GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT
Flat pack 57-storey skyscraper
built in 19 days
Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yue took less than three weeks to
build world’s tallest prefab tower
The Mini Sky City
tower in the city of
Changsha, China.
SOURCES
www.archdaily.com,
www.cnn.com, www.bbc.com,
www.bdcnetwork.com,www.ft.com
and www.inhabitat.com
On the outskirts of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province in southern
China, stands a 57-storey tower. It is not known for its architectural
design or height, but rather for the speed at which it was built in 2015
by Broad Sustainable Building (BSB), a Chinese firm that specialises in
prefabricated construction.
“Three floors in a day is China’s new normal,” says a representative for
the Mini Sky City tower skyscraper that was built in just 19 days. The
tower was built in two bursts: the first 20 storeys went up in a week in
2014, but red tape held up construction for a year, with the final 37
storeys completed in 12 working days in February 2015. Inhabitat.com
names it the world’s tallest prefab tower.
The 180 000 sqm mixed-use building was assembled from thousands of
factory-made steel modules, slotted together like Meccano. The process
also claimed to have required less materials and significantly reduced
the amount of air pollution. The tower is comprised of 19 ten-metre-high
atriums, 800 apartments and office space for 4 000 people.
According to CNN, by preparing more than 2 700 modules in a
factory for four months before site work began, BSB says it was able to
assemble the structure at the rate of three stories per day - like a giant
vertical jigsaw. To put the pace of BSB’s construction into context, it took
16 months to build the Barclays Head Office in Gaborone which is
effectively 8 floors tall.
BSB Chairman Zhang Yue says his method is not only fast, but also
safe and cheap. Now he wants to use the same technique to build the
world’s tallest skyscraper, Sky City. BBC reports that while the current
10
record holder, the 828m-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai, took five years to
“top out”, Yue says his proposed 220-storey tower that will reach nearly
840-metres will take only seven months - four for the foundations, and
three for the tower itself. And it will be 10m taller.
Safety concerns
There have been questions regarding the labour and safety practices
employed during its construction given the sheer speed of assembly.
CNN reports that a detailed company slideshow from BSB’s Sky City
project, however, states that the company’s buildings are all constructed
by skilled “professional workers” and not “day labourers.” According to
the Financial Times, Sky City has been put on hold because of concerns
about the safety of BSB chairman Zhang Yue’s proprietary technology.
Shipping flat packs across the globe
BSB is aiming to sell buildings worldwide, making them in China and
shipping them across the globe. Austin Williams, associate professor in
architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in the city of Suzhou
told CNN that fast-build projects like Mini Sky City could be extremely
useful for housing needs in other parts of the world.
Urbanisation is already happening at a rapid rate across many parts
of Asia and Africa. More than 2.5 billion people will be added to
the world’s urban population by 2050, according to the U.N. 2014
World Urbanisation Prospects report. And nearly 90% of this growth is
expected to be concentrated in Asian and African cities.
ISSUE 30 - JUNE 2017