Just a shower thought. Seeing how these structures took decades to build in their times, and that too entirely with manual labour, I was wondering how long these architectural marvels would take to be built in this post modern era with the help of our technological advancements.
Imagine the world has dedicated its focus and the entirety of its resources on building just one Pyramid as quickly as possible out of the same materials and in the same location as the original ones. The medium of construction has no constraints but the end result must be indistinguishable, structure and composition wise.
I would love to hear how the process would take place in addition.
The Manhattan project took 2.5 years. It involved mining 18.8 million pounds of uranium. 10 Cyclotron factories of 20 cyclotrons for 22,000 workers were built in 6 months to separate the uranium.
It boils down to collecting all the building equipment from around the world and sending it to where you want to build the pyramid.
50,000 people cutting stone while 50,000 heavy construction equipment operators move the stones would take 2 months.
So it’s really down to resources. If it was a Manhattan Project level of resources thrown at building a Pyramid, I’d wild guess 3 months.
If anyone wants to understand the pain of fissile uranium production, play factorio. Gives you a little tiny fraction of what it’s like to produce enough fuel for a powerplant. You need a lot more for a bomb.
The Louvre Pyramid took five years to complete. Designed in '84 and completed in 1989.
The Walter Pyramid took two years to complete. It’s 18 stories tall, and can seat 6,000 people. Each side of the perimeter of Walter Pyramid measures 345 feet (105 m), making it a mathematically true pyramid. It is one of only four true pyramid-style buildings in the United States, the others being the Summum Pyramid in Salt Lake City, Utah, Luxor Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Memphis Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee.
Pyramids are pretty simple. What you really want are today’s architectural wonders.
The Petronas Twin Towers are a pair of 88-storey skyscrapers standing at 451.9 m (1,483 ft) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. They are the world’s tallest twin towers and were the tallest pair of buildings in the world after their construction in 2004. Both buildings are linked by a 2-story skybridge at their 41st and 42nd floors and the bridge is 170 m (558 ft) tall, which makes it the world’s highest 2-story sky bridge.
The Washington Monument is the world’s tallest stone structure, and the world’s tallest obelisk. It’s made of granite, bluestone gneis, and marble. It had a staggered construction, and took around 10 years to complete.
The Sydney Opera House took fourteen years to complete. Considered to be a modern masterpiece, it was the result of a competition and was opened by Queen Elizabeth II. It has also been featured in Star Trek as a hat.
The Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. Constructed between 1931 and 1936, during the Great Depression, it was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives.
And so on and so forth
Here’s a great podcast episode about the design competition and fraught construction of the Sydney Opera House. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-chorus-of-contempt-at-the-sydney-opera-house
It has also been featured in Star Trek as a hat.
My child intensifies
How much effort are you putting in?
The pyramids were kind of like FDRs New Deal. When there wasn’t work to be done, the workers worked on the pyramids and still got paid.
If there was work to be done, they didn’t work on the pyramid.
The Luxor casino in Vegas apparently took about 6 months between starting construction and opening.
Cheap - fast - good… Pick 2
