I can make sure that every Civil Engineer have
played LEGO when a child. So the question is: Could a building be constructed
like playing LEGO?
Thanks to Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of
Broad Sustainable Building, the answer is a big Yes.
After the video “A 30 story building in 15
days” he got famous as the responsible of this big achievement. In an
interview, when asked by Lauren Hilgers, if he had decided to start a
construction company, apart from his air condition business, Zhang Yue said:
“It’s not a construction company. It’s a structural revolution.”
Versatile design
What LEGO does is to break a specific structure
into typical pieces and some special ones, That is why design process is
fundamental in LEGO Philosophy. Making as many typical pieces as they can
provide us versatility, because it means: using the same pieces you can build
several different structures.
But if pieces are typical, how do they acquire
that versatility? The answer is because versatility of their connections. In
LEGO you can either connect two pieces by extremes or by half large or one by
extreme and the other by half large.
For example, I have taken just a couple of
typical pieces and they can be connected in 4 different ways, as shown here:
Keeping in mind that the LEGO model I’m using
for this experiment contains 65 pieces, as shown here:
A rough calculation to determine how many
different shapes I can build would be:
# Shapes = (# ways of connecting two pieces) #
pieces of the model - 1
So using
our data:
# Shapes = 465-1 = 3.40 x 1038
It means by using only this little LEGO model
we could create 34000000000000000000000000000000000000000 different shapes,
many of them even better than what is printed in the box.
Mass production
For getting as many typical pieces as possible,
LEGO is specially designed to mass production. Perhaps some pieces left as
non-typical, but they are only exceptions and won’t delay the delivery date.
As example, in our LEGO model we consider as
special pieces all unique ones, so 7 out
of 65 pieces are non-typical or unique in the set of pieces. You can identify the here, they are those that appear "1x" as quantity:
So we can comment that roughly the 89% of
pieces are typical in a usual LEGO model
Easy Erection
A manual comes inside each LEGO box,
in which you can see how assembly process should be and it is as easy that even
a 10 years old child could finish the model.
Then speed in erection process
depends on how well fast are connections. For instance in my 65 pieces model I will
suppose the same number of connections (65) and according to my tests I take
almost 5 seconds to fix one typical connections, so my erection would be:
Erection Time = # Connections x time per connection
Using our
data:
Erection Time = 65 connections x 5 sec/connection
= 325 sec = 5.42 min = 0.09 hours
So, finishing a model in just 5 minutes is a
perfect example of how fast could we erect a building if we focus our endeavors
on improving construction process, especially regarding to connections, at
least in steel buildings.
Maybe our friends of LEGO were the only who
didn’t get smashed while watching “A 30 story building in 15 days”, and even
maybe they are asking: Why those Chinese took so long for just a 30 story
building?
