SKY CITY ONE TAKES CONSTRUCTION TO NEW HEIGHTS

Sky City One will be 220 storeys and 838 metres tall when finished and will cost around $680 million. This will be 8 storeys higher than the Burj Khalifa which cost $1.6 billion to build.

BSB specialises in building pre-fabricated towers made from mass produced building components. A total of 19,000 workers will prefabricate the parts in four months before commencing a three-month assembly process on site. This technique has already been successfully used by BSB to build a 30 storey hotel in 15 days in December 2011.

The prefabricated construction method results in cheap, thermally efficient and environmentally friendly buildings. Sky City One will be earthquake resistant to a magnitude of 9.0 and have a fire resistance of three hours due to ceramic tiles. Sky City One will also be five times more energy efficient than buildings built with conventional techniques, featuring 15cm thermal insulators, four paned windows, fresh air heat recovery systems, non-electric air conditioners, cooling-heating power systems and LED lighting.

The building, which will be located in an empty field near the city of Changsha, China, is being billed as the future of sustainable urbanisation. It intends to address the growing population in the world by offering a city-in-a-skyscraper that will eventually house 30,000 people. While Burj Khalifa is considered much a status-building, Sky City One is much more of a practical affair designed to accommodate a hospital, five schools, apartments and offices in sustainable surroundings reducing the per capita use of land.

While it may not be the most spacious or luxurious abode, BSB believes that it signals the way forward for Chinese cities, saying "Urbanisation cannot be materialised at the cost of land and environmental pollution."

While building Sky City One in 90 days seems like a tall order, it will be an impressive, revolutionary and highly practical construction, regardless of how long it takes.