Sky City (Chinese: 天空城市; pinyin: tiānkōng chéngshì), or Sky City One, is a proposed supertall skyscraper approved for construction in the city of Changsha, Hunan in south-central China, to be constructed by the Chinese construction company Broad Sustainable Building.
If built as planned and to schedule, Sky City would be likely to be the tallest building in the world at the time of its completion, with 220 floors and a total height of 838 meters. The construction plan calls for it to be built from pre-fabricated units constructed on site in an unprecedentedly short period of 210 days. BSB's plan is to assemble 95% of the building in its factory before a single shovelful of dirt has been moved at the actual build site.
The proposed building will have total floor space of 1.2million m2. The main building will be 1.05million m2, a basement of 130,000m2 and a 3-7 floor high annex of 35,000m2.
A cost estimate of $1500 per square meter of floor space would make Sky City considerably cheaper than the similarly high Burj Khalifa ($4500 per square meter)
On June 8th, 2012, a spokesperson of Broad Group said that Sky City had not received final approval from the government yet.
As of October, BSB has received approval from the government and has stated that they are still going to begin construction in November, but announced a new build time of 210 days. This puts the date of completion at May 2013.
On November 16th, Juliet Jiang, senior vice president of Broad Group, said in an interview that the company will adhere to its previous time table of building five floors a day and completing the building in a 90 day time frame. She also said the building is still waiting for government approval.
Later in November, the company announced January 2013 as the start for the construction.
Although structural details are not available, outside architects have expressed doubts that a modular design would have the stiffness on lower floors to withstand the wind loads imposed by such a height, without unacceptable amounts of sway, or that the building could be built without high-strength concrete, whose curing time would preclude such a rapid construction rate.
Famous quotes containing the words sky and/or city:
“The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)