57-floor building goes up in 19 days
Broad Sustainable Building, a prefab construction company in the Chinese city of Changsha, erected a 57-floor building in only 19 days in February, handling the construction as if working with Lego blocks, as many netizens commented after seeing an online
Mini Sky City was built by 1,200 people working around the clock in the city, which is in Hunan province. The 200-metre structure contains 800 homes and working spaces for 4,000 people, said Xiao Changgeng, the company’s manager. All that remains is the interior decoration.
"It could be built quickly because the steel structure was made of prefabricated parts, and 95 per cent of the process took place in plants in advance," Xiao said.
Mini Sky City is more earthquake-resistant than other buildings. Moreover, it is 80 per cent more energy-efficient than a regular building with steel and concrete, cutting carbon-dioxide emissions by 12,000 tonnes annually, he said.
Prefabricated steel structures have been widely adopted for commercial buildings in China for their better energy efficiency and shorter construction period, said Liu Dongwei, chief architect of the China Institute of Building Standard Design and Research at the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.
A steel building has a metal structure for internal support and exterior cladding, as opposed to regular steel and concrete buildings, Liu said.
"They could be a good solution to promote green construction, considering the huge amount of waste produced in the whole process of building," he said.
