How to Make Construction Faster and Cheaper

 

Recently I looked at another high-rise tower and wondered how long it takes to build its upper floors. A handful of floors on 30 store level take about as much time and probably effort as the lower 20 or so floors. Instead of building as high as 30 or 40 stores why not just build a couple of more towers nearby. 

Considering we have housing crisis and shortage of available homes its only sane thing to do. We should build in the way that will deliver a lot of new homes as fast as possible.

To save time and effort we should build homes as high as land-based crane can reach. That should be around 20 floors, a very respectable number. Floors higher than that require more elaborate setup and it's not worth to do it with few exceptions.

There are many more ways to save money and time. For example, building wide multi entrance apartment blocks, similar to what socialist countries used to do. Socialist architecture does not look appealing, but we do not have to copy its aesthetics, just its structural methods. To compare it with something nicer, we can say it's like a Dutch townhouse. Except its Dutch tower instead where apartment block towers share its side walls with its neighbors. We can have many towers build together wall to wall to save more money and time. Of course they could not be built one by one independently, one company has to build the whole block together at the same time.

To make it even better we can also save on foundation. A tall but narrow tower require a lot of underground structure to keep it stable. That is a lot of work that is both invisible and unlivable. Instead, we can use wall to wall towers to support each other's structure and make do with much less underground work. To make structure even more stable we can arrange Dutch towers in L, T or X shape so that the whole block is supported on every side. That way we can even do with tiny one store basement.

It's certainly cheaper to decorate each tower or section in a block in exact the same way, but it's also possible to make each section slightly different from each other.

Sure, such a huge mega block could be a challenge to navigate, but it does not have to. Even it all towers look the same, you can still mark each entrance with a clear letter from A up to Z. Then first number of the apartment would be the floor and second is the apartment on the floor. like A135 or C073.

Doing all that we can build a lot of homes faster and cheaper. That will allow us to solve housing crisis and get ahead.