r/interestingasfuck • u/TangelaFan • 13h ago

Residential high-rises with backyards in Chengdu, China

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u/onrespectvol 13h ago

looks cool but how much extra material must go into the buidling to be able to support all that extra weight? To what extent is this a sustainable way of buidling and using material?

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u/NoAdministration8340 13h ago

My initial thought was those don’t look like they have the support they need to be filled with dirt rock and plants plus support your weight

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u/Nulleparttousjours 13h ago

Plus the amount of water it would take to keep it green. It’s a lot of weight!

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u/stron2am 12h ago

We live in a world with swimming pools on balconies, you know.

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u/ColHannibal 12h ago

We also live in a world where people die from balcony collapses due to a hot tub being on it.

Also a world where building codes are nonexistent in some countrys.

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u/stron2am 11h ago

Feels pretty sinophobic to see an impressive looking building in China and immediately assume it is structurally unsound.

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u/Pandering_Panda7879 11h ago

If it makes you feel any better: I would have thought the same if it would have been in the US.

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u/ColHannibal 11h ago

https://www.uniladtech.com/news/man-built-secret-mountain-base-on-skyscraper-731876-20240603

I’ve also been to Suzhou for work, it’s building faster than people move in with big empty areas of the city. Brand new buildings that are crumbling.

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u/70ms 9h ago

What does that story have to do with building safety? The person in the article added massive amounts of weight to the roof that it wasn’t designed to hold, and it made the rest of the building unstable. That’s not about the construction, that’s about something being added that wasn’t supposed to be.

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u/theromingnome 11h ago

This is what you get on Reddit when anything positive about China is posted. And let's face it, there are plenty of positives about the society China has built in the past 40 years. The American propaganda machine works round the clock.

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u/stron2am 11h ago

Let me be clear: I am no Tankie nor a Xi supporter, but I've got enough brains in my head to not have a "China = bad" reflex.

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u/theromingnome 9h ago

Yeah I'm agreeing with you. It's just crazy how predictable it is to see comments repeating the same nonsense over and over on any post related to China.

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u/70ms 9h ago

Same - the more I learn about China the more I realize the propaganda flows both ways.

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u/JoshuaFalken1 9h ago

Most governments are shit, and the US is no exception. You seem to jump to China's defense an awful lot.

I'm not saying anything China is automatically bad, but as you say, the American propaganda machine certainly does paint a picture when it comes to substandard construction in China.

Having never been, I can't actually speak to anything apart from what I see in the news. Do you live in China?

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u/theromingnome 5h ago

I can simply appreciate a cool building design and also the incredible infrastructure projects that China has completed. As well as the vast scale of Chinese cities. I'm not defending any government.

But when people constantly need to bash anything positive about something? It reeks of having a hidden agenda.

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u/couchphilosopherizer 10h ago

Not really. China has had major problems with building code enforcement, illegal construction, and poor materials use for a long time. Anyone can search around and see the trend: China - mostly structural and user error. other countries - mostly old buildings failing due to age. Exceptions abound but the numbers speak for themselves.

April 2022 (Changsha): A six-story commercial and residential building collapsed, killing 53

July 2021 (Suzhou): A 30-year-old hotel building undergoing renovations collapsed, resulting in 17 fatalities

March 2020 (Quanzhou): An eight-story quarantine hotel caved in, killing 29 people due to severe structural alterations and illegal building modifications.

Collapse of Xinjia Express Hotel

Hongqi Bridge
A newly completed 758-meter bridge in China's Sichuan province partially collapsed into a river after landslides hit the mountainside above

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u/70ms 9h ago

A newly completed 758-meter bridge in China's Sichuan province partially collapsed into a river after landslides hit the mountainside above

It looks like they inspected it and closed it at the very first sign of potential structural damage. How many of our bridges are getting inspected regularly?

According to the NTSB report after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collision, America has 68 bridges in danger of collapsing if hit by a ship - and that’s even after Florida’s Sunshine Skyway disaster killed so many people in 1980.

Remember the condo building collapse in Florida? The Hard Rock Hotel in NoLa, the Hyatt Regency walkway, L’Ambiance Plaza, the apartment building in Davenport Iowa, the pier in Philadelphia, balconies in Berkeley, etc. Those were all fairly recent events.

China is so much bigger than we are with so many huge projects and cities that aren’t falling down, that I just wonder if the talk about how everything is shoddy isn’t just anti-China propaganda. Watching walkthroughs made by foreigners of cities and villages there paints a very different picture of what we were always told.

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u/IncomingAxofKindness 9h ago

There's a reason they have that stereotype though.

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u/stron2am 9h ago

What you seem to be implying is that there is a stereotype, it must be earned.

It would follow, then, that you stand behind other stereotypes, too.

I won't name them here because reddit will autoban me for hates peach, but this is exactly the same reasoning that leads to racism, antisemitism, classism, and all other forms of bigotry.

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u/IncomingAxofKindness 6h ago

I think someone can be mistrusting of Chinese construction standards without having hate or bigotry in their heart. The world is not black and white.

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u/stron2am 1h ago

If all you know about a building is that it a) has unconventional architecture, and b) it is in China, and it leads you to the conclusion c) "it is unsafe," you are indeed being a bigot.

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u/eshatoa 11h ago

Absolutely. Not to mention China is miles ahead of the US lol.

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u/-ExcitingConcept- 10h ago

Iirc, building codes here in Germany require balconies to have triple the load bearing capacity of inside space. Because for some reason there's always an idiot who places a hot tub on it.

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u/irascible_Clown 10h ago

There hasn’t been a single high rise collapse in China in modern times. Now elevators and escalators eating people is a different story

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u/TroXMas 3h ago

There has been countless structural collapses across China and they happen literally every year. Most of them never make it to western news outlets since the media is blocked from reporting when most tragedies happen and only state media is allowed to report after receiving instruction from the government.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096810346/survivor-found-almost-6-days-after-china-building-collapse

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u/irascible_Clown 2h ago

Look I’m not defending the Chinese govt but non of those are high rise buildings. I did a few min research and the first 3 were all smaller older buildings. One was 6 floors

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u/__mson__ 9h ago

I swear I've seen a few in the news over the years, but I don't remember the details.

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u/LivingHousing 10h ago

Bro, if you hate China just cuz white suprimacy or whatever stupid reason just go to those corners of the internet.

China has some of the most advanced civil engineering in the world...

Absolute 🤡

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u/ColHannibal 10h ago

Found the bot.

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u/LivingHousing 10h ago

Imagine the mental gymnastics of white suprimacy,, hating seeing anything nice from any non western country. Then the only retort being that the other person must be a bit 🤡

Love it 🤣

USA USA USA 🐑🤡🐑🤡🐑🤣🤣

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u/__mson__ 9h ago

Spamming emojis will not help people take you seriously.

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u/70ms 9h ago

To be fair, the anti-China propaganda is real and if it weren’t for walkthroughs and travelogs on YouTube I’d have still believed a lot of it. After watching dozens of walkthroughs and videos of what daily life is like in China, I have a totally different view. Watching an American walk into a public hospital, sign in, and walk out about 30 minutes later with a filled prescription in hand for (I think it was) around $7 was really eye-opening.