China's Plan for the World's Tallest Building: The Rest of the Story

Following up on Thursday's "China Plans to Build World's Tallest Building in Just 90 Days" the WSJ Asia's China RealTime Report does a deeper dive:

A Chinese construction company that has struck Internet gold in recent years with a series of videos highlighting its lighting-fast building technique is once again attracting attention, this time with a plan to build the world’s tallest building. In nine months.

Changsha-based Broad Group says the skyscraper – dubbed Tiankong Chengshi, or Sky City, and to be located in Broad’s home city of Changsha in central China’s Hunan province – will climb to a height of 838 meters. That’s 10 meters higher that the world’s current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

According to a preliminary plan China Real Time obtained from Broad, the project began in April and is scheduled to be completed in January next year. The Burj, by comparison, took six years to complete.
Can they pull it off? And is it even wise to try?

If there’s one thing Broad has proved – to the delight of millions of YouTube users – it’s that it can throw together tall buildings at a blistering pace. Originally an a central air conditioning manufacturer, the company first gained global fame in 2010 after a time-lapse video appeared online showing its crews constructing a 15-storey hotel in six days.



 Less than two years later, the company starred in another video, this one documenting the construction of a 30-storey hotel in just 15 days....MUCH MORE