This article was taken from the Februayr 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Sustainable Building, is not a particularly humble man. A humble man would not have erected, on his firm's corporate campus in the Chinese province of Hunan, a classical palace and a 40-metre replica of an Egyptian pyramid. A humble man, for that matter, would not have redirected Broad from its core business -- manufacturing industrial air-conditioning units -- to invent a new method of building skyscrapers. And a humble man certainly wouldn't be putting up those skyscrapers at a pace never before achieved in history.
In late 2011, Broad built a 30-storey building in 15 days; now it intends to use similar methods to erect the world's tallest building in just seven months. Perhaps you're already familiar with Zhang's handiwork: on New Year's Day 2012, Broad released
a time-lapse video of its 30-storey achievement that quickly went viral: construction workers buzzing around like flies while a clock in the corner of the screen marks the time. In just 360 hours, a 100-metre tower called the T30 rises from an empty site to overlook Hunan's Xiang River. At the end of the video, the camera spirals around the building as the Broad logo appears on the screen: a lower-case b curled up like an @ symbol.
In person, Zhang himself seems to move at an impossible time-lapse clip. He's almost always surrounded by Broad employees, all wearing identical white shirts (the uniform for the corporate office) and all offering papers for him to review or sign. When Wired arrives, he's issuing a steady barrage of instructions while spinning himself around in his office chair. When he's finally ready to start the interview, he abruptly stops spinning and, without looking up, barks out, "Begin!"
The pace of Broad Sustainable Building's development is driven entirely by this one man. Broad Town, the sprawling headquarters, is completely Zhang's creation. Employees call him not "the chairman" or "our chairman" but "my chairman". To become an employee of Broad, you must recite a life manual penned by Zhang, guidelines that include tips on saving energy, brushing your teeth and having children. All prospective employees must be able, over a two-day period, to run 12 kilometres. You can eat for free at Broad Town cafeterias, but if someone catches you wasting food, you're not merely fined but publicly shamed.
So far, Broad has built 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun. They are fabricated in sections at two factories in Hunan, roughly an hour's drive from Broad Town. From there, the modules -- complete with pre-installed ducts and plumbing for electricity, water and other infrastructure -- are shipped to the site and assembled like LEGO. The company is in the process of franchising this technology to partners in India, Brazil and Russia. What it's selling is the world's first standardised skyscraper, and with it Zhang aims to turn Broad into the McDonald's of sustainable building. "Traditional construction is chaotic," he says. "We took construction and moved it into the factory." According to Zhang, his buildings will help solve many problems within the construction industry. They will be safer, quicker and cheaper to build. And they will have low energy consumption and CO2 emissions. When Wired asks Zhang why he decided to start a construction company, he corrects us: "It's not a construction company -- it's a structural revolution."
Asked about his life story, Zhang avers that it's too boring to discuss. ("This whole article shouldn't be more than two pages," he says.) But he goes on to attribute his success to his creativity and to his outsider perspective on technology. He started out as an art student in the 80s, but in 1988, with the help of two partners, including his brother (an engineer by training), Zhang left the art world to found Broad. The company began as a maker of non-pressurised boilers. Although Zhang again insists that the story isn't interesting enough to talk about, Broad's senior vice-president, a smiley woman named Juliet Jiang who sports a bowl haircut just too long to stay out of her eyes, is happy to fill in the gaps. "He made his fortune on boilers," she says. "He could have kept doing this business, but my chairman, he saw the need for non-electric air-conditioning." China's economy was expanding past the capacity of the nation's electricity grid, she explains. Power shortages were a problem. Industrial air-conditioning (AC) units fuelled by natural gas could help companies ease their electricity load, reduce costs and enjoy more reliable climate control.
The units that Zhang still manufactures are gigantic, barge-sized affairs. The so-called micro-chillers weigh 5.4 tonnes; the largest is 3,175 tonnes and can cool 0.46 million square metres. The technology Broad employs, called absorption cooling, is an old one. Instead of using electricity to compress a refrigerant from a gas to a liquid and back again, non-electric air conditioners use natural gas or another source of heat to turn a special liquid (typically a solution containing lithium bromide) into vapour; as the vapour condenses, it cools the air around it. Today, Broad has units operating in more than 70 countries, cooling some of the largest buildings and airports on the planet. These are all monitored from a central headquarters in Broad Town: when an AC malfunctions in Brazil, an alarm goes off in Hunan.
For two decades, Zhang's air-conditioning business boomed. But a couple of events conspired to change his course. The first was that Zhang became an environmentalist, a gradual awakening that he says began around ten or 12 years ago. The second was the 7.9-magnitude
earthquake that hit China's Sichuan province in May 2008, causing the collapse of poorly constructed buildings and killing some 87,000 people. In the aftermath, Zhang began to fixate on the problem of building design. At first, he recalls, he tried to convince developers to retrofit existing buildings in order to make them both more stable and more sustainable. "People paid no attention at all," he says. So instead Zhang drafted in his own engineers -- some 300 of them, according to Jiang -- and started researching how to build cheap, environmentally friendly structures that could also withstand an earthquake.
Within six months of starting his research, Zhang had given up on traditional methods. He was frustrated by the cost of hiring designers and specialists for each new structure. The best way to cut costs, he decided, was to take building into the factory -- and as a manufacturer of massive AC units, he knew how factories worked. But to create a factory-built skyscraper, Broad had to abandon the principles by which skyscrapers are typically designed.
The whole load-bearing structure had to be different. To reduce the overall weight of the building, it used less concrete in the floors; that in turn enabled it to cut down on structural steel.
The result was the T30, 90 per cent of which was built inside the factory. And Zhang is confident that this percentage will rise with future buildings.
These theories are increasingly accepted by the sustainable-building community in the west, where prefabricated and modular buildings are gaining popularity. In New York, a 32-storey modular building, the world's tallest of this kind, is slated to go up near the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn (though union disputes might result in a more traditional building instead). Two entirely modular developments have gone up in the suburbs of London. Both modular buildings (which are delivered to a site in pre-built cubes) and prefabricated towers (closer to what Broad is doing) are safer to construct and easier to regulate than traditional structures, and both cut down on waste.
But modular and prefabricated buildings in the west are, for the most part, low-rise. Broad is alone in applying these methods to skyscrapers. For Zhang, the environmental savings alone justify all this effort. According to Broad, a traditional high-rise will produce about 2,700 tonnes of construction waste, whereas a Broad building will produce only 23 tonnes. Traditional towers also require 4,500 tonnes of water in the building process; Broad uses none.
Compared with the west's elegant modular buildings, Zhang's skyscrapers are aesthetically underwhelming, to say the least. On a tour of the T30 (shown far right), Wired's guide gestures at a scale model and says, "It's not very good-looking, is it?" Used as a hotel, an awkward pyramid-shaped structure had to be attached to the base to create a sufficiently spacious lobby. Inside, the corridors are uncomfortably narrow; climbing the central stairway feels like clanging up the stairs of a sports stadium.
It's worth noting, though, that the majority of apartment buildings going up in China are equally ugly. Broad's biggest selling point, amazingly enough, is in the quality. In a nation where construction standards vary widely, and where builders often use cheap and unreliable concrete, Broad's method offers a rare sort of consistency. Its materials are uniform and dependable, and there's little opportunity for construction workers to cut corners, since doing so would leave stray pieces, like when you bungle your Ikea desk. At the same time, costs are considerably reduced -- the T30 was just £620 per square metre to build, compared with around £870 for traditional commercial high-rise construction in China.
And there is less chance of an on-site accident: Jiang says that during the construction of the first 20 Broad buildings, "not even one fingernail was hurt". For example, elevator systems -- the base, rails and machine room -- can be installed at the factory, eliminating the risk of a technician falling down a 30-storey shaft. And instead of shipping a lift car to the site in pieces, Broad orders a finished one and drops it into the shaft by crane.
In future, lift manufacturers are hoping to pre-install the doors, eliminating any chance that a worker might fall.
While Jiang focuses on bringing Broad buildings to the world, her boss is fixated on the company's most outlandish plan yet -- the J220, a factory-built 220-floor behemoth that would just happen to be the tallest building in the world. It's hard to say for sure that the 1.5-million-square-metre plan isn't entirely a publicity stunt. But Zhang has hired some of the engineers who worked on the current height-record holder, Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and Broad has created two large models of " Sky City" (as the J220 has been nicknamed). The foundations are due to be laid before the end of 2012 at a site in Hunan; the building is due to be completed in March 2013. Adding together factory and on-site time, construction is expected to take just seven months. Assuming it happens. When my T30 guide plugs in one of the models and the lights flicker on, he tells me, "My chairman says we have to attract eyes. We have to shock the world."
But if all Broad ever does is build 30-storey skyscrapers -- in 15 days, at minimal cost, with little waste and low worker risk, and where the end result can withstand a 9.0 earthquake -- it will have shocked the world quite enough.
Lauren Hilgers is an American reporter, recently based in Shanghai
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
