As an architect, I find this completely amazing. Before the Olympics we showed the
Ark Hotel erected in six days, but it had nothing on this 170,000 square foot, 30 story hotel that
was turnkeyed in 360 hours. It completely changes the way buildings are constructed and, I believe,
is about to change the entire industry.
I have followed the Broad Corporation for years at TreeHugger, as they became the world's
largest producer of air conditioning equipment. This prefabricated building system works much
like the Kenner Girder and panel building set of my childhood; completely wired, plumbed, tiled
and drywalled prefabricated sections are dropped on top of the columns that come complete
with diagonal bracing, and then another column is stuck on top.
Even the floor tiles are put on in the factory.
All of the other components they need for that particular slab, the walls, the interior finishes,
are lifted together with the slab, so there is no separate shipping of drywall or studs,
everything you need is right there. What a difference this would make in work flow on a construction site.
It really is incredibly clever; because that column stub is built into the slab panel they can
just pile panels on top of column instead of trying to fit them in between a structural frame,
the more conventional approach. Those diagonal braces give it the strength and rigidity it needs
when building with so many shorter pieces.
Wrap the whole thing in a six inch thick prefab skin and you have a building that claimed to
be five times more energy efficient. (than what, they don't say). A heat recovery ventilation system
delivers what is claimed to be 20 times purer air.
When I was a kid I used to play with systems like this, but never thought that they would actually
become real some day. The implications of this are significant; construction is just about
the only industry that has not been exported. But now the Broad Sustainable Building
Corporation has designed a system that will let them build anywhere, to construction tolerances
of +/- 0.2 mm. The architectural and construction world just changed.
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