This is the deliverable future of mass production home building. What no one has done yet tie to connect the dots and start linkingthese structures to farm land to deliver a viable local community tothe land. The foot print is so small that a village of five hundredcan be installed on a farm's actual living space with any top soilsimply moved to points of need with zero loss of overallproductivity.
Once that starts to happen, the need for urban centralization willquickly decline.
I would set out to fully integrate village and farm and local urbancenter to maximize attractiveness. However, that will inevitablyevolve over time until; there exists a template of good governancethat everyone emulates.
Meet the Man WhoBuilt a 30-Story Building in 15 Days
- BY LAUREN HILGERSEMAIL AUTHOR09.25.12
In late 2011, Broadbuilt a 30-story building in 15 days; now it intends to use similarmethods to erect the world’s tallest building in just seven months.Perhaps you’re already familiar with Zhang’s handiwork: On NewYear’s Day 2012, Broad released a time-lapse video of its 30-storyachievement that quickly went viral: construction workers buzzingaround like gnats while a clock in the corner of the screen marks thetime. In just 360 hours, a 328-foot-tall tower called the T30 risesfrom an empty site to overlook Hunan’s Xiang River. At the end ofthe video, the camera spirals around the building overhead as theBroad logo appears on the screen: a lowercase b that wrapsaround itself in an imitation of the @ symbol.
In person, Zhanghimself seems to move at an impossible time-lapse clip. He’s almostalways surrounded by Broad employees, all wearing identical whitebutton-front shirts (the uniform for the corporate office) and alloffering papers for him to review or sign. When I arrive, he’sissuing a steady barrage of instructions while spinning himselfaround in his office chair. When he’s finally ready to start theinterview, he abruptly stops spinning and, without looking at me,barks out, “Begin!”
The pace of BroadSustainable Building’s development is driven entirely by this oneman. Broad Town, the sprawling headquarters, is completely Zhang’screation. Employees call him not “the chairman” or “ourchairman” but “my chairman.” To become an employee ofBroad, you must recite a life manual penned by Zhang, guidelines thatinclude tips on saving energy, brushing your teeth, and havingchildren. All prospective employees must be able, over a two-dayperiod, to run 7.5 miles. You can eat for free at Broad Towncafeterias unless someone catches you wasting food, at which pointyou’re not merely fined but publicly shamed.
So far, Broad hasbuilt 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun. They arefabricated in sections at two factories in Hunan, roughly an hour’sdrive from Broad Town. From there the modules—complete withpreinstalled ducts and plumbing for electricity, water, and otherinfrastructure—are shipped to the site and assembled like Legos.The company is in the process of franchising this technology topartners in India, Brazil, and Russia. What it’s selling is theworld’s first standardized skyscraper, and with it, Zhang aims toturn Broad into the McDonald’s of the sustainable buildingindustry.
“Traditionalconstruction is chaotic,” he says. “We took construction andmoved it into the factory.” According to Zhang, his buildings willhelp solve the many problems of the construction industry. They willbe safer, quicker, and cheaper to build. And they will have lowenergy consumption and CO2emissions. When I ask Zhang why he decidedto start a construction company, he corrects me. “It’s not aconstruction company,” he says. “It’s a structural revolution.”
The Instant Skyscraper
Broad plans every step for construction speed, from how it designs floor modules to how workers load the trucks.
1// Identical modules
The floors and ceilings of the skyscraper are built in sections, each measuring 15.6 by 3.9 meters, with a depth of 45 centimeters.
Asked about his life story, Zhang avers that it’s too boring to discuss. (“This whole article shouldn’t be more than two pages,” he says.) But he goes on to attribute his success to his creativity and to his outsider perspective on technology. He started out as an art student in the 1980s, but in 1988, with the help of two partners, including his brother (an engineer by training), Zhang left the art world to found Broad. The company started out as a maker of nonpressurized boilers. While Zhang again insists that the story isn’t interesting enough to talk about, Broad’s senior vice president, a smiley woman named Juliet Jiang who sports a bowl haircut just too long to stay out of her eyes, is happy to fill in the gaps. “He made his fortune on boilers,” she says. “He could have kept doing this business, but my chairman, he saw the need for nonelectric air-conditioning.” China’s economy was expanding past the capacity of the nation’s electricity grid, she explains. Power shortages were a problem. Industrial air-conditioning units fueled by natural gas could help companies ease their electricity load, reduce costs, and enjoy more reliable climate control in the bargain.
The AC units thatZhang still manufactures are gigantic, barge-sized affairs. Theso-called micro chillers weigh 6 tons; the largest is 3,500 tons andcan cool 5 million square feet. The technology Broad employs, calledabsorption cooling, is an old one. Instead of using electricity tocompress a refrigerant from a gas to a liquid and back again,nonelectric air conditioners use natural gas or another source ofheat to turn a special liquid (typically a solution containinglithium bromide) into vapor; as the vapor condenses, it cools the airaround it. Today, Broad has units operating in more than 70countries, cooling some of the largest buildings and airports on theplanet. These systems are all monitored from a central headquartersin Broad Town: When an air conditioner malfunctions in Brazil, analarm goes off in Hunan.
For two decades,Zhang’s AC business boomed. But a couple of events conspired tochange his course. The first was that Zhang became anenvironmentalist, a gradual awakening that he says began 10 or 12years ago. The second was the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hitChina’s Sichuan Province in 2008, causing the collapse of poorlyconstructed buildings and killing some 87,000 people. In theaftermath, Zhang began to fixate on the problem of building design.At first, he says, he tried to convince developers to retrofitexisting buildings to make them both more stable and moresustainable. “People paid no attention at all,” he says. So Zhangdrafted his own engineers—300 of them, according to Jiang—andstarted researching how to build cheap, environmentally friendlystructures that could also withstand an earthquake.
Within six months ofstarting his research, Zhang had given up on traditional methods. Hewas frustrated by the cost of hiring designers and specialists foreach new structure. The best way to cut costs, he decided, was totake building to the factory—and as a manufacturer of massive ACunits, he knew how factories worked. But to create a factory-builtskyscraper, Broad had to abandon the principles by which skyscrapersare typically designed. The whole load-bearing structure had to bedifferent. To reduce the overall weight of the building, it used lessconcrete in the floors; that in turn enabled it to cut down onstructural steel. The result was the T30, 90 percent of which wasbuilt inside the factory. And Zhang says this percentage will onlyrise with future buildings: The more that happens in the factory, hesays, the safer and less wasteful construction becomes.
These theories areincreasingly accepted by the sustainable building community in theWest, where prefabricated and modular buildings are gaining inpopularity. In New York, a 32-story modular building, the world’stallest of its kind, is slated to go up near the Barclays Centerarena in Brooklyn (though union disputes might result in a moretraditional building instead). Two entirely modular developments havegone up in the suburbs of London. Both modular buildings (which aredelivered to a site in prebuilt cubes) and prefabricated towers(closer to what Broad is doing) are safer to construct and easier toregulate than traditional structures, and both cut down on waste.
But modular andprefabricated buildings in the West are, for the most part, low-rise.Broad is alone—perhaps forebodingly alone—in applying thesemethods to skyscrapers. For Zhang, the environmental savings alonejustify the effort. According to Broad’s numbers, a traditionalhigh-rise will produce about 3,000 tons of construction waste, whilea Broad building will produce only 25 tons. Traditional buildingsalso require 5,000 tons of water onsite to build, while Broadbuildings use none.
Compared with theWest’s elegant modular buildings, Zhang’s skyscrapers areaesthetically underwhelming, to say the least. On a tour of the T30,my guide gestures at a scale model and says, “It’s not verygood-looking, is it?” To create a sufficiently spacious lobby forthe hotel, an awkward pyramid-shaped structure had to be attached tothe base. Inside, the hallways are uncomfortably narrow; climbing thecentral stairway feels like clanging up the stairs of a stadiumbleacher.
It’s worth noting,though, that the majority of apartment buildings going up in Chinaare equally ugly. Broad’s biggest selling point, amazingly enough,is in the quality. In a nation where construction standards varywidely, and where builders often use cheap and unreliable concrete,Broad’s method offers a rare sort of consistency. Its materials areuniform and dependable. There’s little opportunity for theconstruction workers to cut corners, since doing so would leave straypieces, like when you bungle your Ikea desk. And with Broad’sapproach, consistency can be had on the cheap: The T30 cost just$1,000 per square meter to build, compared with around $1,400 fortraditional commercial high-rise construction in China.
The building processis also safer. Jiang tells me that during the construction of thefirst 20 Broad buildings, “not even one fingernail was hurt.”Elevator systems—the base, rails, and machine room—can beinstalled at the factory, eliminating the risk of a technicianfalling down a 30-story elevator shaft. And instead of shipping anelevator car to the site in pieces, Broad orders a finished car anddrops it into the shaft by crane. In the future, elevatormanufacturers are hoping to preinstall the doors, completelyeliminating any chance that a worker might fall.
While Jiang focuses onbringing Broad buildings to the world, her boss is fixated on thecompany’s most outlandish plan—the J220, a factory-built220-floor behemoth that would just happen to be the tallest buildingin the world. It’s hard to say for sure that the16-million-square-foot plan isn’t entirely a publicity stunt. ButZhang has hired some of the engineers who worked on the currentheight-record holder, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and Broad has createdtwo large models of “Sky City” (as the J220 has been nicknamed).The foundation is scheduled to be laid in November at a site inHunan; if everything goes well, the building will be complete inMarch 2013. All in all, including factory time and onsite time,construction is expected to take just seven months. Again, that’sassuming it really happens: When my guide at the T30 plugs in one ofthe models and the lights flicker on, he tells me, “My chairmansays we have to attract eyes. We have to shock the world.”
But if all Broad everdoes is build 30-story skyscrapers—in 15 days, at $1,000 per squarefoot, with little waste and low worker risk, and where the end resultcan withstand a 9.0 quake—it will have shocked the world quiteenough.
LaurenHilgers (lauren.hilgers@gmail.com) was based in Shanghai asa reporter from 2007 to July 2012.
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