I’m fairy obsessed with this mind-blowing (the dramatic music certainly helps) time-lapse video of a 30-story prefab hotel in China reaching completion in just 15 days that’s been blowing up around the interwebs recently. Today, I thought I’d share it with you.

 

Located on Dongting Lake in China’s Hunan province, the 170,000-square-foot T30 Hotel was erected, with the aid of 200 workers and what appears to be a very busy crane, in an astonishing 360 hours. The whole thing was finished off in record time on New Year’s Eve. Of course, those 360 hours don’t include the time spent actually building/assembling the prefabricated elements of the structure inside of an off-site factory. That would be just crazy if everything was done within a little more than two weeks.

 

Like smaller prefab building projects, the advantages of this modular marvel from Broad Sustainable Building are numerous: speed, efficiency, and a hell of a lot less construction waste are the biggies. What’s more, the T30 Hotel was designed to offer superior energy efficiency with its super-thick windows, external solar shading, heat recovery ventilation system, and insulating, 6-inch thick prefab skin. BSB also claims that the air inside the T30 is 20 times cleaner than the outside air thanks in part to a state-of-the-art, three-stage air filtration system and air monitoring in each individual room. Plus, the entire structure is capable of withstanding a 9.0-magnitude earthquake.

 

Impressive, potentially game-changing stuff, although it looks like they now have 360 additional hours to devote to landscaping. TreeHugger's Lloyd Alter says that this project completely “changes the way buildings are constructed and, I believe, is about to change the entire industry.” What do you think? Can you see this highly efficient drop-and-stack building method taking off not just in China but in the States as well?