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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.
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I am moving to Mars where they still build houses the old fashion way. Wait... what? ..... Aww crap
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!"
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.
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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.
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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.
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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