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Detroit's Exchange Tower – a building made from the top down

2 points by rmason 3y ago

rmason 3y ago
Until very recently there hadn't been a new skyscraper built in Detroit since 1962. A handful are now being built downtown but the most transformative one is the building discussed here. I've watched it go up on my visits to the city and it truly messes with your head watching it being built from the top down. It seems so contradictory yet there are advantages to doing it that way. It is also the second new apartment building in downtown Detroit where one bedrooms are going for $4000 per month. Isn't that more than in San Francisco these days?
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This is really cool! The headline feels ridiculously misleading though. They built a spine via regular means, then assemble floors 9n the ground & lift them: > Basically they loaded all of the materials on a floor plate. Each floor plate was about a million pounds each, and they basically lifted them up off of two spines... Each floor was assembled at ground level and lifted at a speed of roughly 20 feet per hour. The liftbuild team said their technology is safer, 30% faster, and 10-20% cheaper than average construction. I can see it being a little faster, because you don't have to lift each bit of material up individually. The photo is really cool. At the same time though, it's a tiny bit disappointing just how big the core looks versus what's being lifted. It's maybe 20% of the floorplan? I guess that could be much worse but it does look like a huge core. I wonder if something like this could be useful for increasing sustainability. If you could remodel an old building by taking down all the living space, floor by floor, but leaving the spine intact, I wonder if that structural core could be reused a half dozen times, many hundreds of years. It's going to be wild seeing high rises reaching end of life in some of our lifetime, huge effort to take down and rebuild massive massive buildings; maybe that will help bolster some excitement for practices that can be enduring, and this modular building style certainly feels like it could be a big win. I wonder if it can scale down effectively at all.

2 points by rmason 3y ago

Until very recently there hadn't been a new skyscraper built in Detroit since 1962. A handful are now being built downtown but the most transformative one is the building discussed here. I've watched it go up on my visits to the city and it truly messes with your head watching it being built from the top down. It seems so contradictory yet there are advantages to doing it that way. It is also the second new apartment building in downtown Detroit where one bedrooms are going for $4000 per month. Isn't that more than in San Francisco these days?

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

This is really cool! The headline feels ridiculously misleading though. They built a spine via regular means, then assemble floors 9n the ground & lift them: > Basically they loaded all of the materials on a floor plate. Each floor plate was about a million pounds each, and they basically lifted them up off of two spines... Each floor was assembled at ground level and lifted at a speed of roughly 20 feet per hour. The liftbuild team said their technology is safer, 30% faster, and 10-20% cheaper than average construction. I can see it being a little faster, because you don't have to lift each bit of material up individually. The photo is really cool. At the same time though, it's a tiny bit disappointing just how big the core looks versus what's being lifted. It's maybe 20% of the floorplan? I guess that could be much worse but it does look like a huge core. I wonder if something like this could be useful for increasing sustainability. If you could remodel an old building by taking down all the living space, floor by floor, but leaving the spine intact, I wonder if that structural core could be reused a half dozen times, many hundreds of years. It's going to be wild seeing high rises reaching end of life in some of our lifetime, huge effort to take down and rebuild massive massive buildings; maybe that will help bolster some excitement for practices that can be enduring, and this modular building style certainly feels like it could be a big win. I wonder if it can scale down effectively at all.