CHANGSHA | Sky City | 847m | 2778ft | 220 floors

[hunser]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

article today in Glob and Mail (Canadian newspaper) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle4575806/

“I don’t think there is any need to build that high in a market like Changsha,” Mr. Macdonald said.

Of course there isn't. The spirit in China is totally different from Western countries: "Why do you build so big / tall? Because we can!"

[TallBob]

Nonsense! PLain and simple!!

[MolsonExport]

unlike many other supertalls (completed, u/c, proposals) in China, this one is extremely blah.

[Downburst]

It kind of reminds me of Fritz Hoger's plan for a (1937) skyscraper in Hamburg, just three times taller and with a less prominent cruciform shape.

[drumz0rz]

Building to rise in 90 days; 5 floors per day

Designed by engineers that worked on the Burj Khalifa, Sky City will achieve the target by using BSB’s 95%-prefabricated modular technology at the astonishing construction pace of five storeys a day.

Juliet Jiang, senior VP of Broad Group, has said that the company’s plan to construct its 838m skyscraper by the Xiangjiang River in Changsha city “will go on as planned with the completion of five storeys a day.”

Broad, which has built a total 20 structures in China, demonstrated its rapid construction method to a wider audience in January, when the company constructed a 30-storey hotel in just 15 days.

Work on the foundations is expected to go ahead by the end of the month, while the planned three month construction period runs from the end of the year to the end of March 2013.

Source: Construction Week Online

[Dylan Leblanc]

so they're really going to do this huh...

[Yackemflaber69]

blah its so ugly

[JDRCRASH]

Wait, Broad Group as in Eli Broad??

EDIT: never mind

[Bigtime]

If this actually happens we won't even need a time-lapse video of the construction, it'll be fast enough to watch in real time!

[GeorgiaBoy24]

This building puts the phrase "China's stealing our designs" to a whole new level. Looks like they based it almost entirely on Sears. China, if you want to build a meaningless, unoccupied, prefabricated deathtrap of a building in a practically unheard of city which will offer no context to the rest of the city's skyline (built in a forest, away from the rest of the city???) and somehow give the desire to make it the world's tallest, that's fine. It's another thing to steal from OUR architecture and become globally renowned for it.

[ThatOneGuy]

This is 10x uglier than Sears Tower.

[thomax]

Originally Posted by GeorgiaBoy24

This building puts the phrase "China's stealing our designs" to a whole new level. Looks like they based it almost entirely on Sears. China, if you want to build a meaningless, unoccupied, prefabricated deathtrap of a building in a practically unheard of city which will offer no context to the rest of the city's skyline (built in a forest, away from the rest of the city???) and somehow give the desire to make it the world's tallest, that's fine. It's another thing to steal from OUR architecture and become globally renowned for it.

Wow. So much I can say about this post.

"Looks like they based it almost entirely on sears" - Other than the fact that they are both very squarish designed buildings, they look nothing alike. Different colour, materials, height (Sky City is nearly twice the height), Symmetrical design (Sky City is very symmetrical while the Sears tower is very asymetrical with lots of random levels)

"meaningless, unoccupied, prefabricated deathtrap of a building" - Meaningless? A new extremely innovative way of constructing buildings in record time is hardly meaningless. Unoccupied? In a country with a population of over 1.3 billion, they'll find people to occupy it. Deathtrap? It will be built to withstand a 9.0 magnitude earthquake.

"unheard of city" - Changsha has a population of over 7 million people. It seems that there are a few people that have heard of the city.

"will offer no context to the rest of the city's skyline (built in a forest, away from the rest of the city???)" - I can agree that it will offer no context to the rest of the city's skyline, but it isn't supposed too because the building is a city itself. It is being built to mainly demonstrate how a city for 30,000 people can be built in a few months on a very tiny footprint. It is quite smart actually, having a building that is a city for 30,000 people in the middle of the forest because everyone does everything in the building and everyone shares a huge forest as there backyard. Elevators replace cars, buses, etc. and you don't have to drive to the city's edge to get into nature. It seems to me that it is a much more natural way to live, rather than depending on cars and other transpotation to get to very spread out locations, have everything in one structure and preserve the land around it. It is like an ant-hill, or beehive, but for people.

[GeorgiaBoy24]

You made some good points. However, I still respectfully disagree in many ways.

After looking closely at pictures of the Sears Tower, I can clearly notice the asymmetric design of it versus the symmetric design of Sky City. Still, at first glance and even now it looks way too much like our tallest building for it to be considered unique.

It is meaningless in that it will surely never become occupied. Just look at all the space in that thing! And unless this new prefabricated construction is a breakthrough, which will change everything if it is, it just doesn't seem safe.

Sure, Changsha has 7 million people, but Dallas has a comparable 6.5 million. Ask anyone in China if they've heard of Dallas and they'll probably say no.

"It is much more natural way to live." Yeah, because being in a cubicle 2000 feet up is so natural! All putting a skyscraper in a forest does is separate it from the skyline, providing no reference point for how tall it truly is. Just look at Sears. It's by a 900 foot building and it completely dwarfs it, providing a visual on just how massive the building is. Without buildings around it, you lose too much of the sense of scale.

[M II A II R II K]

http://news.sky.com/story/1014603/ch...per-in-90-days

.....

From the foundations upwards, the whole construction will be erected within three months at a rate of five floors a day. Work will start at the end of this month and it should all be finished by the end of February.

- The building will be called Sky City and its statistics are quite remarkable. It will be 838 metres high, with 220 floors and a construction area of one million square metres. To achieve that, 200,000 tons of steel will be used. There will be space for 31,000 people inside, who will be able to move up and down with the help of 104 high speed lifts.

- Some 83% of the building will be for residential use, with room for 17,400 people. It will also contain a hotel with a capacity for 1,000. There will be schools educating up to 4,600 children and a hospital which will treat 1,400 patients. Only 3% of the building will be for office use. Any remaining space will be shops and restaurants. The building will be just a few metres taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai but will be constructed at a fraction of the cost.

.....

[sw5710]

I want to see steel going up soon.

[NYC2ATX]

I'm so underwhelmed and...actually disappointed by this whole thing. I find China incredibly annoying for exactly these sort of proposals. Comparable to the Sears Tower? Maybe, but more comparable to the uninteresting box hotels that they throw up every so often here in New York. I understand that China has a unprecedented and tremendous population, but their cities have absolutely no identity whatsoever.

I think what makes the great cities of the world great is that, once any of their names is mentioned, several iconic images and ideas immediately pop into one's mind. That's what I love about American cities, they're all unique and famous for different reasons...well most of them anyway. New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, DC, New Orleans, etc. etc. ...all the things one thinks of. Broadening the scope, take Paris, Rome, London, Berlin or Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City...Sydney, Bangkok, Tokyo, Moscow, Cairo, Delhi, Mumbai...I can go on. Even Dubai, if they did one thing right, nowadays most people know where you're talking about when you mention Dubai.

Now consider China. You of course have Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, the fortunate three that truly are known worldwide. Let's look at the other large cities in the country, several of which could be viewed as the relative equivalents of the US cities I mentioned above. Guangzhou and Shenzhen are trying, but I can't help but think I wouldn't know of them if I wasn't on this website all the time. How about Tianjin, Wuhan, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu...and Changsha? What do any of those names make you think of? I don't know about you, but I know nothing of these places other than that they're probably bursting at the seams with people. No emotions arise, no images come to mind...and those are all among China's 25 largest, and arguably most "influential" cities. I grant you who might call me ignorant that I've never been to China and I am speaking from the perspective of what most Americans, and westerners, know and think of the Far East's largest nation, but isn't that viewpoint central to my argument? Not everyone knows what we know because they spend so much time on SSP.

My point is this: Changsha does not deserve the world's tallest building because it has no standing among the world's great cities, it has no identity. I feel the Chinese should focus more on developing culture and identity in their metropolises, beyond one megaproject after another. I just wish China's cities would become real places in the 21st-Century human psyche before they start trumping every record known to man.

[tennis1400]

Agreed about the critiques of Chinas cities but I think a huge part of the problem is they are trying to create a cities identity overnight and that cant really be done at least not well. Dubai and Las Vegas are the two cities that have an identity that is probably the easiest to create in a shortest timeframe.

Off topic but how do we know this building will be safe? Seems crazy that it wont topple over or implode on itself! I know I wouldnt go near it because the timeframe for construction seems impossible with current construction methods.

[M II A II R II K]

BSB is a big fan of modular technology, which uses pre-fabricated, factory-produced materials that are assembled on-site at dramatic speeds. It's basically Lego blocks, but on a much bigger scale. The company claims the 220-story building will be constructed at a rate of five stories per day, thanks to 95 percent of the construction done at pre-fabrication factories. The same technology can be seen in this video depicting a 30-story building that was constructed by BSB in just 15 days.




• Video Link

[denizen467]

I'm not impressed with the M9 earthquake resistance if they haven't also considered wind loads. Those become a much more important issue with supertalls and there's nothing apparent in the massing here to suggest they've planned for the proverbial hundred-year or five-hundred year horizontal load.

Gee, I wonder if that explains the siting in the middle of a big woodland? I can picture a future YouTube video of this thing falling over.

Anyway, 3 months to build the structure is not particularly interesting if it takes the plumbing, electrician, hvac, elevator, and other trades another 1 year + to make the edifice actually have any relevance.

[Fatality]

Originally Posted by GeorgiaBoy24

You made some good points. However, I still respectfully disagree in many ways.

After looking closely at pictures of the Sears Tower, I can clearly notice the asymmetric design of it versus the symmetric design of Sky City. Still, at first glance and even now it looks way too much like our tallest building for it to be considered unique.

It is meaningless in that it will surely never become occupied. Just look at all the space in that thing! And unless this new prefabricated construction is a breakthrough, which will change everything if it is, it just doesn't seem safe.

Sure, Changsha has 7 million people, but Dallas has a comparable 6.5 million. Ask anyone in China if they've heard of Dallas and they'll probably say no.

"It is much more natural way to live." Yeah, because being in a cubicle 2000 feet up is so natural! All putting a skyscraper in a forest does is separate it from the skyline, providing no reference point for how tall it truly is. Just look at Sears. It's by a 900 foot building and it completely dwarfs it, providing a visual on just how massive the building is. Without buildings around it, you lose too much of the sense of scale.

Lol you are acting like how the chinese would expect an American with the inability to look beyond the box to react.

First of all, there are many buildings that look like the sears tower, and there are many copied buildings all around the world. Though I do agree that the design is subpar considering it is a supertall, I think they know what they are doing considering they are paying and building this thing.

What you say about in-occupancy can go either way. The burg khalifa had the same problem but China is very different from Dubai in the sense that Dubai builds to show their wealth off and try and create more tourism and a greater population. China, on the other hand, can easily absorb this due to their massive population.

Also, what the hell do you mean if the chinese have heard of Dallas. Maybe they have, maybe they haven't. Not knowing don't of their cities, isn't justifiable by saying that they dont know American cities. Just cause you are ignorant doesnt make Changsha any smaller or unheard of a city. Try and remember that China is halfway across the globe.


And sure it might be a natural way to live if the chinese think so. It's called innovation, and trial and error. If it works, then they keep buiilding, if not then they dont. If everyone was as close-minded as you are being then there wouldn't even be skyscrapers or buildings at all because they would ask pessimistic questions like you.

"Towers in the sky?? What if someone falls off?"