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Contour Crafting - Extrude-a-House
lww writes "An article in New Scientist discusses the work of Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California to design and build a fully automated robot that performs Contour Crafting, his name for a process to extrude successive layers of semi-fluid building mixtures like concrete to create entire structures. In the article, he says 'The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands.' by 2005. I'm pretty jazzed at the potential to construct buildings with highly curved/creative contours that would be impossible using current construction techniques."
Boy, and I thought houses in housing developments were too cookie-cutter now.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Now, all I have to do is get Fred out of the way...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Matt Helm did this in 1967 in his movie with an inflatable bedroom.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It would be cooler if he did it in acrylic with a prototype printer.
I am moving to Mars where they still build houses the old fashion way. Wait... what? ..... Aww crap
This may be able to construct a house in one day, but I can't see getting this gadget set up in that time. This thing is huge!
Stay tuned for new sig...
Lets get the robot unions in place now... After all, non union labor doing construction? I'd imagine the teamsters would have it smashed before it cut out the first window...
Not trolling, just being sarcastic...
--ryan
At first I read that as "Extrude-a-Horse." I was picturing some unfortunate horse being turned to goo as it was extruded through a small pinhole. Ick.
ex'trude v. ex'trud'ed, ex'trud'ing, ex'trudes
v. tr. 1. To push or thrust out.
Boy, the trolls are going to have a field day with this one.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Would anyone ever be proud to say "a robot shat my home"? These things will likely replace trailer-houses: the Cletus Delroy's of the future can say "Hey Maw! We're movin' to a brand spankin' new droid-turd!"
But what about windows? Having really contoured surfaces dont do so well if you want to put in a window, custom glass costs a boat load....
Not to mention they make awkward living spaces inside; it just seems that boxes work so much better in house design, although I would love curvature in the corner points in my rooms (a nice, soft, apple-like look).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Try getting something like this pushed past the trade unions. You might wake up with a horse head under your sheets.
Th
So it will only take a day to build a house, and with no human hands...but then, you still have to build a big gantry crane over the site, and set up the robot. This thing isn't going to do in-wall plumbing and electricity either. There would still be a LOT of work after the robot did its union minimum.
...
Try getting something like this pushed past the trade unions. You might wake up with a horse head under your sheets.
Or during the night one of the house-crapping bots extrudes an entire 64-unit condo into your bedroom.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Put this on a flatbed truck, then give me a Tiberium Harvester, some Nod buggies, stealth tanks, and I'll be in business!
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Exactly what construction sites has this author been visiting? I don't care if he is from the UK: construction people are NOT drinking tea in those cups.
Fortunately, I downloaded the movies and made a BitTorrent version available:Enjoy.
0x0D 0x0A
It looks like this sort of technology is actually targeted at just the "smaller" buildings, like houses.
It would seem that this is because it is essentially a "print-a-house" device, which will be limited by the size of the "printer" as well as the type of materials that can be used for "ink." No steel buildings here, only ceramics, some plastics, or adobe-type products.
One thing that struck me funny is that they cited "construction of structures on Moon and Mars" as a possible application, but I simply can't see how it'd be a better option than, say, inflatables.
Bad news: Ink cartriges are one miiiiiiiilllllon dollars! (Austin Powers voice).
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This would be nice for a home with no infratructure. How does it tie in to sewer lines, electric grids, etc? This isn't even mentioning teh internal infrastructure - all teh 14guage wiring, the three way switches, the copper feed and pvc drain pipes, etc.
Also, how does it get all the city bureaucrats on site in one day to do all the
This sounds like the flying cars we were all promised.
As with current construction methods, if you have, say masonry construction, you typically specify a masonry opening dimension for the contractor to build to (which is approximately the size of your opening), and any extra space is just shimmed out. A bit of shim, maybe some backer rod and sealant, and you're gold.
One possible problem that I can see offhand would be expansion/contraction cracks. Would the robot create construction joints every few feet to allow for said expansion/contraction?
The video shows girders neatly and precisely arranged in preparation for the construction. The labor involved in lugging these onsite and then ordering them fussily along the ground, in addition to the laying of tracks for the giant house-plotter, would seem to be better spent actually building a real house instead of one made out of the semi-liquid gak that Hordak poured onto He-Man.
If I could make this sig kill you, I would.
Sure it's cool that a robot might build a house in a day, but would you really want to live in it?
Personally, I'd rather have my house built by 100 Amish carpenters over the course of one year.
I may be a Luddite, in this respect, but I'm also a big believer in TLC.
- jbum
Because were running short of those fragile humans...
EBTX had this idea a long, long time ago:
http://www.ebtx.com/mech/mech05.htm
True, this guy didn't actually have the materials in mind, but we ought to give him credit for coming up with it first.
Here's another such robotic builder concept.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Negative! There's an alternative building process called cobbing that allows for free-form walls. A group called Cobworks is currently building a cob house in Mexico that's got a number of curved walls.
Curved walls are nowhere near impossible. And placing windows in them is nowhere near impossible either. Furniture and home decoration obviously also has to be bought to fit or placed properly in rooms (i.e. no six foot long paintings hung on a curved wall).
If you want to see some beautiful uses of curves and non-right-angles in architecture, check out the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA. It is truly beautiful, and the kind of thing which could not possibly have been built even 15 years ago because the computer modeling technology wasn't there. But that is a place you go to spend a few hours once a month, not to live there, and it was built with plenty of open space around it, not packed in like a house.
But I think this house-creating technology is cool and I'm sure it will find uses in more spread-out areas where there is room to be creative.
The logical next step is P2P architecture, right?
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quoting from the article:
"Greg Lynn, a leading architect from Venice, California, said. "I believe that aesthetically there's a great potential to make things that have never been seen before."
Look at Lynn's site [Flash plugin required] to see examples of the kind of forms that might be possible with this process.
All they gotta do now is make a robot that potties metal and we can make home made cars and real buildings. What a treat!
Bizzarely enough Henry Ford (IIRC) was convinced of the viability of concrete houses and actually constructed a protype with the furniture poured in place as a demostration. I remember seeing this in Popular Mechanics as one those 50 years ago bits but I can't find anything on the web.
Also, you can do *anything* with steel...it's how much you want to pay, not limitations on current building materials.
Personally, I like our 1928 home...great lighting, decent layout, and it has character. All elements lacking in anything built after 1945 for me.
The animation shows the machine making a framed structure on a prepared lot. Stick framing can already be done in a day (albeit with a few sets of human hands involved). The thing that takes time in building a house is the wiring, plumbing, hvac, and finishing.
I don't see much future for this until they can automate some of these functions.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
Infact, you didn't even have to read the article; you just had to look at the purty pictures.
Instead of giving us an insightful comment based upon the actual content of the article, you've given us so much more.
Thanks!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Now the rest of the country will look like Southern California-pink, beige, and stucco.
This guy is way out there
This seems to be a larger version (albeit by an order of magnitudes) of the kind of technology that has been employed in rapid prototyping and model making for manufacturing an other applications for quite some time. See, for example this and this.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
Looks like he'll have to extrude-a-server while he's at it.
Whatever format this machine has, it's likely going to have to be mounted on a framework with all construction carried out inside the confines of the frame. Now, were the construction material especially fast-drying, sturdy, and lightweight, it might be economical to produce structures in a factory and haul them to location. But for anything larger than a small home, it seems likely that a portable on-site scaffolding-like frame would be necessary. I wonder what sort of calibration issues might arise from such a necessity: the temperature, stability, angle, and many other factors would all affect the construction. Sounds to me like the best idea would be to lay down a concrete floor first the conventional way, with attachment points for the machine, then bring it in, turn it on, wait, and move it on to the next site. No matter how this is done, houses are not going to be constructed in a single day: you'd still need the foundation, the flooring, the roofing, the electrical and plumbing systems, doors, paint, windows, bathroom fixtures, and a myriad of other things to all be installed. As it is, pouring concrete and constructing the walls of a house is by no means the most time-consuming part of making a new home. IANAE, but I really doubt that implementation of this technology would shorten the construction time of an average structure by more than a day or two.
Extruded doesn't mean it has to be curved.
There is even a few animations of it doing a straight wall.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
So now all houses will be made out of concrete? What about the earthquake considerations? I suppose this will have this places, but it doesn't sound like it will be oozing out the houses of the future.
Can't we just feed code from Second Life into this thing?
so, what's going to happen to all those laborers that are put out of work by this new process?
You can...
I've been doing this for years look
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Thank you for linking to the "print" style!
You wouldn't believe how tired I am of the click-wait-read-loop!
The idea is cool for things that are extruded surfaces, but... how do you get any tinsile strength out of it? How do you put in vertical elements that are not concrete, but integrated into the structure? The site pre-casting idea is neat, but there isn't anything showing how it would stand up to seismic, or even strong wind loads. I know... work in progress.
It's actually very close to building with stone, only you use a liquid instead.
Lug this giant pooper into a destitute region of SA or China, and lay down inexpensive shelter for an entire town. Encourage corporate sponsorship - no joke - I'm sure Pepsi wouldn't mind putting up some cash for this process, if each house built had a big pepsi logo carved into it.
Of course, people destitute enough to live in a soft-serve house probably aren't too embroiled in the cola wars. Ebola wars, maybe.
If I could make this sig kill you, I would.
The desire to have curved pool walls, which cost a fortune in concrete formwork would be where this could make in-roads if it were able to work around reinforcing steel(unreinforced concrete isn't that crash hot for any serious structural works, especially in any areas of seismicity).
Curved walls may well look pretty, but are a nuisance to work around if you are trying to fit beds, couches, tables against them. One of the bonuses of straight walls iwth square corners.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
It's ridiculous to pay $350-400K for a house that's built out of crappy wood by minimal-wage mexicans.
Let's see, the high-priced white collar jobs are going overseas, and the menial work will be done by robots. What does that leave for the rest of us? Organ donors?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
For windows and doors, even in a curved surface, you justspecify a flat flange to install them to. Still have to install them, though. Also the interior door. But what about foundations? Still gotta dig the hole and fill it with something heavy, rigid and stable. How do you tie it down to the foundation? Tie rods? You would still need rebar in the structure itself to attach the tie rods to. Here in California (and a lot of other places), you also need sufficient reinforcing in the structure itself to handle seismic loads, and those have to be connected via rods or bolts to the foundation. What about wiring and plumbing? They are typically enclosed inside the walls, for safety and aesthetics. How do you imbed a complete wiring and plumbing system into the walls? Perhaps you could program the machine to actually form the waste piping, but you still need a water supply. Chases in the structure? Then you have the issue of pulling piping and wiring through a complex system of chases. Ventilation, heat and cooling? Same issues. This looks potentially cool, but building the structure is only one small part of building a house, and saving some money there doesnt necessarilly save you anything on the entire structure.
I couldn't read the site, but it sure sounds like a big 3D printer of some sort.
The beauty of arbitrary construction is now I can have my dream home!
I already have a hard time finding frames that fit my pictures & posters well. Now i'm going to have to find curved frames to fit the walls?
Instead of having this thing crap out fancy-schmancy concrete ugliness with many different curves, it could be greatly beneficial in the way we currently use construction robots on assembly lines: mass production. Specifically, for those unable to afford houses constructed traditionally. Think of it: Rather than sending a boatload of materials and hundreds of workers to some poor, third-world country (or impoverished urban area), just ship one or ten of these suckers out there, along with one or two operators per, and mix the raw materials on-site. In a week you'll be housing five hundred families. Of course this assumes several years of R&D before then, such that the process will be cheap, the raw materials commonplace and easily available, and little problems like pipes and windows are solved. You may laugh at a bunch of cookie-cutter houses all slapped down in a row, but I bet the homeless wouldn't. You could call it Habitat for Robotity...
Reminds me of this place.
I remember 20+ years ago touring a house constructed from a durable, high-strength foam. It was located in Gatlinburg, TN and was called "Xanadu - House of the Future". I recall that it was constructed by inflating large, plastic dome-like balloons and then spraying those balloons with the hardening foam. Builders then subsequently went in with saws and simply chopped out wherever they wanted a doorway, hall, or secret passageway to be. I remember being totally blown away when, towards the end of the tour, they had an Atari 2600 (playing that Snoopy vs. the Red Baron game) and color TV embedded in the wall. Plus, it had a slide/tunnel to get from the kids' room upstairs down to the den.
Good times... good times. (obligatory Homestarrunner reference =)
Cheers..
m@
Not unless someone screwed up. in poured structures, the reinforcement, wiring chases, plumbing, ventilation, all the things necesary to turn a structure into an office or home, are laid into the walls before the pour. Fixing a mistake later, by drilling for example. is hideously expensive, and has sent more than one contractor into bankruptcy.
some chain hotels are built using premodular components today.. entire guestrooms, with plumbing and all. the make'em, put them on a barge, and install them on a foundation(i.e. in NYC it's a godsend)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Wow, they need a new webmaster. That web site is sooo 1994.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Now THAT would be impressive.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Antonio Gaudi loved using curves in unusual places. Have a look at some of these: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Well I Am An Architect... and I have to say this is by no means the first attempt at such things - for example: http://archnet.org/library/documents/one-document. tcl?document_id=4473.
What amazes me is that we are still attempting rapid construction with unsuitable (dense, energy-intensive) materials assembled piecemeal when there are many composites that may be better suited to prefabrication and rapid assembly. Assembly on site can be arbitrarily-fast, if the sections are fabricated offsite where detailing issues - fit, finish, technical performance - can be fully resolved on a production-line basis. There's no reason why such processes should even preclude custom design; thats the benefit of any modular system; just look at Lego. It's all in how you put detail and assemble the elements.
The reasons these techniques are yet to be widely accepted are as much cultural as technical; here in the UK people are hung up on owning 'bricks and mortar' - insert your own regional preference here.
BTW the technical problems have to do with moisture control and fire mainly; the trick is to use the equivalent of fire-resistant Goretex with some structural integrity. Buldings has to resist the effects of inhabitants each adding a couple of litres of water vapour daily without condensation but without excess air infiltration (= heat loss). And we want it to behave in a predictable way when something catches fire to allow safe evacuation - so regular FibreGlass doesn't cut it.
Funnily enough good ol' fashioned timber is difficult to beat. And we are using it right now to sectionally prefabricate Student housing units in large numbers here in the South West UK. I won't post the link because the my employer's IT dept. wouldn't appreciate a 'slashdotting'
hmm... on the other hand...
The same guy is working on using plastics and metal also. The main innovation is his use of the moving extruder and trowels to smooth the surface of the object.
The moving extruder enables you to build items bigger than the tank of goo that previous laser powered rapid prototyping setups used.
The trowels let you produce a smooth finished item. Other systems result in a stack of disks (cross sections). To minimize the stack of disks surface, you make the cross sections very very thin but this means there are thousands of cross sections and it takes a long time. With the trowels you can spit out thick tubes and smooth it out later.
Other than houses they say you can build boats (not from adobe, duh, from plastic). Think of other smooth shells.
When this thing goes off patent in 20 years, I can see people setting up a robot in some big commercial garage building. You create a CAD design at home and bring it down to the garage. They extrude out an item and you bring it home. You can trade designs on the internet. Someone should start an Open Source design program now to be ready with a standard file format.
list things that would be easy to make.
Anything big hollow and plastic, ceramic or metal:
Plastic child's wading pool for the back yard.
Kids play set.
Kayaks, Canoes, snow sleds.
Garbage cans.
Patio Furniture
Frisbees
Hoola-hoops
Custom computer case mods could get really crazy.
Dishes or cookware?
Think of your own. It's fun.
This reminds me of the concrete domes that you can build for a house. Basic dome form with poured concrete. As the structure is made with concrete, it will last a really long time. The Monolithic Domes are really cool. A simple inflatable form holds the concrete: You pour and BAM! 48 hours later you have a completed structure!
Thalasar
Now the whole issue of open source and software patents can be brought to the masses. When the blue prints for a physical structure are the valuable part because an auto-builder just reads 'em and builds the house, what is the valuable part? :)
After all, that's how software works. you write some blueprints, and an auto-builder (compiler) makes it into a binary. Could this be the start of finallly making the playing field even? (watch for big companies to start sueing for features in the blue print "just like the feature in our blue print". Can't put in bathroom because then you'd HAVE to have seen our blueprint to build one that works like ours...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
This guy needs to get with the guy who puts the fiber-optics in the concrete.
How do you reinforce the concrete houses for CA building codes and/or stability from earthquake/natural hazard, etc. I haven't RTA, but it seems like extruding rebar isn't feasible, nor is building the rebar on site and pouring the concrete over it (that would negate the extrusion part of the machine). How do you build stable houses using this technology? Or would they already be stable?
this could completely change the way things are done. As I see it this machine could build a dog house for (a totally wild guess) $50,000, or a big honking ranch style house for $65,000. The expense is still going to be in site preparation and getting the equipment in place. No surprise, right?
I think that once designers get a handle on what this machine can do that they will come up with ways to build houses that will seriously cut down on finish work and systems installation. What about cast in place air ducting, and cast in place conduits? Finish work would be a snap. Believe me, when you hire an experienced stucco crew you'd better be ready for them because you go to lunch and they'll have the job done before you get back. That stuff can be done a lot faster than the vapor barrier-rigid insulation, siding, paint system.
And as far as insulation goes, what' stopping them from extruding that also? Air entrained concrete with those little expanded poly beads is great insulation! If you want to go farther, it wouldn't be hard to cast in little notches to hang interior sheating and then pump insulation behind that.
I spent a summer with a fist full of rebar ties in one hand and a tool in the other, and it wasn't a lot of fun. If you can trade a lot of little hand labor, for a couple of days of guys with heavy equipment, it might be worth it. Who knows.
One thing's for sure, building houses this way isn't going to be done by ma & pop construction outfits.
My experience with concrete is very small, but this could be big, if it isn't a scam and we can get the building codes people to buy it.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Can it extrude light-transmitting concrete???
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
And we've known it since Thomas Edison tried it, at the turn of the last century.
A crew of two, myself and one other skilled and motivated hard worker. We were paid piece, so no structure, no pay. Slab foundation poured when we came in, and we stood up the walls, rolled roof trusses, sided with 4x8 sheets of T111, hung windows and outside doors, sheathed the roof, trimmed out the outside. 950 to 1250 sq foot houses. The two of us routinely knocked out 2 of them a week, working 6 10 hour days. This process seems to address the cheapest part of buildng cheap houses, with a very expensive machine, requiring tedious and precise set up.
New York Times article
Another thing that is being overlooked is the strength and stability of the structure. I know that curves look cool, but they are hell for supporting weight or analysing the forces and moments created. If houses like this were to be built, the cost of designing a safe structure would be higher than it is now. Also, every structure would have to be analysed on a computer (more real life consequences of program errors!)
It's amusing that someone with the slashdot UID of SubtleNuance has apparently never encountered sarcasm before!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Man, don't go in the bathroom! I just "extruded a house."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
of our 90 year old bungalow. SOME older houses were well built. Not ours. But the wood is amazing. Ald growth all heart doug fir framing in full 2" dimension lumber. Every piece we removed was carefully stacked away to turn into interior trim later. Subfloors of 1x3 TG all heart old growth doug fir. We pulled the sheetrock off one wall ( seems to have been put in mid '50s) and discovered that it covered up 5' high wainskoting in 1 x 12 doug fir, clear, all heart. Our foundation went away completely. It was apparently poured using unwashed beach sand, and was so badly salt-deteriorated that we could dig chunks out by hand. Putting a pipe through wouldnt have required any chiseling or jackhammering.. just push hard and the pipe would have gone right through. And we live less than a mile from the highest-load portion of the Hayward fault. shudder.. god I'm glad we have a new foundation.
when you can have like 10,000 little ass robot ants make you a modular carbon-nanotube house in a day, using swarm AI. I look forward to the practical applications of it. Should be the end of a lot of building problems (and probably the beginning of some new ones, but as long as Microsoft doesn't design the ants I think civilization willl be fine ;) )
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But he beat me to the punch. Credit [H]. - Parent author
illegal aliens
Is this what your Plutocratic masters want to call People? The same bastards who use this derogatory label think they should be allowed to have "Free Trade" -- what about the "Free Movment of People" as a balance?
You cant have it both ways.
Link Please?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
for decades. Just a bit more time consuming and wasteful, since it removes material rather than adding.
You build your foundation and floor. You put a giant "baggie" over it. You pump it full of foam. Wait for it harden.
Now start carving.
Some very interesting free form homes have been made this way. I don't know that I'd want to live in one, but they are interesting.
KFG
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
http://www.deatech.com/cobcottage has all kinds of information and pictures of gorgeous hand-sculpted houses. Why spend millions of dollars developing something that separates us even further from our lives, homes and the environment? And the poster at the top of the page is way right; this would only make the burbs more lockstep conformist.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I'd much rather see a dome construction demo/sample that made allowances for a DOOR or WINDOW..
I can make a dome with a hot glue gun going in circles.. (actually, my family made really neat snowflake looking ornaments pushing hotglue gun glue into a bowl of water) but how do you move the head around a door frame? show me that!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
first, for the record - what full 2" dimension is referred to as "rough hewn" wood. though if ya knew that, sorry to preach :-)
zoikers... ya gots yer work cut out for ya... but it does sound like you've got some really cool materials that you just cant find anymore to work with.
though, it doesnt sound like you have the truly cheap construction - the wood that you're describing is way too nice. if your walls were made with that horrendous horse-hair wallboard/plaster crap that crumbles in your hand - THATS cheap construction...
well.... as for my place....
i bought one of old summer homes of the wannamaker family, and am now the 3rd owner of it... there was absolutely no expense spared in the construction. i've got (original) quarter-cut red-oak floors, still unstained, but finished. my main support is a 4x4 hunk of stone and concrete. plaster walls throughout. 9' ceilings.
now - the electric... AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... scary, scary shit... it was put in post-construction, and replaced the gaslights throughout, so i've got the oh-so-fun-to work with Knob&Tube shit.
To make it worse, the guy i bought it from should never be allowed to wire anything ever again. its horrible. i've got cut lines, wires out in the open, bare wires exposed, chains and lamp-grade wires hanging everywhere he decided he wanted a light...
its un-friggin-believable...
... hi bingo
I am just finishing up and getting ready to move into a new Modular house. They set the house in 1 day, about 2 1/2 months ago, and it took the equivalent of about 3 weeks work to make it almost ready to move into. The house has been languishing over a month in a nearly completed state waiting for power from my friendly neighborhood power company due to a string of mixups, delays and bureaucratic hassles. And I applied to hook up nearly 2 months before the house was set. I can hardly wait for the day that home electrical generation becomes practical.
"Extrude-a-house" ... imagine it more like this: "Shit-a-house". A big lumbering piece of equipments moves over your property and shits you a new house. Sweet.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Very affordable concrete extrusion machines have been available for years to do smaller jobs like edging sidewalks and that kind of thing. I saw one that extrudes a neat little feet-tall wall (which does not have to be straight) for use in gardening and landscaping.
The way I see their only problems are the scale of the job itself and the proper characteristics of the extruded material so when it dries properly you are left with a strong structure.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Does this remind anyone else of the Xanadu House? As a kid I always wanted on of those, they were supposed to be inexpensive to build, easy to maintain, and well insulated.
Maybe if they hadn't pushed all of the other aging technology with it, we would be seeing things like it for new small structures instead of thes extruded houses.
Xanadu House
I'm a Tasty-vore. If it's Tasty, I'll eat it.
To make the contouring process work, the concrete would likely have to be very fast setting, so you'd have to hope the kit didn't break down and gum up the works - unless they find an air-cured building material, the whole concept looks dumb.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
And I'm going to become a lot more poor when I take a mortgage loan. Unfortunately there's no choice but to pay the price if you want to live in a nice area where you have a job.
and the houses had straight walls and windows and were actually up to spec and code.
It was called Habitat.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
btw In museum circles horror stories of unsuitable trophy buildings like this are legion.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Some of the technologies are:
The styrofoam forms have the advantages of also being their own (very high R-value) insulation. You get the further advantages of a single monolithic pour for the who building. The walls have to be vertical, but that is something that the magic 80% of people would want anyway.
Gunnite and shotcrete can be used for the curved ceilings and hobbit-hole style walls if that's what you want.
So my gut feeling is that it's a really cool hack, but the alternatives will probably be cheaper quite a while to come. Also, a big part of real construction is reconciling the architect's drawing with reality. Things change on a job. The site isn't exactly what needs to be, even with good site prep. There are change orders. Or the concrete pumping company has decided to strengthen its bottom line by selling you product that has too much water. Or things aren't quite working right and have to be corrected on the fly.
Turning the robot on and letting it go probably works better in the lab than on the job site.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
It doesn't matter how good it is, or how cheap. People are Luddites are heart and won't trust it. I know builders who want to try things like SIP (Structural insulated panels), whichs are both stronger, and insulate better, but nobody is willing to buy it. Or skipping that, just something other than something other than standard fiberglass insulation, which is only slightly more, and would pay for itself in the first winter.
How does it smell inside one of those houses ? Rubber ?
I am a construction worker. Good to know that I am going to be replaced by you egghead fucks! Just cuz I got no education don't mean I got no life! It don't mean I ain't worth shit you fucking asshole! Who the fuck are you to step on me, my life my wife and my chillen. You never gonna get laid, so SCREW YOU!!! FUCK OFF AND DIE MUTHAFUCKA!!!!
This is subject to the weather problems of building onsite. Factory building can make cool-looking homes too...
Checkout yurtworks
stay frosty and alert
Does it bother anyone else when article posters don't put their hyperlinks on the noun? This one should have been linked on Article, not New Scientist damnit!!
Do you have a plunger by chance?
This reminds me of a scifi story I read (its name long forgotten). For about 50 cents you bought a seed and planted in on a lot you'd purchased. In about a year or two a genetically engineered tree-that-was-a-home grew up. This wasn't a tree house. This was a relatively ordinary house that formed within the trunk of a tree.
All the rooms were there, although I forget if the doors grew or had to be added. Your water supply was draw up through the roots. Your waste fertilized the tree. Bacteria provided lighting. Even furniture like tables grew up out of the floor, although they were having problems keeping the tables from growing excessively. I don't recall if it mentioned electrical power.
All in all, it was a clever idea.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Wow! Think of the possibilities:
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
http://www.peak.org/~deatech/cobcottage/pics/yoga. jpg
1 -1 2-1.low.jpg
http://www.peak.org/~deatech/cobcottage/pics/cb
Just design any furniture you like right into the house. Every wall can be covered with custom-shaped bookshelves. Beds, desks, benches, tables, etc can flow out of a wall or up from the floor.
This could lead to the age of the disposable house. Create a new one when you're bored of what you've got, just grind it up and re-extrude. I can imagine changing my house every week, it would be fun and interesting!
Somewhere in my stack of architecture design articles is a paper from the 1960's that describes an automated extrusion process to build homes and other structures. The idea involved a robotic arm controling an extrusion device that assembled layers to produce walls, floors etc.
One immediate application was the construction of very large insulated dome lids for sewage treatment plants.
If anyone is interested in the details I will try and find the original article, scan and post it here.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, you took the one less travelled and it sucked. Now you want to go back in time"
Just about any knucklehead can repair repair sheetrock on 2x4 construction, and probably has the tools on hand. Not everyone has hammer drills and water cooled saws.
Wealthy types certainly won't go for a bare concrete shell in most places, but this type of construction might lend itself to holding up dressed stone veneers, and that is insanely expensive. Perfect for the person that has money to burn. Or not burn if you are talking about houses in the hills above Oakland, CA.
One of my old bosses had a thing against cheap stick built houses and held forth at length about some Swedish building codes that more or less required concrete shell construction. I wonder if this new crap-a-home technique will be bigger over there than in the land of the cheap.
But you're so right. repair and remodeling is gonna be a pain with these things. I want one anyway.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Really work for who? Not people really. the construction industry maybe. "Real living"? We Americans are the most stressed-out people on earth, surrounded at all times with straight lines and right angles, neither of which occur in nature. Flat planes of single colors, fluorescent lighting, on and on. We feel subconsciously that something's wrong all the time due to these environmental factors being subtly off. So we distract ourselves with Stuff. Things we can bolt to walls, fill in the useless corners with. And we work at jobs we hate at hours that would have shocked our village-dwelling ancestors, just to pay the interest on all that Stuff. I agree the concert hall is a great idea, shared community space and all, but we need something beside suburban conformity-boxes with 30 year mortgages on them. These wooden houses need way more upkeep and cost ten times as much, and are quite a bit bigger than people really need. Check out The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael Smith.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
this is in my neck of the woods. Must check this out...
Clearly you don't live in Oregon. We have teaming, hungry, masses of unemployed right here in my backyard. I think I may have one or two camping there right now...
7% + unemployment is a real bitch, lemme tell you...
In fact the Guild of Merchants' famous publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke, Citie of One Thousand Surprises now has an entire section entitled Soe you're a Barbaeriean Invader? which has notes on night life, folklorique bargains in the bazaar and, under the heading "Steppe-ing Out," a list of restaurants that do a dependable mares' milk and yak pudding. And many a pointed-helmeted vandal has trotted back to his freezing yurt wondering why he seems to be a great deal poorer and the apparent owner of a badly-woven rug, a litre of undrinkable wine and a stuffed purple donkey in a straw hat. (Pratchett, who else.)
We remodeled our 1955 rambler last summer and the guys working on it said that the wood they used even that recently was dramatically better than what we use now. I ran some cabling after they did some re-framing and I can see why they said that. The new studs were like going through carrots they were so soft, but the old ones killed my 18V drill after boring two holes.
The construction foreman (a crusty old Dane) said he's continually amazed at the open spans and spacing they were able to get away with in older houses due to the far better lumber. When they work in 100 year old houses it's often more of a hassle than in 40 year old houses because the codes require joist and stud spacings that the old houses don't have and it means a lot of retrofitting; open a ceiling and find a huge span that suddenly "needs" an LVL or two to meet code, despite the fact that the old floor above didn't even creak when walked on.
Wait 'til the unions hear about this. Could get ugly.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This technology was demonstrated nearly two decades ago.
One of the instances I've seen was a "Home of the Future" known as "Xanadu" up in the Wisconsin Dells (the structure is now gone).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...The hard part is figuring out where to hide the cacodemons, so that when someone grabs the yellow skull key, they get a rather nasty little "suprise".
than using a crew of illegal mexicans to build your house. Which is by the way how most U.S. homes are built.
been done many times :)
Is this really a smart thing to start replacing the human workforce with machines when our economy is so bad?
The coolness factor with innovations like this is quite high, I grant you - but should it be done? no.
Next you're going to say "It's just the way the world works - if you can't adapt, you don't survive." or more cruelly: "Carpenters are all unskilled labor anyway - it's not like we're putting smart people out of work."
Well - wrong and wrong.
Firstly, society has supplanted natural selection with social selection. In eras past, a person born with a birth defect wouldn't be able to survive, because they would get eaten by sabertooth tigers or some such - but now, we call them "differently abled" and help them out. We've realized that being human is more important than any so called "natural process".
Secondly, carpenters are highly skilled workers - they have to be engineers, machinists, mathmaticians - and they have to be somewhat physically fit to perform their duties.
Every time I see something like this in the news, I get a little more angry. All this means is that the rich man that owns the robots and rents them out to build houses gets richer, and the carpenter that used to build those houses now can no longer afford to feed himself or his family.
The idea of robots taking the toil out of life and turning the earth into a paradise is utter bullshit. Until the day comes when someone invents a "replicator" (like the ones on Star Trek's Enterprise) and makes all physical objects free of charge, robots replacing people will simply errode the world's middle class, polarizing the world into the very poor and the very wealthy.
Many very smart economists have said that the best yard stick for any society is measuring the population of it's middle class. Too many poor people, and you've got kenya or bangledesh. Too many rich people and inflation skyrockets, and suddenly money is worthless.
There's been piles upon piles of speculative fiction about this very topic. Everything from The Matrix to the backstory from Frank Herbert's Dune, the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to Skynet from The Terminator.
Granted, all those examples are more than a little melodramatic - that's not the way it will really work. I'm thinking more of an economic wasteland similar to what was portrayed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
A little note to anyone who still wants to argue - how will you feel when someone successfully creates a computer program than can successfully turn a plain English decription of a task into a working computer application that can do that task? How will you feel when someone replaces programmers and sysadmins with a robot?
This "House Printer" is kind of cool, but would you want to watch it? If you've ever seen stereolithography done "live", it's kind of boring.
And what's the resolution on that thing? If it can finish a one-story small house in a day, the resolution can't be all that great.
They don't use forms for the walls as a rule. They dig the hole to shape, rebar the thing then blow shotcrete into it (Gunite is a tradename for a type of shotcrete that is mixed at the nozzle.) It's stiff enough that it's self-supporting.
Then they apply a bond coat, then plaster. Fill it with water and you're ready to swim (almost.)
Sometimes forms are used for features, such as slides, steps, vanishing edges and such. These are often made of Styrofoam and can be bought commercially. But mostly it's hand done.
I could see however where this kind of extrude-to-shape process could be applied to unusual high-end pools, especially if it had good dimensional control. But it's probably too pricey for the typical 20 x 30 kidney shape or rectangle pool that might cost about $30 - $40k to build, including labor and equipment.
And you still have to plumb and wire it correctly.
Wanna know more about pools? Go to National Spa and Pool Institute.
I hope they haven't tried patenting this. I'm pretty sure that there's some prior art dealing with shitting bricks. In fact, I'd preemptively like to call this machine "The Brick-Shitter" in honour of the manner in which it extrudes cement.
With all due respect, though, this machine seriously does look like it could become an interesting tool for building developers. It's like a Rapid Prototyping machine on a grand scale. If it were made faster and more portable, it could be useable on large-scale structures. How feasable would it be to extrude a skyscraper?
Yeah great, a house with complex curving walls for which you can't buy COTS furniture
'New construction options.'
He who fights with Monkeys must take it upon himself not to become a Monkey.
So it looks like the only place where this will really have any use will the third world.
However, it's difficult to get expensive construction equipment and highly skilled operators on site. Third world countries, which are the ones that have severe housing shortages, typically don't have the money to buy a multi-million dollar house-extruder.
If they did, they wouldn't need it in the first place. And they would probably have the money and time to have put in place building codes to prevent massive natural disasters, like those earthquakes we see in India all the time.
This will also be almost useless to use in a built-up highly dense city, like those in most of the world. Unless they like knocking other building around it to the ground, and it can do 3+ stories.
I COULD see a 200,000 unit housing development in Phoenix, Atlanta, LA or LV employeeing a few of them, however.
I didn't hear any mention of reinforcement - metal rods in concrete; that kind of thing. Would this be necessary, to build decent sized houses?
> And that guy next door to you who has a house
> designed to look like a giant vagina is now
> reducing the resale value of your house...
I know a man who has a statue of a giant vagina in his back yard. It is approximately twenty feet tall and is causing him plenty of problems with his neighbours. Thankfully, he does not live in my neighborhood, but I was a little embarassed to be working for him.
Now I can have my own replica of Uncle Owen's moisture farm!
l arsmois turefarm/img/movie_bg.jpgT op-Page_fi les/image018.gif
Moisture farm:
http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/
Concept shot from article:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/RP/RP-
OK, who else has watched the animation of the 'whole house extrusion' from their website and spotted the glaring mistake?!
Short starand fiberglass reinforced concrete is sprayed about 1 inch (25mm) thick on stacked block in some areas of the US, as the foundation (inside and outside)ie basement walls.
It contains adhesive binding agents for the fg, makes it waterproof and VERY strong/crack resistant.
The resulting wall is waterproof, and far stronger and crack resistant vs stacked block and mortar, and rivals poured concrete for strength, with better thermal performance.
This stuff is _made_ for this process... A house MADE of that material would be practically bomb proof.
It is currently also extruded into curbs and ornamental shapes by several companies Ive seen advertizing locally, in a micro version of what the article suggests. (on site)
I don't belive in free trade, and as for the Illegal Alien title, it's a simple matter of putting an adjective in front of a common term for foreigner to come up with a descriptive term for a certain class of criminal. (And yes, if you enter the country illegally, you are a criminal.)
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.