...so sooner rather than later it will all end up in the landfill.
it could be designers' job to make them "visually just beautiful", if bothersome. there are dumpster bins lined up on every street waiting to take demoed kitchens to landfill everyday.
these components on this building might have better chance of morphing into something equally useful. a system like this with expansion and contraction capabilities is nothing to be afraid of.
It's the labor and logistics that must have been expensive (compared to other 15-story apartment buildings in that part of China), though: five or six picks going, and everybody working all night. I assume they were racing to prove a point.
The safety record is very impressive, but I imagine that if anybody might have, say, broken an arm, he would just have been given a long vacation (or a *very* long vacation?) in order to conceal the injury.
Still, setting the erection of a building as a kind of fun 'challenge' under semi-public scrutiny is a nice model (like barn raising, I guess?)... compared to the web of intrigue it seems to typically be (between contractor, subs, client, bank, architect, etc.).
Did anybody notice that they didn't show the interior?
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