China is no stranger to death-defying architecture, containing a cloned Austrian mountain town, cities made of ice, and a 380-room luxury hotel that's burrowed into the ground all within its borders. This time around, though, one Hunan-based builder has high hopes of building the world's tallest tower, and in 90 days.
The proposed Sky City Tower will reach 838 meters high (2749 feet 4? inches), trumping Dubai's Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building, by 10 meters, and feature 104 elevators accessing 1M square meters of usable space (including J Hotel, the world's tallest hotel). All in all, the project will cost Broad Sustainable Building $628M, compared to Burj Khalifa's $1.5B. We'll see: according to CNN Go, BSB is still waiting for final approval but remains "confident the government will green-light the project." (Meanwhile reps from Gensler, the architecture firm behind Shanghai Tower—the tallest in China—think this whole thing is hilarious.)
Anyway, as for how this thing is going to go up so fast: 95 percent of Sky City Tower will be prefab, manufactured at a factory off-site. Current plans have it consuming 20 percent of what a conventional building this size would consume, thanks to extra-thick walls designed to provide insulation.
BSB hopes to break ground on Sky City Tower at the beginning of November and have it done at the end of January 2013. Which gives everyone quite a few years to bask in the glory until the 3,444-foot-tall Azerbaijan Tower is complete—if built it will become the granddaddy of insane human endeavors.
Don't believe BSB can do it? Last year the builder erected a 30-story hotel in nine days. Watch the timelapse video here:
VIDEO: BSB Builds a 30-Story Building in 15 Days:
· Sky City: China Plans World's Tallest Building CNN Go via Boing Boing]
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