china: where 30 story hotels are built in 15 days

"I've never seen a project go up this fast," said Ryan Smith, an expert on prefabricated architecture at the University of Utah. In other countries, the most advanced prefab construction methods can reduce building times by a third to half, Smith said. The builders of the Changsha hotel did better, knocking one-half to two-thirds off the normal schedule. "It's unfathomable," Smith said.