China World Trade Center Tower 3B is the second supertall tower to be built for China World Trade Center project in Beijing Central Business District, a modern looking place that filled with many newly built skyscrapers and it is also one of busiest construction site in the country with lots of skyscrapers under construction, China World Trade Center Tower 3B is one of them and ranked 3rd by height according to all the buildings in current plan. China World Trade Center Tower 3B and its brother the China World Trade Center Tower 3A are both designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, hence the shape of two towers are so similar that make them look like twin towers, while 3B’s facades are more interesting, its canted facades remind us of the Taipei 101 Tower.
The tower had topped out in April, for urban climbers this period of time may be a good time to climb the building, because when a building is officially opened then the security will be improved, people have to provide certificates to get into the building or the upper floors of the building. But the tower had been climbed by a couple during Chinese New Year and was widely reported by medias, they had started paying attention on this kind of actions, so probably still hard to climb it without dressing like a worker. The good thing is, there’ll be hotels and bars in the upper floors when the tower opened.
I passed by the construction site by walk at the end of October and found the west side of the crown atop the tower is still largely covered under the scaffolding.
So last month I guessed wrong the completion date of the tower’s outer part. My prediction was based on the photos that taken from the Third Ring Road as I passed by there which can only show the progress of the east side and south side, leaving the condition of west side of the crown unknown.
The reason behind this is, unlike the installation for the cladding on China Zun Tower that each side keeps the same pace, the dismantle work for the crown of this tower is not simultaneous on all 4 sides, but two sides by two sides, now the scaffolding on South and West side have been fully dismantled, this can be seen in the picture. But the same work on other two sides is still on the way and just started not long ago.
Now let me guess when all these remaining will completed. Given the fact that all these 4 sides of crown are completely same, then the times for dismantle works to get done are just the same, right? Not so in fact, cause when dismantle work of first two sides get done, the workers will focus on another two sides that left, then the pace will be doubled, and the time it consume will be only about a half of that of the first two sides. So I take the east side which is now completed as the reference, it started in early September, and all the scaffolding on the east side of crown got pull off in the late October, it took about 50 days, so it will be about 20 to 30 days for the left two sides, from the picture we can find that the dismantle work on the west side of the crown started not long ago, perhaps up to 10 days, therefore all the scaffolding on all 4 faces will be removed before November 20th. (Update: This picture below that taken a few days ago around November 20th showing the scaffolding on west face of the crown has been fully removed.)
However, this is for outer part as mentioned before, there are still much works to do inside the tower, when all the construction done, there’ll be a light show or light test for the tower, let’s stay tune and look forward to see whatever coming.