Construction of The Arlington

The construction of The Arlington between October 2018 and August 2019 was the first time Bixbus built at scale. Before it, the settlement had put up tents, prefabricated blocks and a handful of low buildings. After it, Bixbus knew it could build towers, and how.

Why it was built

By mid-2018 people were arriving in Bixbus faster than the settlement could house them. The Tent Community was overcrowded and the arrivals were not slowing. In August 2018 the Lead Council agreed to investigate permanent high-rise housing, and in September the detailed designs were presented: two towers of twenty storeys, holding 580 apartments between them, from studios to three-bedroom family homes. No one expected two towers to empty the tents. They were meant to be the first permanent homes, and the proof that Bixbus could build at height ahead of the far larger residential buildings it would need in the years that followed.

Bixbus had neither the materials nor the skilled workers to build them. Both came from the partnership between the Guardians of Bixbus and Killerton Enterprises, which from August 2018 supplied steel, plant and prefabricated assemblies from Earth, and recruited the workforce. The Arlington was the first major project to depend on that supply, and the first to test it.

The team

The project was led by Archibald Beulen, a construction manager from Chicago, as Project Director and Site Manager, with Samantha Greenfield as Project Manager. The towers were designed by the architect Drakon Niemec, with Baharata Goretti as lead structural engineer and Dallas Creight leading the electrical design. The programme was planned by Aldo Heikki and Natasha Volkov. Barry Zigmund ran quality control, Marcus Torres safety, and Ben Clarke the flow of materials through the five portals that fed the site.

How it was built

The leadership team crossed into Bixbus at the end of September 2018 and broke ground on 1 October. From the first week the site ran around the clock on three shifts. The two towers were built about three weeks apart, so that crews could finish a stage on Tower A and move straight to Tower B, and the trades were overlapped floor by floor: concrete cores climbing first, steel following, floors poured behind the steel, the glass curtain wall a few storeys lower, and services and finishes working upwards inside floors that were already closed in. Tower A was topped out on 5 March 2019 and Tower B on 27 March.

The people who built it

Over the life of the project 196 people from 47 nations worked on the site, with no more than 145 there at once. Almost all had been recruited on Earth by Killerton on contracts that described a large residential development at a remote site. Many learned only on arrival where they were, and that the crossing could not be undone. Most lived in the Tent Community or prefabricated blocks while they built homes for others, worked through desert heat, and spoke dozens of languages between them. Homesickness was widespread, and for some it never eased.

The job finished eight weeks ahead of programme, within two per cent of its budget, and without a single day lost to injury. As each trade finished, its crew moved on to the next projects in a settlement that was only beginning to build.

What it meant

Tower A took its first residents on 1 July 2019 and Tower B followed in August. The apartments passed to the newly founded Bixbus Housing Authority, and demand far outstripped them. The allocation was resented from the start, not least by the builders who were not given homes in the towers they had built.

The Arlington was soon overtaken in height and scale, but its methods became the template for the towers that followed, and many of the people who learned their trade on its decks went on to lead crews of their own.