As the United States and China battle over the finer points of currency manipulation at the G-20 summit, American negotiators may want to take note of this startling testimonial to the productivity of Chinese workers: A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days. If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that in tending to such basics as construction.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to imagine the disorientation of Changsha residents who’d gone away, or who just hadn’t recently ventured into the downtown neighborhood of the new Ark Hotel: “Honey, I don’t remember a hotel there, do you?”
The work crew erected the hotel – a soundproofed, thermal-insulated structure reportedly built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake – with all prefabricated materials. In other words, a crew of off-site factory workers built the sections, and their on-site counterparts arranged them on the foundation for the Ark project.
Despite the frenetic pace of construction, no workers were injured – and thanks to the prefab nature of the process, the builders wasted very few construction materials. Below is a time-lapse video that shows the hotel being built from the ground up in less than a week:
You’d be surprised what you can do without having to negotiate with unions, abide by workplace standards, follow environmental regulations or worry about employee accidents / lawsuits.
It only took 410 days to build the Empire State Building back in the day. The days of this in the US are long gone:
Yeah, safety definitely isn’t a high priority like in the U.S. A guy I’ve worked with was at a nuclear power plant that was being built. Rickety bamboo walkways, sewage flowing into the river, and those were the obvious things.
And if it’s built anything like that Chinese suv that was made famous by a YouTube crash test video it probably won’t be standing much more than 6 months.
Crazy, but I defiantly saw several dudes wearing Velcro sneakers. OSHA would have probably fined that construction team more than the cost of the building.
All construction is run by organized crime. The US government has their hands in almost every construction project, I have to comply with ridiculous rules just to quote jobs. I can’t imagine being the GC that has to follow the gov’t every word to make it happen.
You can say it’ll fall, you can say it wasn’t built with safety in mind, you can say there were a lot of workers with next to no pay but in the end they still assembled an entire building in 6 days. Pretty kick ass to me.
I remember when the USA used to do great things…keep in mind I’m all for safety but have we done anything with the world trade center site yet?
This most significant part of the story is the location. This could have been done here in the USA 20+ years ago BUT IT WASN’T. What can we learn from this? What WILL we learn from this?
, china man went to WORRRKKKKK!! baklao >.<