China builds a “horizontal skyscraper” connecting four 60-storey towers

Beijing. March 12. Silkroadnews - Chinese workers are building an enormous glass corridor above four 60-storey towers, People’s Daily Online reports.
Construction workers in Chongqing, in the southwest of China, are building a huge rooftop corridor that will connect four 60-storey towers at an altitude of 250 meters. The enormous glass-walled structure is nearly as long as The Shard in London laid on its side, the report reads.
The design includes a glass-bottomed outdoor observation deck. From there, visitors can enjoy the views of the Yangtze River and the Jialing River merging at Chaotianmen area of Chongqing, one of the oldest metropolitan areas with nearly 30 million residents.
With 30 meters wide and 23 meters in height, a horizontal skyscraper is the pearl of an ambitious project worth £2.7 billion, which includes eight skyscrapers: six measuring 250 meters in height and two with a height of 350 meters.
According to the report, the passageway will comprise 3,200 pieces of glass and 4,800 aluminium panels and weigh a staggering 12,000 tonnes, the equivalent of 1.5 Eiffel Towers or 20 Airbus 380 planes. The humongous complex, called Raffles City Chongqing, is invested by Singaporean real estate company CapitaLand which owns a chain of shopping malls and office buildings across China.  
The eight-building complex with an area of 170 football fields was designed by the Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, who is also the author of the project of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands.
Creating such a huge structure on top of several skyscrapers is a complex process. According to CapitaLand, the workers build it in nine parts. Four of them are built directly above the four buildings in the middle.
Three sites used to connect buildings are constructed on the ground. They will then be raised by hydraulic strand jacks and attached to the buildings to form a continuous passageway. Each of the three sections between the buildings weighs 1100 tons.
The remaining two segments, located on both ends, will be built from the rightmost and leftmost towers. They will connect the corridor to the two adjacent buildings through the cantilever bridges.
According to the representative of Raffles City Chongqing, the construction of a horizontal skyscraper will be completed by the end of June this year.
In addition to the observation deck, there will be two swimming pools, restaurants and conference rooms; with luxury apartments, shopping centers, offices and hotels located in the vertical skyscrapers.
The whole complex is planned to be opened in stages starting from 2019.