If anyone is ever in Shanghai and interested in seeing this, it's in a very cool area called Fengshengli, where you can see these old preserved style warehouse buildings. The area is filled with hip breweries, coffee shops, bike shops, art galleries, and clothing boutiques, and it's actually not that crowded or busy compared to other touristy spots. It's also nicer compared to Xintiandi imo, where it feels more produced and fake, like a reconstruction as opposed to actual heritage buildings.
This, and the few other famous photos and videos of similar operations, confuse me, because it violates my mental model of how buildings work. My mental model is that a modern building has a large, concrete foundation that extends significantly below the ground, and that the foundation is attached to the structural frame of the rest of the above-ground building. Then, how can jacks, whether manual or robotic, raise a building up off of its foundation?
Also, how can they scoot some, but not all, jacks over on any given step, and alternate? I understand that rigidity isn't fully binary, but I figured that buildings were on the more rigid side.
incompatible · 8m ago
These aren't modern buildings, and they aren't skyscrapers that would need significant foundations. The details of the foundations would still be interesting. I suppose they got the process started by finding or clearing spaces underneath, inserting support beams, and jacking them up.
entropie · 2h ago
A few years ago they moved a (historic) train station where I lived. It needed to be moved for some underground tube construction, but also a few meters to make the new buildings fit. I witnessed, it was awesome.
This title is misleading. It makes it seem like the robots did this autonomously, when in reality hundreds if workers were involved. The “robots” were “smart jacks” I would say. Humans couldn’t have done this without hydraulic jacks, they used fancy hydraulic jacks.
ddtaylor · 3h ago
I was not really lead to believe they did this autonomously. It seemed to me like either (a) they were doing the lockstep in a pre-programmed way that required timing of the equipment working together or (b) the same but with humans operating the timing. In either case I find the use of robots impressive.
mixdup · 54m ago
Calling these robots is like calling a wrench a robot
jayde2767 · 4h ago
It is still a very impressive feat of engineering.
selimnairb · 1h ago
Oh, absolutely.
smusamashah · 3h ago
I dont understand this. I always thought houses/buildings have underground supports on which the structure is erected. Doesn't have to be tall towers, all small buildings have underground support too.
How come these buildings don't have any of that? Or is the support in form of metal rods which these structures are freely screwed to?
Avicebron · 3h ago
I found this because I had a similar question, I think it might be hard to gauge how much prep work was done from the video.
This is incredible -- serious question -- has anything of this scale been done in the US or Europe? Do we even have the technology?
dluan · 11m ago
Something similar but different was back in the early 1900s, several city blocks in Seattle were moved or relocated when large chunks of the city were blasted away with water to flatten it. Although most old buildings were simply demolished.
Check out the raising of Chicago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago). From buildings up to entire city blocks were raised, moved on rollers, or both, usually while businesses and residents stayed in them for normal day-to-day life.
wenc · 1h ago
Chicago also reversed the flow of the Chicago River.
They also rebuilt much of the city because it was wiped out during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and now the grid system is one of the most commonsensical ones in any major American city.
Chicago is an example of a (more or less) clean-slate engineered large city -- one that arose as a result of tragedy (fire) and failure (cholera).
The technology in this video appears to be computer control of the many pistons underneath the raised block. I would estimate that could be done with roughly 1970s-level of technology.
pxc · 4h ago
So the impressive thing is really the social coordination, the project management, which was doubtless challenging but is hardly unique.
It's still kind of a wonderful, imo. And it's awesome to be able to see it on video like this.
mmsc · 4h ago
Yes, it has been common enough, no "robots" required. The Indiana Bell Building is a famous one from a century ago, which gets videos posted about it on social media ever so often.
As for your actual question, I'm pretty sure we (US, Europe, humans in general) could do quite a bit more than we do now if we had a reason to do so. (or were 100% sure about the results)
janfoeh · 4h ago
Here is the Kaisersaal in Berlin being moved on air cushions in 1996 [1]. And wasn't a better part of Chicago jacked up building by building some time in the 19th century to make room for a sewage system?
Great snapshot of classic Shanghai architecture, blended with new, like this really cool coffee spot: https://www.archdaily.com/973430/birdie-cup-coffee-fog-archi...
Also, how can they scoot some, but not all, jacks over on any given step, and alternate? I understand that rigidity isn't fully binary, but I figured that buildings were on the more rigid side.
https://www.e-architect.com/images/jpgs/leipzig/bayerischer_... / https://www.e-architect.com/leipzig/bayerischer-bahnhof-buil...
How come these buildings don't have any of that? Or is the support in form of metal rods which these structures are freely screwed to?
https://parametric-architecture.com/shanghai-relocates-7500-...
The houses: https://shanghaistreetstories.com/?page_id=1288
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regrading_in_Seattle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River#Reversing_the_fl...
They also rebuilt much of the city because it was wiped out during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and now the grid system is one of the most commonsensical ones in any major American city.
Chicago is an example of a (more or less) clean-slate engineered large city -- one that arose as a result of tragedy (fire) and failure (cholera).
The technology in this video appears to be computer control of the many pistons underneath the raised block. I would estimate that could be done with roughly 1970s-level of technology.
It's still kind of a wonderful, imo. And it's awesome to be able to see it on video like this.
In the 60s a massive stone monument was moved 200m up in elevation to avoid being flooded by a dam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation
As for your actual question, I'm pretty sure we (US, Europe, humans in general) could do quite a bit more than we do now if we had a reason to do so. (or were 100% sure about the results)
[1] https://www.bz-berlin.de/archiv-artikel/hier-schwebt-ein-den...
Maybe the scale of these other moves were limited by not having the adaptable height jacks to keep everything straight.