221–230 of 261 posts
My first thought was "Yeah, but I bet it's not really printed, just transported printed prefabs to the site". Nope, it's actually printed on-site! Second thought is that the interior looks very Star Trek / Star Wars like. Some confirmation of the non-leakiness of the walls would be good, but otherwise looks extremely promising as a concept.
Would this survive a rain storm or would it turn to mud? I couldn’t tell from the article.
The link below has more information about this project. Apparently they added a coating to help with water resistance and a stabilizing agent to help with strength. https://www.theplan.it/eng/architecture/tecla
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I guess because a shipping container is rectangular and that a house can be rectangular. This wasn't a bad series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5fh29rhLs Put me in the 'shipping containers make shitty houses' camp.
I love that they wood frame the interiors for insulation and walls. Could have just built a wood frame house. Quicker, faster and more roomy.
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The actual products that make it work: Mapesoil 10.[1] "High-performance, fibre-reinforced powdered stabilising agent for sports sub-base contruction surfaces".The amount of Mapesoil 10 required is 3%-5% of the dirt weight. Comes in 500kg bags, on pallets. Dynamon SR4 [2] "Superplasticizer based on acrylic polymer for concrete with long slump retention". About 1%-2% of the mix. That gets the material through the 3D p…
>The trouble with most of these 3D building systems is that there's no tamping I would call that a feature. Building forms is basically building the entire building out of wood (or metal), then building it again out of concrete. Single family homes or multi-unit low rises don't require low void high compressive strength. They need speed. Residential prefab never caught on in North America. Maybe this will. If it is c…
That all said, it is somewhat more expensive than traditional construction. Better insulated, more energy efficient, and more resilient to fire and flood.
In all of these demos, they never show you the resulting bathroom, shower, or kitchen. It's always "here's a shell we made". I'd like to see the finished house, with fixtures in place and working.
Modern bathroom pods are very easy to install and come in pre-configured sizes. They're literally just plug and play. After that, the only challenge is making sure you have plumbing connections at the bathroom and kitchen sites. But modern pex plumbing makes that pretty easy. You're just running flexible rubber tubes from the multiplexer. In this sort of design, I'd imagine you can just pre-print the holes for the tu…
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It seems like installing electrical and plumbing could be a lot easier if a 3D printed building was constructed with all the necessary channels for utilities already there in the walls, and all you have to do is feed wires and pipes through the routes and connect everything. Similarly, finish work is simpler if you don't have to put sheet rock up, and can just use the existing wall texture. I think the bigger advanta…
if I'm an architect and my client wants their living room to look like a gothic cathedral If you were an architect with those kinds of clients you would have a list of potential builders with track records of successfully completing similar work. It’s among the kinds of expertise architects have. And you would look at this with the jaded cynicism that an architect’s experience inevitably produces...for you will have…
My point is that you don't have to have this knowledge, and you don't have to hire expert craftspeople and pay them expert wages if you can have a machine do the difficult work.
> And most importantly you would know that right angles are almost always the right answer...
Not necessarily. Box-shaped rooms work nicely, but the most important thing is to not have acute angles between walls. (IIRC Christopher Alexander goes into this in A Pattern Language in defense of right-angle walls, but for some reason neglects to consider rooms with more than 4 sides as an option.) Greater than 90 degrees is fine as long as it doesn't present a problem for the intended use (i.e. client expects furniture to fit at right angles). Also, if you're printing a whole house you can design benches, shelves, desks, and so forth into the design. Or maybe contract out to some service that will make the furniture based on a 3D model.
A big part of why walls are straight and meet at right angles is that building materials are generally straight and expect to be joined at right angles. Anything else turns into a complicated geometry problem that takes a lot longer to build. With a 3D printer, though, that's not a limitation. It doesn't matter how simple or complicated a design is, it takes about the same amount of time to print and uses about the same amount of material. The main constraints then just become what's strongest, nicest-looking, and most functional. Most people will probably prefer box-shaped rooms, but the point is that they'll have options if a box-shaped room isn't optimal.
One could imagine if house-design software becomes sufficiently advanced, you could dispense with the architect as well. Someone who wants a house could just log onto a website, identify the site where the house is to be built, and specify a bunch of constraints and preferences, and then the backend software generates a bunch of house plans. The customer choses the one they like and pay the money, then a building permit is applied for and a printing machine and work crew show up on site and assemble a house that's unique and exactly suited to its site.
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It seems like installing electrical and plumbing could be a lot easier if a 3D printed building was constructed with all the necessary channels for utilities already there in the walls, and all you have to do is feed wires and pipes through the routes and connect everything. Similarly, finish work is simpler if you don't have to put sheet rock up, and can just use the existing wall texture. I think the bigger advanta…
Something like this already exists; you can construct a house from concrete elements with premade channels/cavities for the wires and pipes. However, they need to be finished up, I think with drywall usually. I'm not aware this method has any real cost savings though compared to wood frame construction.
My impression is that ICF tends to cost about the same as stick frame construction, but I'm not an expert in these things.
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Not sure that fitting a bathroom or kitchen is the difficult part of the concept, though. It reminds me a little of an old Grand Designs episode. [0] Different, in that (AFAICT) the 3D-printed house isn't designed to have high thermal mass (the 'earthship' concept) but it gives an idea how a fully-functional house can be crafted from a lot of earth and work quite well. [0] https://www.granddesignsmagazine.com/grand-d…
When you mentioned Grand Designs, I was expecting a link to the FACIT [0] house! I suppose that's CNC or cutting/routing based though... [0] https://vimeo.com/53932758
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>There are better ways to build affordable housing already. Who'd think that a proof-of-concept doesn't yet compete with existing solutions? >I suspect the reason this is popular is more because they are aesthetically pleasing We are talking about places people can live in . Aesthetics matter. The ability to produce something aesthetically pleasing on the cheap and at scale matters. There is a reason Soviet architect…
Consider what the Soviets replaced in terms of housing. The people who moved in weren’t giving up a dacha life. Same holds for US housing projects. People came from cold water tenaments, share cropper shacks with an outhouse out back, and migrant farm labor camps. They represent a huge improvement in shelter despite their lack of appeal to people of means
So there's value in affordable housing with long-term aesthetics. It affects generations of people beyond those whose lives are immediately improved.
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Something tells me the same things were said about early automobiles: * People have been solving transportation for millenia * Horses and trains are real breakthroughs * The complexity of logistical chain (gas, mechanics, paved roads) precludes widespread application where transportation is a basic need * You need a fleet of other machines to keep it full of fuel. Oats won't do. * It does not demonstrate a better sol…
What is the thing that tells you?
Here's the first hit for "early criticism of automobiles":
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
I am leaving it as an exercise to the reader to verify the extent to which your concerns mirror those of people 100 years ago.