Posted Nov 28, 2012, 1:52 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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Why China's Plan To Build The World's Tallest Skyscraper In 90 Days Is 'Madness'
Read More: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-c...d-idea-2012-11
Quote:
Earlier this year, a Chinese construction company announced plans to build a new "world's tallest skyscraper," an 838-meter highrise in Changsha. It also promised to complete the building, called Sky City One, in an astonishing 90-day timeline, and to do it for $628 million — around a third of the cost of the Burj Khalifa, which currently holds the title of the world's tallest building.
- Pre-fabrication has revolutionized the building industry — applying this now as a strategy for tall buildings under the right conditions is brilliant. The irony is that at the same time, if you look at the outcome of this endeavor urbanistically, it is at best a folly, and at worst, madness. The proposition that a city can be contained within one building is unnatural and devastating to the human spirit.
- The process of making buildings as a local activity enriches the local economy, draws on local resources and develops local skills. The efficiencies gained in off-site modular prefabrication come at the risk of impoverishing the uniqueness, identity and regional wisdom that evolves in different places. This is not to ignore that certain elements of buildings will be sourced or fabricated elsewhere, but that the majority of the act of building should be a sector of a local economy. The more that the activity of building happens remotely, the more individual places are deprived of their own expertise, identity and self-determination.
- The standardization of the building format for Sky City One, repetition of structural elements, and proportionately high volume of space enclosed by the design all add up to significant cost savings. Also, realizing the efficiencies that arise from pre-fabrication and limiting costly construction time on-site reduce the real costs of construction. The irony of building quickly and cheaply is that we ultimately live with our buildings for decades to come, maybe centuries. Buildings that allow long-term use accommodate restoration and reinvestment. In the category of ultra-tall buildings, quick and cheap may be fitting. I say this because these buildings really have no long-term future. The technologies involved are so specific to one moment in time and one manufacturing process that they later prove to be un-restorable.
- Allusions to the audacity of the Empire State Building in New York in the 1930s abound. Even Sky City One’s Art Deco-inspired hero-rendering and its formal stepped design puts off the same monumental aspirations. The Empire State boasted construction in 13 months, Sky City One boasts three months. The Empire State rose at five stories a week, Sky City anticipates five stories a day. Updated for technological advances nearly a century later, it follows that these exponential metrics should be possible. But we must still ask, what does this prove? Fancy, folly, or foolish prestige?
- Density is often presented as the inevitable need and justification for skyscrapers. However, it should rather be understood as a question of format. Density can either be located within fewer tall buildings with inordinately large open spaces around them to allow light to reach building surfaces, or it can be arranged in networks of low to mid-rise buildings with more compact and legible open spaces around them, such as walkable streets, parks, and plazas, providing a more comfortable human habitat. Let’s remember that the average height of a building in Manhattan is three stories.
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Christian Sottile, SCAD Dean of the School of Building Arts.
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