J220 Changsha Sky City One China: Chinese developer to build tallest skyscraper in 90 days; Broad Construction says 220 story tower will contain a school, hospital, 17 helipads, apartments for 30000 people
Tweet Topic Started: 14 Aug 2012, 02:17 AM (6,249 Views)
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.
The company, Broad Sustainable Building, says it plans to accomplish the feat by using a proprietary prefabrication technique. And while it is still waiting for certain government approvals, the company recently reiterated its promise that Sky City One would be standing at full height in March 2013.
The mixed-use building, which would include luxury apartments, low income housing, and space for businesses and retail, sounds incredibly ambitious. But we were skeptical that it could be done on such a tight timeline and small budget.
We reached out to Christian Sottile, the Dean of the School of Building Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He gave us his take on why the project is possible, but a terrible step for architecture and urban living.
Christian Sottile: 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. This project would, however, not be the first to propose such an end. It follows a long tradition of audacious architecture attempting to rethink the city. But in the end, the city always wins. I am speaking of the evolved city of over 7,000 years of transcultural human history — cities that honor the human being, as well as the art, craft, culture and resources of places.
One might do well to remember the Italian Super Studio movement in the 1960s proposing radical new forms of the city. Many of its founding members later went on to reject their propositions in favor of more universal ideas embodied in the traditional city. Among them, Adolfo Natalini once told me that “I started my career as a pyromaniac and ended it as a firefighter.”
In an era of blind adherence to the marvels of technology, we are all too often seduced into believing that any result of its application will advance our collective well-being. We do this without considering all of its possible effects. We might remember that while nuclear physics is in itself a wonder of scientific achievement, it can be used either to create clean energy or fatal weaponry. In the case of Sky City One, the application of this technological feat, even if executed successfully, is ultimately a loss.
Whether you build it in three months, or not, you still lose.
BI: Broad Sustainable Building says the short timeline is possible because of its "modular" technology — most of the building will come prefabricated and be assembled on site. What do you think of the concept, and what are the drawbacks and dangers to "modular" construction?
CS: 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.
BI: Broad Sustainable Building also claims it can do the project on a $628 million budget, which is a fraction of the cost of the Burj Khalifa, which cost $1.5 billion to build. How can the company do it so cheaply?
CS: 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. They can be thought of as single-use buildings. Think of Sky City One as the Paper Plate of Architecture.
BI: Assuming that Broad Sustainable Building gets government approval for the project, do you think there's any chance it will actually be standing at full height in March 2013? Is there a more realistic timeline?
CS: Mark Twain noted that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot.” 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?
BI: Sky City One is billed as a "car-free city for 100,000 people." How does the design help or hurt density problems in the area?
CS: In a disquisition of the ultra-tall building type as a useless format, we must remember to avoid the fallacy of perceived density. 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.
The race is always on. Within the span of just two years, the world's tallest building was built three times in New York City – the 282.5-meter Bank of Manhattan in 1930, the 319-meter Chrysler Building in a few months after, and then 11 months later the 381-meter Empire State Building in 1931.
The era of architectural horse-racing and ego-boosting has only intensified in the decades since. In 2003, the 509-meter Taipei 101 unseated the 452-meter Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur after a seven-year reign as the world's tallest. In 2010, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai far surpassed Taipei 101, climbing up to 828 meters.
Bold builders in China want to go 10 meters higher later this year with a 220-story pre-fab tower that can be constructed in a baffling 90 days. And then, in 2018, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (below, right) will go significantly farther, with a proposed height of at least 1,000 meters.*
Will this race ever stop? Not in the foreseeable future, at least. But there has to be some sort of end point, some highest possible height that a building can reach. There will eventually be a world's tallest building that is unbeatably the tallest, because there has to be an upper limit. Right?
Ask a building professional or skyscraper expert and they'll tell you there are many limitations that stop towers from rising ever-higher. Materials, physical human comfort, elevator technology and, most importantly, money all play a role in determining how tall a building can or can't go.
But surely there must be some physical limitations that would prevent a building from going up too high. We couldn't, for example, build a building that reached the moon because, in scientific terms, moon hit building and building go boom. But could there be a building with a penthouse in space, beyond earth's atmosphere? Or a 100-mile tall building? Or even a 1-mile building?
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a group interested in and focused on the phenomenon of skyscrapers, recently asked a group of leading skyscraper architects and designers about some of the limitations of tall buildings. They wondered, "What do you think is the single biggest limiting factor that would prevent humanity creating a mile-high tower or higher?" The responses are compiled in this video, and tend to focus on the pragmatic technicalities of dealing with funding and the real estate market or the lack of natural light in wide-based buildings.
"The predominant problem is in the elevator and transportation system," says Adrian Smith, the architect behind the current tallest building in the world and the one that will soon outrank it, the kilometer-tall Kingdom Tower in Jeddah.
But in terms of structural limitations, the ultimate expert is likely William Baker. He's the top structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and he worked with Smith on the Burj Khalifa, designing the system that allowed it to rise so high. That system, known as the buttressed core, is a kind of three-winged spear that allows stability, viably usable space (as in not buried deeply and darkly inside a massively wide building) and limited loss of space for structural elements.
Baker says the buttressed core design could be used to build structures even taller than the Burj Khalifa. "We could go twice that or more," he says.
And though he calls skyscraper design "a fairly serious undertaking," he also thinks that it's totally feasible to build much taller than even the Kingdom Tower.
"We could easily do a kilometer. We could easily do a mile," he says. "We could do at least a mile and probably quite a bit more."
The buttressed core would probably have to be modified to go much higher than a mile. But Baker says that other systems could be designed. In fact, he's working on some of them now.
One idea for a new system would be buildings with hollowed bases. Think of the Eiffel Tower, says Tim Johnson. He's chairman at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and a partner at the architecture firm NBBJ, and he says any really, really tall building would have to be like a supersized version of the Parisian icon, otherwise the lower floors required to support the gradually narrowing structure would be way too big to even fill up.
For a Middle East-based client he's not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. "One of the client's requirements was to push human ingenuity," he says. Consider them pushed.
With those inventions and the hollow, Eiffel Tower-like base, Johnson says the design could have worked. The project was canned as a result of the crash of the real estate market in the late 2000s (and probably at least a little good old-fashioned pragmatism). But if things were to change, that building could be built, he says.
"We proved that it is physically and even programmatically possible to build a building a mile-and-a-half tall. If somebody would have said 'Do it two miles,' we probably could have done that, too," Johnson says. "A lot of it comes down to money. Who’s going to have that kind of capital?"
As far as the structure is concerned, others think it's possible, too. My colleague John Metcalfe recently pointed out a 1990s-era concept for a two-and-a-half-mile volcano-looking supertower in Tokyo called the X-Seed 4000 that has a similar Eiffel Towerishness to it.
As Metcalfe notes, this 4,000-meter "skypenetrator" was never built for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious is that "[r]eal estate in Tokyo isn't exactly cheap. The base of this abnormally swole tower would eat up blocks and blocks if it was to be stable." In fact the base of this structure, according to conceptual drawings, would have spread for miles and miles, almost like the base of Mount Fuji, itself about 225 meters smaller than the X-Seed 4000.
A building taller than a mountain seems preposterous. But according to Baker, it's entirely possible.
"You could conceivably go higher than the highest mountain, as long as you kept spreading a wider and wider base," Baker says.
Theoretically, then, a building could be built at least as tall as 8,849 meters, one meter taller than Mount Everest. The base of that mountain, according to these theoretical calculations, is about 4,100 square kilometers – a huge footprint for a building, even one with a hollow core. But given structural systems like the buttressed core, the base probably wouldn't need to be nearly as large as that of a mountain.
And this theoretical tallest building could probably go even taller than 8,849 meters, Baker says, because buildings are far lighter than solid mountains. The Burj Khalifa, he estimates, is about 15 percent structure and 85 percent air. Based on some quick math, if a building is only 15 percent as heavy as a solid object, it could be 6.6667 times taller and weigh the same as that solid object. A building could, hypothetically, climb to nearly 59,000 meters without outweighing Mount Everest or crushing the very earth below. Right?
"I'd have to come up with a considered opinion on that," says Baker.
How about an unconsidered opinion?
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to chicken out on you and not give you a number," Baker laughs. "This is the kind of thing I'd want to do with a student."
"If you get some funding for a grad student for a semester, I'll give you a number," Baker says.
So we still don't really know what the tallest building ever would be. In the meantime, Everest-plus-one is essentially the highest. But like the ever-moving crown for the tallest building in the world, even this estimate could rise with a little investigation. Any grad students out there got a semester to spare?
* Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the proposed height of Kingdom Tower.
Note: As a number of readers have pointed out, this article neglects to mention the concept of the space elevator –a 100,000-kilometer shaft anchored on the earth that rises out beyond our atmosphere where a counterweight would hold it in place, enabling earth-based vehicles to relatively efficiently climb up into space. Admittedly, that would be a tall structure, probably the tallest. But for the purposes of this article, I chose to focus on buildings in the common perception of the word. My sincere apologies to any space elevator enthusiasts out there who feel left out. Excelsior!
Broad Sustainable Construction informs us that a long and arduous approval process has been completed, and that they are starting excavation and construction on Sky CIty in June, 2013.
Why build the world's tallest building in the middle of a field in Changsha, China? Why build it at all? The answer, according to BSC, is that it is the most sustainable way to accommodate a growing population.
This is not a trophy like the Burj Khalifa, a thin high tech spire that isn't even connected to a sewer system. They call it a "pragmatic" building, designed for efficiency, affordability, replicability. They also make a strong case for it being sustainable. BSC writes:
The Sky City concept significantly reduces the per capita use of land, and the CO2 emissions generated getting around. They call it "a way of development for higher life quality and lower impact on the environment" They see this as the future of Chinese city building: "Urbanization can not be materialized at the cost of land and environmental pollution."
By going up, hundreds of acres of land are saved from being turned into roads and parking lots. By using elevators instead of cars to get to schools, businesses and recreational facilities, thousands of cars are taken off the roads and thousands of hours of commuting time are saved. It makes sense; vertical distances between people are a whole lot shorter than the horizontal, and elevators are about the most energy efficient moving devices made. A resident of Sky City is using 1/100th the average land per person.
If you would rather walk rather than wait for one of 92 elevators, there is six mile long ramp running from the first to the 170th floor. Beside the ramp are 56 different 30 foot high courtyards used for basketball, tennis, swimming, theatres, and 930,000 square feet of interior vertical organic farms.
The numbers continue to stagger. In one building, there will be accommodation for 4450 families in apartments ranging from 645 SF to 5,000 SF, 250 hotel rooms, 100,000 SF of school, hospital and office space, totalling over eleven million square feet. The building footprint is only 10% of the site; the rest is open parkland.
Back in late June I carried some news about a ‘tiny’ home designed architect Renzo Piano, described as “a technically perfect and aesthetically attractive refuge, testing the potential of the minimalist house.”
Now comes the world’s tallest mixed-use building in Changsha, China and while the scale is very different these two buildings they do share the fact that both are pre-fabricated.
The tiny house is equipped with everything you need and the same is claimed for Sky City; although, with its 27 meters foundations Sky City is setting many different records and clearly on a far greater scale.
While the South China Morning Post quotes a professor of architecture from Tsinghua University who calls the scheme “insane” the project boasts some amazing statistics.
From January 1, 2014 the prefab floors and structure will start to be assembled on-site and the aim is to top off the structure in April 2014.
Yes that’s correct, all 202 floors in just four months.
And while at 202 floors the aim is to be recognised as the world’s tallest building, there are claims of a wider goal that might well impact China’s urbanisation policies.
Sky City aims to pioneer an environment that is healthier, saves energy and land and with less building material.
If Sky City was to be built as a conventional residential estate, it would occupy two square kilometres of land and need to accommodate parking for more than 2000 cars. In contrast as a tower Sky City is planned to accommodate apartments, offices, schools, shopping, a hospital and recreational facilities in just the one (very tall) building.
As a resident of Sky City if you feel like stretching your legs then via a continuous internal ramping ‘street’ you will be able to walk from the ground floor to the 170th floor.
A variety of public spaces will serve as civic squares, playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools and theatres.
The estimated 280,000 pieces the building sections are being built via a process described as “similar to aircraft component management.”
Sky City will contain eleven million square feet and cost an estimated US$1.5 billion.
There have been concerns express about the social implications of such a concentrated urban environment and some safety concerns.
Like the time required for an emergency evacuation and its ability to resist earthquakes – the building has been designed to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake.
Clearly the amount of prefabrication and construction between Sky City and the world’s smallest house are worlds apart but there are common factors.
Both address concerns of housing density, energy efficiency and building innovation.
I find this an interesting comparison once you account for scale still I think that the conversation is much the same as we look for varied housing options across our world.
This is indeed an interesting project... In my opinion, a tad nonsensical ... bat-shit crazy even ( and not because its so darn high with so much stuff - i LOVE that part of it - could be the way of the future )
Let's just say i know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy ... But that guy spent some time reviewing and consulting for this scheme along with a few other people who know what they are doing ...
This should be a game changing development , really pushing what a vertical city can be to deal with densely populated areas...
It may well earn reputation as giant monument standing for everything that is wrong with projects pushed to make insane timeframes without refining and engineering an idea towards its best possible outcome.
This is indeed an interesting project... In my opinion, a tad nonsensical ... bat-shit crazy even ( and not because its so darn high with so much stuff - i LOVE that part of it - could be the way of the future )
Let's just say i know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy ... But that guy spent some time reviewing and consulting for this scheme along with a few other people who know what they are doing ...
This should be a game changing development , really pushing what a vertical city can be to deal with densely populated areas...
It may well earn reputation as giant monument standing for everything that is wrong with projects pushed to make insane timeframes without refining and engineering an idea towards its best possible outcome.
Time will tell.
Only the Chinese could spend $1.5B on a proof-of-concept.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
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