I lived right next to a construction site a few years ago, and even "normally", some things move pretty quickly. The lot was a parking lot. One day, I looked out the window, and it was a pile of dirt with a fence around it. The asphalt was removed in a workday. Then the lot sat for a few months. Then a drilling machine came in, and they spent a few months doing something with that and some concrete, presumably some part of the foundation. Then when that was over, the workers got busy and constructed 7 stories of parking garage in a week. (That was when I stopped paying attention, because now the new building was blocking all light.) In another few weeks, the whole skyscraper was "finished". Then it sat around for a year, finishing the interior.<p>So my conclusion is that the hard part of building a building is not erecting the steel skeleton and pouring the concrete. It's the foundation and details that take all the time, and the article omits any details about how long that process took for this hotel.
When you work with 'prefab' it's not rare to see a structure go up in an incredibly short time, I've seen a house 'erected' in less than a day. In the morning there was just a concrete pad and in the afternoon they were busy connecting the electrical wiring.<p>Still, that does not detract from the very impressive performance here. A carpenter from Canada once remarked that if a million guys all swing a hammer once that's a lot of work done. Throwing 200 workers at this likely didn't hurt either, the logistics and the choreography are what impress me most about this.<p>if you watch the video wait for the covering of the outside, it's like watching a slowed down flood-fill but with real life hardware. In spite of the 'no work injuries' reported some of the stills had me cringe, I'm pretty sure that a building inspector or safety officer on a crew from the US or Canada would have had a heart attack on the spot.
Amish barn raising in one day...<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pg_vpy2mxg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pg_vpy2mxg</a>.<p>It's all comes down to coordinated mobilization and logistical management. Seven cranes costs a lot of money, around the clock operations cost even more. Construction schedules are prepared to optimize the start of revenue streams with the cost of construction.
Earlier discussion about the hotel construction at<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901274" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901274</a>
Lets just hope it doesn't fall over like that other one.<p>That said, it does remind me an awful lot of Total Annihilation when you get about fifty construction vehicles to make things damn near instantly.
For an idea of how good these buildings actually are, check out this story about a 13 story building falling over in Shanghai: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips-over-in-shanghai/gallery/" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips...</a>
Someone sent this around the office recently in response to an email that the "coffee break room" renovation was going to be extended an additional four weeks.
There's also a sometimes interesting webcam of a building being constructed (obviously not this one) in Hong Kong: <a href="http://202.94.229.4:81/view/view.shtml?id=3418&imagePath=/mjpg/video.mjpg&size=1" rel="nofollow">http://202.94.229.4:81/view/view.shtml?id=3418&imagePath...</a>