Construction Week Online – Broad Sustainable Building (BSB), a subsidiary of the Broad Group based in Changsha in Hunan province, China, insists that it will deliver its 220-storey Sky City within the targeted 90 days, rather than in 210 days as rumored by the media. The 90 day assembly schedule does not include time to complete the foundation, but the time to assemble all of the floors.
The new Sky City skyscraper will be built at one tenth of the cost per square foot as the current tallest building (the Burj Khalifa).
Designed by engineers that worked on the Burj Khalifa, Sky City will achieve the target by using BSB’s 95%-prefabricated modular technology at the astonishing construction pace of five storeys a day.
Juliet Jiang, senior VP of Broad Group, has said that the company’s plan to construct its 838m skyscraper by the Xiangjiang River in Changsha city “will go on as planned with the completion of five storeys a day.”
Work on the foundations is expected to go ahead by the end of the month, while the planned three month construction period runs from the end of the year to the end of March 2013.
150 Franchise Partners
The company is currently increasing its franchise partners to 150 with more Chinese and international partnerships, including from Malaysia.
With the licence, said BSB, the system’s proprietor, a franchisee will be able to “recoup its capital within two years”.
“Our franchisees in China managed to recoup their capital within two years … the Malaysian franchisee can expect a similar return but it’ll depend on its annual output. The more that it produces, the quicker the payback,” Jiang said.
“We have not issued any press statement on this and it will go on as planned … we have not said anything about 210 days,” said Jiang, adding that the company is still waiting for project approval from the Chinese government.
Sky City has been designed to house 31,400 people in its luxury and low-income communities. Residential area will occupy 83% of the tower, all serviced by schools, hospitals, offices, shops and restaurants within the building.
The structure will be constructed using approximately 200,000 tonnes of steel, and will be built to withstand earthquakes of a magnitude of up to 9.0 on the Richter scale, and to resist fire for up to three hours.
Environmentally radical, Sky City will also be equipped with 15cm thermal insulators, four-paned windows, fresh air heat-recovery systems, and a host of other equally eco-friendly features.
Perhaps the boldest claim is that the cost of the construction of Sky City will come at less than $1,500 per m2 – a tenth of the cost of the Burj Khalifa with its $15,000 per m2 price tag.
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