...and, surprise, it's a mall. Sometimes I really wonder who's buying all that crap since everything seems to become a mall these days. I have three within a 10 minutes radius on foot. Where are the times when the largest buildings on the planet were used to build spaceships. Anyway, this is in China, meaning that it's a. supersized, b. extremely ugly and c. built from the ground up in only 18 short months. Slave labor does have its perks! However, my prediction is that it'll end up like the last supermall they built: a crumbling ruin devoid of life. Or rather it's more city-sized, so it might become one more Chinese ghost town. This doesn't look so bad. Not pretty, but not disgusting either. THIS is disgusting More pictures.
At least one economist has the theory that a sure sign your economy is about to go tits up is that you're setting records in the size of your buildings.
China's setting construction records, and the US can't even find the political will to maintain its bridges. I think I'll start learning Chinese.
Don't take these superlatives too seriously. They just want to show that they can. In two years that thing will be a ruin.
That building is truly impressive. Go to the link and check out the escalators---those are far and away the longest ones I've ever seen.
If I was a better writer, i could conceive of a post-apocalyptic story about a gigantic mall now occupied by various competing tribes in conflict (who can't practically move out for some reason) - sort of like every different wing, or floor, or store represent warring city states or some such.
Wait for Disneyland to construct a 1:1 scale replica of the Jedi Temple. After all they own the rights to it now IIRC the ziggurat is 500 - 600 meters on a side at its base, and rises to about half the height of the full structure including towers (so maybe 400 m high at the ziggurat roof level) The pinnacle of the center tower is about 1 km above the temple base. A little taller than the Burj Khalifa, or about an additional 600m above the ziggurat roof. Now that would be a monster.
I thought online shopping was slaughtering malls. WTF are they doing building more of the land blighting beasts?
Yeah, yeah, all the more reason. Aren't they supposed to be learning from the mistakes of us capitalist pigs?
There's a book like that I have read a long time ago. It's called THE BLOCK (no longer available, can't find it on Amazon). It's basically about a monumental residential building that breaks up into tribes for no reason at all. They fight, and in the end, they just stop and shamefully resume their daily lives.
It all depends on location (as always when it comes to retail). The South China Mall, the famous ghost mall which everyone always talks about, was built in BFE, there aren't good roads or mass transit connecting it, and even the neighboring high rise apartments are massively too costly for what is other wise a poor rural area. Oh, and there are no jobs and the only reason it was built there was because it was empty so the developer could get the land cheap. Can mega malls make it and survive? Sure, but it will be all about location and they'll have to find a place with good transit, a fairly wealthy population, and limited competition. I'm sure such locations do exist but they're rare and simply plopping down mega malls willy-nilly won't work.
