Maybe this works because they're building apartments so tiny they can be carried on a truck.
There's a more successful concept - prefab bathrooms and modular kitchens. See "ameripod.com" (bathrooms). This reduces on-site labor on the parts of the building that are labor-intensive. It's much cheaper to build a bathroom in a factory, install it as a unit, and plug it in. In a factory, you can hold tolerances and all the parts fit.
Bathrooms are a convenient size for trucking purposes, too. Moving standard-width loads is cheap and routine.
Making the exterior walls part of the module means more exterior seams. Building shells aren't expensive. Steelwork and exterior walls go up fast. Building steel and concrete boxes is a solved problem. Most of the time and money go into interior details.
They failed to mention that this project is close to two years behind.
The modular construction project has been such an abject failure that the other two building projects on the site have broken ground with conventional steel frame construction.
> it has the grace you'd expect of a 60's housing project in the eastern bloc
Maybe because I'm now writing this comment from inside a 70's housing project in the (former) eastern bloc, but lately (meaning the last 2-3 years) I've seen a re-appraisal of the eastern bloc esthetics.
"Brutalism - for people who like living in unfinished construction sites covered in seeping water damage"
I cheer a little on the inside whenever I see a brutalist building being torn down. There's so very few buildings of the type that are worth anything, and so many of the type that barely last a generation before needing repairs that amount to new construction cost.
I also live a couple blocks from it and the only upside is that it'll eventually block the rusty looking Barclays Center from view. I'd gladly take the old Freddy's back.
Does rust automatically turn people off because of cultural connotations? It's self-finishing, already appears established, and doesn't require maintenance.
I like the material, particularly when it's juxtaposed with nature, but its use on the Barclays Center doesn't do it for me. There's nothing around the structure that relieves it.
Main difference as far as I can see is the NYC structure is made up of pre-assembled room-size room-size units, whereas the Chinese hotel is more conventional beams, panels and cladding but pre-cut to specific sizes (and presumably also for the interior finish)
The Chinese seem to be trying to prove a point with their speed, though they do have a considerable advantage when it comes to costs and lack of regulations to adhere too though, probably aren't building to the [unusual] level of tolerances specified for the US project.
(my dad was doing this back in the days when 9 storeys was "possibly the tallest of its type in the world", and under a year for a building that size was really fast. Which really wasn't all that long ago.)
My Dad has worked in the modular construction industry since before I was born and it's quite an interesting method.
It allows things to be done at the same time, so whilst the groundwork and any preparation is being done on site, the modules for the building can be being built in a factory.
It's a fairly popular method in the UK, whether it's constructed entirely modularly or using modular parts like bathroom pods (prefabricated bathrooms).
The uses are fairly varied too, it's been used for hotel bathrooms, prison cells, McDonalds restaurants, sections of Tesco supermarkets, petrol station shops, hospitals and schools. I've probably missed a few, but you get the idea.
It's very weird to step into a bathroom pod when it's at the end of the production line and hooked up to water and electricity for testing. When you shut the door, you'd have no idea that you were in a factory (besides the noise) .
But, I went in to look at the apartments and they're boring as hell which is sad because they're in the LA Arts District which is full of amazing lofts (similar to SF's SOMA District).
> the kind of line assembly popularized by Henry Ford's T-Birds
Henry Ford never saw the T-bird (Thunderbird): he died eight years before it was released. Of course the author meant the Model T, but that such an error about a major milestone in American history slipped through editing is pretty amazing--like crediting William Boeing with the invention of the airplane.
There's a more successful concept - prefab bathrooms and modular kitchens. See "ameripod.com" (bathrooms). This reduces on-site labor on the parts of the building that are labor-intensive. It's much cheaper to build a bathroom in a factory, install it as a unit, and plug it in. In a factory, you can hold tolerances and all the parts fit. Bathrooms are a convenient size for trucking purposes, too. Moving standard-width loads is cheap and routine.
Making the exterior walls part of the module means more exterior seams. Building shells aren't expensive. Steelwork and exterior walls go up fast. Building steel and concrete boxes is a solved problem. Most of the time and money go into interior details.