They Paved Paradise

Several times now, we've posted on the construction of the "pair of pants" building.  In the the time we've been here, we've been buffered from the hub-bub of the work by the acres of green space that surround the construction site.  The trees lining the sidewalks seemed to knock down much of the noise.  In the springtime, it was fun to watch the kite-flyers and model-airplane-crashers play out in the open fields.  Last summer, the low spots in the field were turned into lotus ponds, and we enjoyed the lotus flowers for most of the summer.  

Note the use of the past tense in the previous paragraph. 

Sometime March, they began removing all the trees which lined the sidewalks.  This was actually an interesting process to watch.  A tree would be selected and a team of workers would dig a circular trench around the base....by hand with spades and pick-axes.  Then they would begin the process making a root-ball with a netting of ropes.  At the base of the trench, they would start undercutting the roots and would work the rope netting underneath also.  Finally, as shown in the photo above, they would cut through the final roots and tip the tree over on its side. 

They must have done this to 60 or 70 trees....if not more.  I don't know if they are able to replant them someplace else.  The root balls seem too small for that.

They also brought in truck-load after truck-load of concrete Lincoln logs, as shown by the photo above.   They would make a pile of these, and then after a while they would take down the pile and reconstruct it 200 feet away.  I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is, but I suspect it is some type of testing for soil compression and load bearing....to gather the kind of data that you need before you start building something.

Once the trees were all down, a team of workers built a ten foot high brick and steel wall around the site.  The bricks were used to make columns, and the steel was used to string between the columns on the horizontal.  Later, then came back and bolted panels to the steel stringers.  Then they covered all the panels with advertising, like the one shown below.

In May, they had a groundbreaking ceremony.  A very big tent went up and a lot of fireworks were fired off one Saturday morning.

The top photo shows what it all looks like now.  They've poured acres of concrete slabs and have brought in drilling rigs to sink the piles needed to make a foundation for a building.

You can see the official press release from the local government at this link.  All the activity described above is in preparation for construction of the new Suzhou Center.  This will be a complex of 10 buildings, including the pair-of-pants.  There will be six or seven buildings of 40 or 50 stories built along the flanks.  In the center, the plans are to build two towers - one 450 meters tall and the other 500 meters tall. 

Now, 500 meters will not be THE tallest building in the world, but it would be ONE of the tallest.  The shorter one, at 450 meters, would be a hair taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago....or whatever the Sears Tower is called now.  The taller one would be hair taller than the Shanghai Financial Center - which is currently the tallest building in China.  I suspect, though, by the time that these towers are completed that there will be many more above it on the list.  There is no shortage of prideful communities looking for bragging rights.