WAT
Reuters Magazine: The Made-in-China CEO
Thu Jun 28, 2012 6:39am IST
By Terril Yue Jones
Zhang Yue, founder and CEO of Broad Group, gestures as he talks about his building designs during an interview with Reuters in his office at the company's headquarter in Changsha, Hunan province April 26, 2012.
REUTERS - Zhang Yue fondly caresses the blueprints as he slowly flips through them, occasionally pausing to stare at a drawing as he explains his new project.
The plan seems impossibly ambitious: Build a 220-story building, the tallest in the world, in just four months by using the rapid-construction techniques his company has developed.
Zhang, a slight but wiry and intense man of 52, says "Sky City" - as he has dubbed it - can fix many of the world's pollution, congestion, transportation and even disease problems by completely purifying the tower's air. The 838-meter-tall building (10 meters taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the world's tallest) will hold schools, a hospital, 17 helipads and some 30,000 people. It will, indeed, be a city in the sky.
His dreams don't stop there.
Pinned up on his office wall are plans for a project even more audacious - an almost preposterously massive building two kilometers high. When asked to estimate the odds of this 636-floor giganto-scraper ever being built, Zhang responds without hesitation, "One hundred percent! Some say that it's sensationalism to construct such a tall building. That's not so. Land shortages are already a grave problem. There's also the very serious transportation issue. We must bring cities together and stretch for the sky in order to save cities and save the Earth. We must eliminate most traffic, traffic that has no value! And we must reduce our dependency on roads and transportation."
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/0...85R00V20120628
Damn this guy has big plans.
Looking at the plans in the picture, it looks like it's a further development of the buttressed core concept, but where the buttresses have become so big they now have there own mini buttresses.