The Proposed Sky City skyscraper (via WikiCommons)
The next "tallest building in the world" will be built in China and it is a pre-fab, environmentally friendly building that will be built much faster than any skyscraper ever. Below are some key things to know about the building.
Key Facts
- It will be 2,749 feet tall with 220 floors.
- Construction is set to beging in June 2013.
- It will be built in Changsha, Hunan in south-central China.
- Estimated cost is $630 million. The current tallest building the wold in Dubai cost $1.5 billion in 2010.
- The Chinese company building it is Broad Sustainable Building which is a company that until recently had been mostly in the air conditioner business. Over the last few years they have built 17 pre-fab buildings.
- Due to prefabrication, it is estimated that it will take just 90-210 days to construct. The Dubai building took 5 years to build which was considered very fast at that time.
- The number of people in the building will be over 100,000 at times making it the most exterme urban density in the world.
- It will be built to withstand earthquakes of a magnitude of up to 9.0 on the Richter scale.
- A few items about what is in the building:
- A 6 mile ramp that goes from the 1st floor to the 170th so people can walk up and down.
- 4,450 apartments.
- Over 50 "courtyards" which hold various sporting courts, movie theaters, and other large gathering places.
- 92 elevators.
- 17 landing pads for helicopters.
- 930,000 sq ft of vertical organic farms inside the building
- A 1,000-person luxury hotel
- A school able to accommodate 4,600 children
Sky City is Very Green
Here's some of the key aspects of how it is environmentally friendly. The first one feels a bit strange, but make sense.
- It drastically reduces dependence of transportation by integrated offices, residencies, schools, hospitals, shopping malls and entertainments. This will cut down on CO2 usage as residents and businesses will not need to use transportation nearly as much. TreeHugger reports: "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."
- It reduces 80% of energy consumption by utilizing 20-inch wall thermal insulation, 4-layer windows, heat recovery fresh air system, LED lighting, and exterior shading that cuts down on cooling by 30 percent.
- It makes much more efficient use of land by building up instead of wide.
- It eliminates building syndrome caused by air cross contamination by using 100% fresh air and cleans the dust in air at 99.8% by 3-stages air purification.
- It reduces 99% of construction wastes and dust by pre-fabrication and on-site installation.
- It drastically enhances the life span of the building (more durable than Eiffel Tower) by steel structure. It provides wealth heritage of 170,000 tons of steel rather than 1,000,000+ concrete wastes to the future generations.
- It has co-generation plant using waste heat for power generation for heating and cooling
Video Preview of "Sky City"
Previous Example: A 30 Story Hotel Built in 15 Days
The same company built a 30 story hotel in 15 days. Here's some details from the Daily Mail:
- The Ark Hotel was built on Dongting lake, in the Hunan Province, by Broad Group, a Chinese construction company which specialises in sustainable architecture.
- It was built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake, as tested by the China Academy of Building Research, who claim this is five times more quake-resistant than conventional buildings.
- All the materials were prefabricated and sections built to specification off-site, so there was very little wastage.
- The builders took just 46 hours to finish the main structural components and another 90 hours to finish the building enclosure
This video shows a time lapse of how they built it: