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World's fastest building is racing ahead...

Last Updated 07 May 2015, 16:09 IST

The most frustrating part of buying property, either commercial or personal, is the wait. You have made the down payment, the bank has approved the loan, but your building still won’t be complete for another year.

Annoying, isn’t it?

Now a Chinese construction company is claiming to be the world’s fastest builder after building a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 working days in central China. The Broad Sustainable Building Company put up the rectangular, glass-and-steel Mini Sky City in the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha using a modular method, assembling three floors per day, company vice president Xiao Changgeng said.

The company worked on this building in two installments. What is more remarkable is that it was done in harsh winter months. The story of the construction was uploaded on You Tube, and has gone viral on Chinese video-sharing sites. This is sure to benefit the company since it has plans to build what it considers to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, at 220 floors in just about three months.

When asked how his company achieved this ‘express construction’, a company engineer, Chen Xiangquian explained that whereas in regular construction a skyscraper is built brick by brick in his method they just assembled blocks.This method is not entirely new since it has been used for high-rise apartments in other countries, including the US and the UK They were, however, not entirely popular there since critics complained that there was no variety in the buildings and the method could lead to cityscapes looking uniform and without aesthetic beauty.

Chinese consultants, however, are very enthusiastic about this method of construction. Liu Peng, associate director of the engineering consulting firm ARUP Beijing, said the method is worth developing because it could become a safe and reliable way to build skyscrapers rapidly. Liu acknowledged that such architecture is not universally liked and does not meet the aesthetic needs of all the people and their personalised demands.
Mini Sky City, which has 19 atriums, 800 apartments and office space for 4,000 people, goes on sale in May. The structure is safe and can withstand earthquakes, Xiao said.

The Changsha-based company spent four and a half months fabricating the building’s 2,736 modules before construction began. The first 20 floors were completed last year and the remaining 37 were built from January 31 to February 17 this year, Xiao said.The company has perfected its technology to accelerate its construction speed from two floors to three floors a day, he said. “This is definitely the fastest speed in our industry,” Xiao said.Now, if only we could build our buildings in India just as fast, we would be home sooner if not home ‘free.’

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(Published 07 May 2015, 16:09 IST)

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