Instant Hotel

Every 35 minutes, the monster crane with a boom almost as long as a football field plucked a 35-ton concrete box from a waiting truck-trailer and swung it high over the construction site beside the San Antonio River. Ever so delicately, Crane Operator Gene Smith steadied the massive shell against the push of the wind; every gust was countered by radioed adjustments in the pitch of a helicopter tail rotor mounted on the lifting rig. With directional help from a magnetic compass, Smith gently stacked each concrete box atop an identical unit, to which it was sealed with more concrete. Seventy-two times last week, a guest room was thus lofted into place around the 21-story elevator core of San Antonio's fast-rising Hilton Palacio Del Rio Hotel.

Contractor Henry B. Zachry borrowed the basic idea for his instant-construction technique from Expo 67's Habitat, a twelve-story Montreal housing complex built of prefabricated concrete apartments piled up like children's blocks. The method promises to cut construction time on Zachry's $10 million, 445-room hotel from a normal twelve months to eight. And only by such a speedup could the hotel be completed in time for the April opening of San Antonio's HemisFair '68, of which Zachry is chairman. Though he estimates that so far the technique itself has cost about as much as conventional construction, the 33% faster schedule will not only save Zachry a bundle of money in financing costs but also enable the hotel to start earning money sooner. And Zachry owns the hotel; Hilton will lease and manage it.

Factory Furnished. The process is remarkably efficient because every guest room is not only precast but completely pre-equipped. Everything from plumbing and wiring to light bulbs, bed linen and furniture (which is bolted to the floor or walls) is installed before the rooms leave a factory-like production line seven miles from the site. To allow workmen space to repair pipes and wires in later years, the room modules are set 20 inches apart and the resulting gaps in the hotel's facade are filled with brick. To provide corridors, the back of each room module comes with a 2 1/2-ft. protruding concrete lip, which is sealed to a similar lip to form a 5-ft. hallway.

In Russia and much of Europe, builders have been achieving construction economies for years with variations of Zachry's technique. "This is going to be the trend of the future," says Manhattan Architect William Tabler, the busiest U.S. designer of hotels. "What Zachry is doing is wonderful. I'd be doing it too, if we could." Like most contractors, Tabler blames organized labor for preventing adoption of such cost-cutting methods, sometimes by the threat of tying up a job in jurisdictional disputes, sometimes through covert control of local building codes. In New York City, for instance, Electrical Workers Local 3 will install only light fixtures made by its own members.

Zachry faces no such problems. Much building labor in San Antonio remains unorganized. And commercial construction costs, according to the American Appraisal Co.'s widely used index, rank as sixth lowest among U.S. cities--8% above those in cheapest Savannah, Ga., and Jackson, Miss., but 35% below those in costliest New York City.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.