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Pudong city is falling dung, falling dung, falling dung...
http://www.haohaoreport.com/l/40627
Is Pudong going to sink?
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Well… it is actually. In fact all of Shanghai is sinking: About 2 meters in the last 100 years to be exact.
Just less than one year ago the local news was abuzz with reports of cracks appearing in the streets and sidewalks around Shanghai’s latest building project, the “Shanghai Tower Project” in Pudong. Scheduled to open in early 2015, Gensler’s Shanghai Tower will be the second-tallest building in the world. At 2,073 feet it’ll be taller than the 1,379-foot Jin Mao Tower and the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center making it the tallest structure in Lujiazui.
Now, a year later (last Thursday Feb.7th 2013), this report comes across the local news. “Pudong’s Buildings were shaking. No one knows why.”
Most importantly (for Chinese face anyway), the new Shanghai tower that is cracking the streets, shaking it’s neighbours, and doing its best to turn Pudong into a lake, will be taller than Taipei’s 101 which measures in at 1,667 ft. When the WFC was under construction, so too was this Taiwanese monolith and in an effort to beat out their smaller Asian neighbor, a full extra 7 stories were added to the WFC, the current record holder for height in Shanghai. 7 stories that the foundations laid a decade earlier were not designed to support. Even with the extra floors, the CCP’s newest phallus was a bit on the short side and the new Shanghai Tower was put into development to prove china really does have the Asia’s longest erection .
Artists depiction of Pudong with the Shanghai Tower completed in 2015.
With these facts in mind, it is no surprise that physics, architectural integrity and common sense have taken a backseat to China’s grand face saving construction project. Soon after the initial floors were starting to go up, those cracks I alluded to at the onset of this article began to appear. Gaps in the street, sometimes over a foot in width, were passed off as “natural”.
“Ge Qing, design director of Shanghai Tower Construction and Development, also wrote messages on Sina Weibo, confirming all was safe and sound during construction of the base of Shanghai Tower.
Engineering experts said such “settlement” cracks were common anywhere in the world and had nothing to do with the weight or height of buildings.
“Groundwater and rainfall may be blamed for settlements, and the soft soil foundation in Shanghai is another reason,” said Liu Dongwei, chief architect of the China Institute of Building Standard Design and Research.” The Shanghaiist
Yeah, nothing to do with tall buildings being built on what is essentially mud. Shanghai is part of the Yangtze River Delta, a region that is basically built from river sediment. In other words: sand and silt. There is no bedrock under Shanghai. Basically Shanghai is a giant sandbar, not the idealist of places to build anything, let alone multiple towers reaching over 90 or 100 floors in height. Even out in the suburbs where I live, the sinking is quite noticeable, especially near bridges that are set on piles. One street near my home has sank over a foot in the last 3 years and about 2 feet since it was constructed making it appear more and more as hill rather than a level crossing. On another nearby street the sidewalks have sunk so much away from the retaining walls that the slant makes walking difficult (especially for the blind who are supposed to walk on the tiles with the rectangular indentations).
A common site in Shanghai. A slanted sidewalk.
So why build all these tall buildings in the first place. Well, besides “face”, there is the fact that there is a limited amount of space. Shanghai aims to be “a world financial center” (something that will probably never ever happen), and to achieve this lofty un-achievable goal, you need a lot of space for all the companies mistakenly thought to be interested in locating their Asian headquarters here (they don’t want to and they won’t simply because of the restrictive financial environment in China, and the fact that the internet is a hostile place so long as it is controlled by the CCP). So, they build towers. But this is the only somewhat reasonable argument for such construction projects. The real reason is looks. Shanghai wants to be Manhattan. And why can’t it you may be wondering? Well, for one, Manhattan’s sky scraper zone is built on bedrock, not mud. It’s as simple as that.
Under Manhattan. the skyscrapers are built on solid bedrock.
One characteristic of the Chinese psyche is the inability to plan. Whether crossing a street, driving a car, organizing an event, or opening a business, Chinese people have almost no ability to contemplate the future and prepare for eventualities. Anyone who has lived and worked here for just long enough to encounter a Chinese holiday is always shocked that a month prior to it, no one, not even the government, knows when the days off will be and how work will be scheduled around it. So why should building a zone of some of the world’s tallest buildings be any different? In short, it isn’t. They build them now and if they fall over later, they’ll deal with it then. That’s the Chinese way…
http://www.haohaoreport.com/l/40627
Is Pudong going to sink?
Leave a reply
Well… it is actually. In fact all of Shanghai is sinking: About 2 meters in the last 100 years to be exact.
Just less than one year ago the local news was abuzz with reports of cracks appearing in the streets and sidewalks around Shanghai’s latest building project, the “Shanghai Tower Project” in Pudong. Scheduled to open in early 2015, Gensler’s Shanghai Tower will be the second-tallest building in the world. At 2,073 feet it’ll be taller than the 1,379-foot Jin Mao Tower and the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center making it the tallest structure in Lujiazui.
Now, a year later (last Thursday Feb.7th 2013), this report comes across the local news. “Pudong’s Buildings were shaking. No one knows why.”
Most importantly (for Chinese face anyway), the new Shanghai tower that is cracking the streets, shaking it’s neighbours, and doing its best to turn Pudong into a lake, will be taller than Taipei’s 101 which measures in at 1,667 ft. When the WFC was under construction, so too was this Taiwanese monolith and in an effort to beat out their smaller Asian neighbor, a full extra 7 stories were added to the WFC, the current record holder for height in Shanghai. 7 stories that the foundations laid a decade earlier were not designed to support. Even with the extra floors, the CCP’s newest phallus was a bit on the short side and the new Shanghai Tower was put into development to prove china really does have the Asia’s longest erection .
Artists depiction of Pudong with the Shanghai Tower completed in 2015.
With these facts in mind, it is no surprise that physics, architectural integrity and common sense have taken a backseat to China’s grand face saving construction project. Soon after the initial floors were starting to go up, those cracks I alluded to at the onset of this article began to appear. Gaps in the street, sometimes over a foot in width, were passed off as “natural”.
“Ge Qing, design director of Shanghai Tower Construction and Development, also wrote messages on Sina Weibo, confirming all was safe and sound during construction of the base of Shanghai Tower.
Engineering experts said such “settlement” cracks were common anywhere in the world and had nothing to do with the weight or height of buildings.
“Groundwater and rainfall may be blamed for settlements, and the soft soil foundation in Shanghai is another reason,” said Liu Dongwei, chief architect of the China Institute of Building Standard Design and Research.” The Shanghaiist
Yeah, nothing to do with tall buildings being built on what is essentially mud. Shanghai is part of the Yangtze River Delta, a region that is basically built from river sediment. In other words: sand and silt. There is no bedrock under Shanghai. Basically Shanghai is a giant sandbar, not the idealist of places to build anything, let alone multiple towers reaching over 90 or 100 floors in height. Even out in the suburbs where I live, the sinking is quite noticeable, especially near bridges that are set on piles. One street near my home has sank over a foot in the last 3 years and about 2 feet since it was constructed making it appear more and more as hill rather than a level crossing. On another nearby street the sidewalks have sunk so much away from the retaining walls that the slant makes walking difficult (especially for the blind who are supposed to walk on the tiles with the rectangular indentations).
A common site in Shanghai. A slanted sidewalk.
So why build all these tall buildings in the first place. Well, besides “face”, there is the fact that there is a limited amount of space. Shanghai aims to be “a world financial center” (something that will probably never ever happen), and to achieve this lofty un-achievable goal, you need a lot of space for all the companies mistakenly thought to be interested in locating their Asian headquarters here (they don’t want to and they won’t simply because of the restrictive financial environment in China, and the fact that the internet is a hostile place so long as it is controlled by the CCP). So, they build towers. But this is the only somewhat reasonable argument for such construction projects. The real reason is looks. Shanghai wants to be Manhattan. And why can’t it you may be wondering? Well, for one, Manhattan’s sky scraper zone is built on bedrock, not mud. It’s as simple as that.
Under Manhattan. the skyscrapers are built on solid bedrock.
One characteristic of the Chinese psyche is the inability to plan. Whether crossing a street, driving a car, organizing an event, or opening a business, Chinese people have almost no ability to contemplate the future and prepare for eventualities. Anyone who has lived and worked here for just long enough to encounter a Chinese holiday is always shocked that a month prior to it, no one, not even the government, knows when the days off will be and how work will be scheduled around it. So why should building a zone of some of the world’s tallest buildings be any different? In short, it isn’t. They build them now and if they fall over later, they’ll deal with it then. That’s the Chinese way…