Lauren Hilgers profiles Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Sustainable Building (Broad), the Chinese company behind plans to construct the world's tallest building in seven months.
Even though Broad documented building a 30-story building in only 15 days in 2011, when its plans to build Sky City, a 220-story mega-building in the provincial capital of Hunan Province, were announced earlier this year most readers (including yours truly) likely dashed it off as pure fantasy.
Well, it turns out we underestimated Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad, a company whose core business is in manufacturing industrial air-conditioning units, and is now revolutionizing how skyscrapers are built. "So far," notes Hilgers, "Broad has built 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun...The
company is in the process of franchising this technology to partners in
India, Brazil, and Russia. What it's selling is the world's first
standardized skyscraper, and with it, Zhang aims to turn Broad into the
McDonald's of the sustainable building industry."
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