Broad Group, a Chinese construction company in Hunan Province has built a hotel. At 30 stories tall and 183,000-square feet, the hotel itself is nothing extraordinary. What is extraordinary is the time the company needed to build it.
Just 360 hours, or 15 days!
But Broad Group didn’t sacrifice quality for speed. Their hotel is sturdy, earthquake-safe up to magnitude 9. It’s sustainable architecture design has 4-paned insulated windows and a smart heat conservation system. The company boasts an energy efficiency five times that of conventional hotels. Air filters also make the hotel’s air 20 times the purity of conventional hotels. No small convenience in smog-smothered China.
As you can see, the workers made use of all 360 hours, working around the clock. Not sure why they play the video twice. Maybe it’s so fast you might miss it the first time. The amazing speed, of course, would be impossible were the materials not prefabricated. One curiosity of mine, however, and that of many YouTube viewers is the method by which they got the crane out of the center of the hotel. Maybe it doubles as an elevator.
If there was any question as to how China would populate the wilderness stretching between their southern mega city, we now have the answer. Hotels and/or apartment buildings like this one appearing overnight is yet another symbol of China’s booming economy and push towards modernization. Except, maybe they should have taken it more slowly with their much-touted bullet train that sped its way to disaster this past July. At any rate, the hotel doubles Broad Group’s previous already awesome construction of the 15-story Ark Hotel which took a mere 46.5 hours to build! Obviously the company is intent on revolutionizing large-scale architecture. With their dreams and means of growth, China’s just the place to do it.
