China Goes Sky High For Sky City

Sky City is an 838 metre tall planned skyscraper in the city of Changsha, Hunan in south-central China.

Despite the sheer size of the building, the most amazing part of the planned project is that construction is estimated to only take just 210 days by prospective builders, Broad Sustainable Building. This includes 120 days needed by the builders to adequately prepare the prefabrication required to construct a project of this volume.

 
 A Vertical Metropolis
With a proposed total floor space of 1.2 million square metres, the building is set to have 202 stories including a hotel accommodating 1000 guests, a hospital, 5 schools, and offices.

The building is also planned to have state of the art sport facilities, which will include a lavish six basketball courts and 10 tennis courts.

Nearly 83 per cent of the space is planned for residential purposes, housing up to 17,000 people. The building will also have 17 helipads for guests to access the building when required.

To access the sheer volume of levels and density, the building will have 104 high-speed elevators installed.

Of course, with all of these included features, Sky City will not come with a cheap construction price tag. With these exorbitant features construction costs are currently estimated at RMB 9 billion ($1.46 billion).

 
When will we see it?
A project of this magnitude does not come without criticisms, with critics questioning whether the building will ever be constructed at all. Another criticism is whether the building will be constructed within the short time frame provided.

Chinese residents are also quick to pass judgement with one user on Weibo (China’s twitter-like service) criticising the liveability of the homes and going so far as calling the project “a giant stack of trailer homes”.

Despite the criticism, on July 20 2013, Sky City broke ground with Zhang Yue.

However, just five days later construction was halted by authorities, as the building did not receive adequate permission.

Fast-forward to October 2014 and there still are no reports that say pre-fabrication has even started on the work site.

 
Is this the future?
With apartment density picking up throughout major worldwide capitals, more extravagant projects such as Sky City may begin popping up. Although these types of projects have an implication on residents, there has already been a shift to higher density buildings.

Higher density buildings often come with state of the art facilities designed to make residents feel at home despite living with thousands of other owners.

Although Sky City takes high density to the extreme (and we won't likely see a project just like it in Australia), there is an upward trend toward smaller apartment size and increased apartment volume.