loading . . . While Buildings in London or New York Can Take Three Years to Complete, China Built a 26-Story Tower in Just Five Days With 100 Workers In most of the world, putting up a high-rise is a slow, messy affair. Concrete is poured floor by floor. Tradespeople cycle through for months, installing wiring, ductwork, and windows. A medium-sized tower in London or New York routinely takes three years from groundbreaking to occupancy. Delays and budget overruns are so common they barely make news.
Then there is what happened in Xiangyin County, Hunan Province, in January 2024.
A crew of roughly **100 workers** arrived at a site with a mobile crane and a tower crane. Trucks pulled in carrying what looked like oversized shipping containers. Each unit was 12 meters long, 3 meters high, and 2.4 meters wide. The workers lifted them into position and bolted them together, stacking the boxes one on top of another. There was no concrete pour, no months of masonry, and no welding on site.
**_A high-rise that takes three years in London went up in five days in rural China. Credit: Broad Group_**
On January 7, 2024, the first module was set. Five days later, on January 11, a fully assembled 26-story residential tower stood on the lot. The structure, named the **Jingdu Holon Building** , was not a shell. The electricity and water were ready to be turned on.
The developer, **Broad Group Holon** , had erected 14,000 square meters of living space. Inside, the**208 apartments** were already furnished and finished. That speed made the project a stark data point in the **global modular construction market** , which already handles US$95 billion in annual activity.
## A Steel Skeleton Factory-Made
The speed comes from a construction philosophy that reverses the traditional logic of building. Instead of bringing materials to a site and assembling them in the open air, Broad Group builds almost the entire apartment in a factory.
Each unit is a **prefabricated stainless steel module**. Inside the plant, workers install the electrical wiring, air conditioning piping, and interior finishes before the module is loaded onto a flatbed truck. According to details published by the France-based Modular Building Institute, the company says its production line can complete one module every 21 minutes.
The core material is the unconventional choice. The company uses a patented stainless steel sandwich structure it calls **B-CORE** , not conventional reinforced concrete. Broad Group USA marketing director Jeremy Zimman told the institute that the firm switched to stainless steel about five years ago. The draw was not just corrosion resistance but mechanical performance under stress.
**_Entire apartments leave the factory with wiring and ducts installed, then stack like blocks using a patented stainless steel core** _**_. Credit: Broad Group_**_**_**
“Stainless steel also had great ductility, meaning it could withstand tensile stress,” Zimman said. That property allows the building to flex during seismic events, which matters in a country where a major 2008 earthquake killed tens of thousands. Broad Group was founded in 2009 as a direct response to that disaster, with the goal of making structures that would not collapse like dominoes.
Broad Group general manager Li Shun made a bolder claim to the state-run publication China Daily: the tower is engineered to last more than 1,000 years. That figure is impossible to verify in the present day, but it rests on stainless steel’s well known resistance to corrosion and weathering compared to reinforced concrete, which often shows serious deterioration within five to seven decades.
## Move-In Ready, Right Down to the Tap Water
The apartments are not bare metal boxes. Each 68-square-meter unit came out of the factory with **four-paned windows** designed to block solar heat, insulated exterior walls to cut noise and retain heat, and an energy-recovery ventilation system built on passive house principles.
Zhang Yanwei, a manager at Broad Group Holon Jianan Co, told China Daily that the company furnished the units before handing them over. Residents only needed to bring portable appliances such as a refrigerator, washing machine, and microwave. The building’s integrated water filtration system makes tap water directly drinkable, a meaningful feature in a country where most people still boil or filter municipal water due to distrust of the public supply.
**_Furnished units come with four-paned windows, filtered drinking water from the tap, and a system that slashes cooling costs** _**_. Credit: Broad Group_**_**_**
Tony Frost, a New Zealand modular building specialist, spent a week in an earlier 11-story Holon building in Changsha late last year. He told the institute that the structure felt “sturdy, almost like a concrete structure” and noted the high-tech water system. His only criticism was cosmetic: a small adjustment to interior colors and textures would improve it further.
## A Tower That Can Move
The same bolted connections that allow rapid assembly also work in reverse. Broad Group states that the entire Jingdu Holon Building can be **dismantled, loaded onto trucks, and reassembled** at a different site.
This turns a large residential asset into something closer to a relocatable product. For governments and housing authorities, that changes the financial equation. A building is no longer an immovable sunk cost tied to one piece of land. If zoning, flooding, or infrastructure forces a neighborhood to shift, the investment can shift with it. The concept was noted both by the initial project report and in China Daily’s coverage.
**_The entire 26-story building unbolts, loads onto trucks, and reassembles elsewhere, turning a fixed asset into a relocatable one** _. Credit: Broad Group_**_**
The company is already extending the model internationally. Zimman told the institute that Broad Group has projects in the pipeline for Ohio, Texas, and California, alongside work in the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates. The modules are dimensioned to the standard 40-foot shipping container footprint, allowing them to travel on flatbed trucks or container ships without special permits.
Sunny Wang, president of Broad Group USA, told the institute that there is no theoretical **height limit for modular construction** with this system. “We are leveraging stainless steel,” he said, “which is strong enough that we can go as high as we can design.” https://indiandefencereview.com/china-modular-construction-26-story-building-five-days/
