Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting

ambermichelle wrote in with a link to a story about the possibility that the home of the future might be printed instead of built. "It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle. Minimizing the time and cost that goes into creating shelters will enable aid workers to address the needs of people in desperate situations. This, at least, is what Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering and director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies, or CRAFT, at the University of Southern California, hopes will come of his inventions."

Comments

printers

[Anonymous Coward]

printers took our jobs!!!

Cookie Cutter Concrete

[ColdWetDog]

So this will finish the outside. That goes up pretty fast. The slow part of a custom home is the plumbing, the wiring, the trim and the painting and finishing. I don't see this as a big game changer.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[trout007]

I work in a machine shop and every time I do finish
carpentry at home I think about what a pain it is
coping all of those joints. It would be nice to have a little CNC surfacing router that can measure the joint and cut the cope.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[lezerno]

When I used to work as a carpenter, two other carpenters and I could frame out a 3000 square foot house in about 3 days. As you say, the rest took about 3 months.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[HornWumpus]

No obvious way to put plumbing or conduit into the crete.

Everything would be in the floor. Which I presume would be poured in more or less the standard way.

How many tilt up houses do they sell? This is more flex able, but I'm not sure it would be all that much cheaper for square boxes.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[peragrin]

How do you put lights in the ceiling then? what about a second story?

Even modular homes, have such features. with this it would be impractical.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[HornWumpus]

Same way they do on a tilt up. They install forms, fabricate the plumbing and wiring above them (including holes for services to the ceiling), then pour the second floor. Steps have been removed for simplicity (beams etc). Generally dropped ceilings are a rule for many messy details hidden there.

Services also installed in inside non-load bearing walls.

I've seen very very few tilt up houses in the USA. I'm betting stick houses are cheaper unless you need to build hurricane proof structures (or bigger ones).

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Baron_Yam]

To be fair, the article says mods to install plumbing and wiring are possible. I don't see why not, either. Actually, as concrete can be made waterproof, you could just design the sewer pipes as part of the structure, only the inbound pressurized pipes would need to be something else.

I can also see this being programmed to produce mounting points for exterior insulation - put the insulation panels on the outside then add your siding to cover it up. This would make the concrete part of the thermal mass of the house, helping keep the temperature steady.

You'd also add similar interior points for hanging drywall, no stud walls necessary. That's IF you feel the need. Why not design the walls with channels for central air and wiring, and just paint directly on the concrete?

It's a potential game changer if you can get an architect to embrace it and produce something useful, desirable, and for less than a traditional home.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, reinforcing. Won't the concrete structure need steel reinforcing? That will take a lot of labour to erect and the process would have to work around it. Maybe build in a MIG head and lay the reinforcing as you go. Oh and lay steel rod for where there is nothing to add weld to. And .... What I'm saying is good idea but I think it needs a bit more work. Maybe it will be OK for some sort of monolithic concrete construction. Currently flat prefab panels with built-in wiring etc seem to be at least more viable but underused in domestic construction. Well at least in Australia. No doubt countries with their heads in the 21st century will use rapid build techniques like that.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[jbengt]

Not to mention the excavation, foundation, utiliies, landscaping, etc.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[aXis100]

Yeah the inside can just have a skim-coat of plaster, and then painted. In essence the same as internal brick or tilt-up concrete.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[cayenne8]

Geez...just what we need...MORE cookie cutter homes that all look the same...neighborhood after neighborhood, not character at all.

Makes me glad I live in New Orleans, with all the great old architecture, where no two houses look the same, and best of all...no fucking Homeowners Association to put up with...

If you like a purple house (and we have them here), feel free to customize.

As much as slash dotters like to customize things, I'm sometimes surprised more people here aren't against stupid HA rules, and such keeping people from individualizing their homes they are supposed to own.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[jbengt]

Actually, as concrete can be made waterproof, you could just design the sewer pipes as part of the structure, only the inbound pressurized pipes would need to be something else.

Uh, no. Concrete cracks and is porous. It would never be a good idea to use your walls to carry waste waster, not to mention codes not allowing it. I know concrete sewers exist, but those aren't inside your walls when they leak. What if you want to remodel and need to make changes to the plumbing layout? And how are you going to do repairs? In high rises it is not uncommon to have some piping (actual plastic or metal pipes) cast into the concrete floors, but it is a huge pain when those embedded pipes fail, as all things do, eventually.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[hirundo]

Geez...just what we need...MORE cookie cutter homes that all look the same...

You've got that backwards. Printing homes mean far more customizations. Bespoke your heart out on Sketchup, send it to be validated by a building code / physics model, and off to the printer. A room shaped like Einstein's hollowed out head? A bas-relief tribute to your dog on the living room wall? No problem! Try getting that kind of flexibility from a conventional contractor for conventional prices.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[quarkscat]

Printed houses? Really?

I've seen poured concrete houses, in Roanoke VA USA, and I don't think they age well. They are inherently cold as an icebox, expensive to make any utility repairs in, even more expensive to expand or modify, and when they do eventually crack due to settling are nearly impossible to maintain wall alignment. "Printed houses" can either be equally problematic to poured concrete houses, or else "disposable".

The longest standing buildings have used post-and-beam construction, with either stone or concrete block walls, or quicklime & straw block walls. Some such constructions are listed in Britain's Domesday Book, nearly 800 years old. The modern equivalent building is made of reinforced concrete and steel beams -- very durable in spite of extreme examples to the contrary seen by the destruction of the NYC WTC Towers & Building 7 -- certainly historical anomalies.

Ideally, houses would be efficiently constructed from local building materials, like the sod dugouts built in the USA Northern Plains. I would rather live in a yurt than a "printed house" -- at least they have been proven to "travel" well. In many "purportedly civilized" regions, building codes that enforce monopoly construction methods outweigh common sense. Bankers' rules. Better a small home wholly owned than a modern palace "rented" from a bank for nearly forever.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[walshy007]

Houses within a 100km radius of here average between $450k and $800k

With an average wage of about $40k, paying off a home and actually having enough money to.. you know, live. Can be difficult.

Reduce that cost to even $250k, and young people will be able to buy homes again. I'd take a house that looks the same over no house.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[__aaltlg1547]

In places where the cost of an average home is over 150k, most of the cost is land. You can't print land.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Polo]

I think you could solve that pretty easily. At a certain height, have someone manually go around and lay down electrical conduit.

Go a little higher, and lay out the plumbing.

It might also work out to lay down pex tubing before the floor goes down for hydrionic radiant heat.

In any case, the article said the use would be other countries, so the first world is probably not the target market... Unless they come up with clever curved designs that prove popular.

For instance, how about a hobbit home with a round door, or maybe a castle with ramparts and walk-in fireplaces?

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Polo]

I agree. If this slashdot article compared it to Lego for homes, I think we'd see more ideas...

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[crdotson]

Well, a couple of things make this interesting, I think. One is that if you can take even a few percent out of the cost of a house, that's impressive. Another's imagining all of the amazing things that could be done with printing instead of standard forms (interesting curves, leaving cutouts for wiring, being able to choose from thousands of designs instead of the few your builder knows, etc.)

I think it may take quite a while for this to become practical, but I think it could definitely be a game changer long term.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

Right you are
but, you could go even further: Sears use to sell prefab houses; you got a bunch of precut lumber, and assembled it onsite
whole towns were made this way (Sears adv literature touted cost: their designers had made the house so that you used lumber as it came, in 8ft lengths, thus greatly reducing waste and cost...as opposed to architect designed homes, where you might saw an 8ft into a five foot, and throw away 3ft)

I've always been amazed at the sight of highly paid construction people on a site; you would thinkg that at a min, you could rent a protable mobile home with table saw, etc and wireless from the saw to workers....

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the article says mods to install plumbing and wiring are possible. I don't see why not, either. Actually, as concrete can be made waterproof, you could just design the sewer pipes as part of the structure, only the inbound pressurized pipes would need to be something else.

And hope you don't live somewhere the temperature doesn't fall below freezing. I'd hate to see what happens when your "pipes" freeze and your entire wall cracks.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[cusco]

There are many adobe homes scattered around the world that are about that age. Used to work in a building in Cuzco, Peru, that has withstood 500 years of earthquakes, many of them well over 7 on the Richter scale. Replace the roof every 60 years, put new railings and stair treads ever 30 years, new doors and windows every century or so.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[JoeMerchant]

They've done these prototype concrete printers for many years (sorry, no link handy, but I saw a video at least 5 years ago...)

If you don't mind really rough interior walls, they could be printed too, slap on some EMT and surface mount electrical receptacles, exposed plumbing and HVAC, and this can be "finished" in way less than 3 months. Insulation? Print two walls - concrete is cheap compared to labor.

If you want "finished" carpentry, or custom carved stonework, or other things that take time, that will... take time.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

There are some concrete additives that make it "self-healing." I don't know how well they work for plumbing type applications, they were designed for water-proofing of concrete walls and roofs. The way they work is that when the concrete cracks and moisture enters the new crack it reacts with the additive which expands, fills the crack and then cures.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Tilt up is more expensive, but only by 5-10% which can be made up in reduced operational costs (cheaper to heat and cool, no termite treatments, better fire resistance for cheaper insurance, etc). But builders don't care about operational costs - only the selling price and most buyers are not informed enough to understand the implications of modern construction techniques.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[ArsonSmith]

I don't know, i heard they were stretching New Mexico.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Eli Gottlieb]

Most of the housing stock and materials are the same between the $150k houses and the $450k houses. The difference already is the land-value.

One other thought on making houses cheaper by eliminating human labor: will only construction jobs be in decline because of this, or will all wages drop a bit? I'm not a luddite, just a socialist. If technology concentrates wealth and income, we need some way to democratize it again.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[westlake]

Bespoke your heart out on Sketchup, send it to be validated by a building code / physics model, and off to the printer. A room shaped like Einstein's hollowed out head? A bas-relief tribute to your dog on the living room wall? No problem!

Until you try to finance the project.

Until you put your wildly eccentric house up for sale.

Then you will discover very quickly that no one else shares you enthusiasm for architectural follies.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Neil Boekend]

That is the personal choice of the home owner.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Neil Boekend]

Insulation is easy. Most insulation types that can be sprayed onto a wall before the second wall would be printed. A house building 3d printer should have a second printnozzle for that.
A double wall is something you put insulation in between, not a replacement for insulation.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Neil Boekend]

I'd love a hobbit house (but scaled up, I am almost 2 meters (6 feet) tall and I'd like to walk around without bumping my head.)

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Fjandr]

I've seen what happens when embedded piping fails in residential concrete floors. Sometimes, engineers just screw up in their estimations, and when they do the failures are ugly.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiosity, how much did those 9 man-days of labor cost the home owner?

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[CubicleView]

While I don't think it will happen this way, I believe the general idea is that
1. It will not be expensive to finance, the site and material costs will eventually be the largest expenses
2. Since construction costs have deminished, you're likely just selling the site and materials for recycling into a lanffill or something.
3. If everyone can print more or less anything they want, you will end up with daft houses, loads of daft house exist today that were built the old fashioned way.
I don't see that this technology will make houses cheaper any time soon though (if ever), so most of the arguments are mut.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[bickerdyke]

In any case, the article said the use would be other countries, so the first world is probably not the target market... Unless they come up with clever curved designs that prove popular.

But the second or third world probably isn't the best target market for construction technics that rely on expensive machinery and/or non-local construction materials.

Not to mention that traditional construction materials/methods are usually perfect for the local climate. If I was to live in a dessert, I'd prefer a simple tent over an expensive brick house that needs even more expensive A/C to be habitable at all and gets swallowed by the next wandering dune a few years after completition.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[sourcerror]

It's the homeowner's duty to strike for good balance between uniqueness and resale value.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[hey!]

My first reaction, exactly.

Then I thought about it. Everyone's surprised when they learn that those things take so much time, then it becomes accepted wisdom. But it's not some kind of law of physics; it's a result of a particular building process in which you frame out the house and then run utilities through the frame. Just to be wildly speculative, you could imagine a world in which people built a framework of utility distribution conduits, then *framed the house around the utilities*. Then utilities would go up in a few days, and *framing* would take forever.

So let's imagine a process in which the structure of the house and it's utilities are built in parallel. You'd pause the 3D printing process when you'd laid out channels for the horizontal distribution of plumbing and wiring. That would be very quick because you don't have to mess with the frame. You'd also put voids in the walls as you built them for vertical distribution, leaving an access hatch at the points where vertical distribution meets horizontal. Then when you're ready to put in the next horizontal distribution network, you run your pipes and wires down through the void to the junction below.

We can go further, and imagine *printing* some of the time consuming stuff. It's not that hard to imagine printing plumbing, although provisions for maintaining that plumbing will be a problem. On the plus side, there's no marginal cost to bringing plumbing into every room in the house.

Electricity could be distributed through fat bus bars printed from conductive epoxy. Conductive epoxy isn't conductive as copper wiring, so you make those bus bars *extremely fat*. Alternatively the robot could have spools of wire it lays down at the appropriate time. Either way, electricity should be easier than plumbing.

Paint? That's the easiest of all. You have pigment reservoirs in the robot and mix the pigment with the building material. The homeowner would never have to paint again unless he wanted to. You could make the outer layers of the house extra hard so it can be periodically polished.

Trim would be printed in place, or could be fabricated using the same technology in exactly fitting pieces that snap into place. You could print the wall surfaces separately to snap into place, like drywall but without having to screw it down. That'd allow the homeowner to change the color of his walls or add more electrical outlets.

If you're going to imagine something as radical as printing the structure of a house, you ought to throw out the methods developed to add features to a fully built stick frame.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the housing stock and materials are the same between the $150k houses and the $450k houses. The difference already is the land-value.

Only if you got ripped off. After having seen the process first-hand twice, I can assure you that the construction materials for a well-built $500k home are quite different from even a $300k home, let alone a $150k home. Land value is typically 20-25% of the total purchase price.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[aaarrrgggh]

Pure concrete pipes would be stupid, but you can do blow-up liners that go through the chase easily enough. You could also conceivably just do some kind of plastic extrusion within the chase that could easily conform to whatever shape required.

The down side is that the walls and floors would need to be quite thick, potentially reducing the savings. (Concrete slab cost is about 1/3 materials; walls are a little less.)

It makes for a much more interesting solution than tilt-up, and makes the advantages of tilt-up viable on a much smaller scale.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[aaarrrgggh]

Tilt-up concrete is hard on a residential scale because you need a large flat area and a good size crane. Insulated concrete forms are a little more interesting for the low-tech approach-- you can even do a hip-roof with minimal effort.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[DerekLyons]

So this will finish the outside. That goes up pretty fast. The slow part of a custom home is the plumbing, the wiring, the trim and the painting and finishing.

The slow part of any home is all the detail work that the systems and details require, regardless of whether it's custom or not.
 
But yeah, this really is a solution in search of a problem. Concrete homes have so many drawbacks on top of this 'solution' not addressing the expensive bits...

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[mcgrew]

I would never consider "resale value" whan buying a house. I buy a house to live in. I buy it for ME. I've never once bought or even rented a house I ever planned on moving out of. You buy a house usually with a 20 or 30 year mortgage, that's quite a while in the future for your crystal ball to tell what will and won't sell in twenty years.

That's one reason the housing market crashed -- too damned many people buying houses not to live in or rent out, but to hold for a couple of years until the price rose. Pretty stupid, considering that whatever you make from the price inflation when you sell it, you will have lost when you replace it.

"Starter home" is marketspeak from realitors, whose jobs are to sell houses, and as many as possible. Buy the best house you can afford and stay there!

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[tehcyder]

I've never once bought or even rented a house I ever planned on moving out of.

No, but I bet you have moved out of several through your life. Things change inpeople's lives and they move house. Not wrecking the one you're in with tasteless crap everywhere is common sense.

No, I can't predict the future, but I think it's a safe bet that if I gutted my house and made it into one big trampoline room or replica of the bridge of the USS Enterprise I'd have trouble selling it if I ever needed to move.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[tehcyder]

One other thought on making houses cheaper by eliminating human labor: will only construction jobs be in decline because of this, or will all wages drop a bit? I'm not a luddite, just a socialist. If technology concentrates wealth and income, we need some way to democratize it again

It's called taxation. Socialist countries tax progressively and highly in order to redistribute wealth. And yes, that means that if you're lucky enough to earn a lot of money, you pay a lot of tax.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[HornWumpus]

I bet it's more then 5-10% once you have finished disguising the tilt-up nature of the house.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[nurb432]

No technical reason it cant print actual pipes in the walls. We have home units now printing stuff from PVC. Could make wall coverings in plastic, even 'frames' for cabinets..

Change the plastics to epoxy and you could even deposit a sink or a tub or a counter top.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[jmichaelg]

Adobe has a mixed record. For every surviving adobe house, there are scads of adobe ruins in California that didn't survive the numerous quakes we have here. I suspect it's a matter of luck as to how a particular site moves versus the alleged benefits of adobe. Unreinforced masonry just doesn't cut it when the land starts shaking.

Even if rebar is used, concrete has been known to fail. The Oakland Cypress Overpass which was made of concrete and rebar collapsed during the Loma Prieta quake because the contractor skimped on the rebar. He was supposed to have tied the rebar together to form a metal fasces and he either used substandard wire or in some cases, none at all.

I can't see a printed house working in California if the printer can't properly lay and tie rebar.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[tibit]

That's just plain old exaggeration. Why the heck would all homes look the same? Those techniques make it easier to modify the plans! As for coping joints: if it's done right, it'll look like a CNC router did it. That's why, ultimately, you want a CNC router because the labor and potential for wasted material is just too much. This has got nothing to do with cookie-cutternes, what the heck, do you look at every coping joint to make sure they all got no repeating imperfections?!

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[tibit]

Presumably, such homes could cost way less if the land is reasonably priced. All this points to, though, is that we need way more very highly skilled workforce: we need engineers, there are really not as many job for very low skilled labour around. That's the price we pay for our lifestyle, and the available workforce seems to be 2-3 decades behind the curve. There simply are no more low-skilled jobs around, and there will be less and less. For U.S. to maintain its lifestyle, in about 50 years you'll need almost completely highly skilled labor force: say 50% of population will need to be at the skill level of a decent engineer.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[tibit]

I completely agree, yet there's a third way.

If a house would be properly designed, like - say - an airplane, where every hole and every fastener is on the drawings, then even a framed house could be very, very easily prefabricated yet still assembled on site. The assembly would then be a much quicker process.

So you start with a CAD drawing that has every piece of lumber, every fastener, every wire, pipe and duct run, all the insulation, vapor barrier, etc. Every piece of lumber (studs, joists, etc) can be pre-cut, pre-drilled and pre-marked using relatively simple machines. Marking is there to identify (number) every piece of wood, and to mark locations of other pieces that mate with it. You'd also want the machine to identify crown direction and align all pieces of wood so that when you put up a wall it can be properly leveled and the drywall won't bow. When you do it manually, a bit of distraction and you can miss it. Heck, you'd also want all the pieces measured for true cross-section dimensions, so that any variation in thickness and depth can be acommodated for in sizes of perpendicular members of the assembly. For exterior walls, the changes in lumber depth (larger dimension of the cross-section) would be all taken up from outside of the house so that the drywall doesn't crack when you screw it down. For interior walls, you'd want the machine to either mill it down to calibrate the cross-section depth, or you'd simply select the pieces if the project is sufficiently large.

Any modified concrete blocks for the foundation are either modified using CAM machines, or 3D printed. All pieces of wire and tube are cut to length (with necessary extra length for inside of boxes/panels as required by code). All attachment points for wire, pipe, ducts are pre-marked so that all that you do is string a wire through a pre-marked path, staple it / clamp it down where marked, pull through predrilled holes. Same for forced air ducting: every piece is pre-cut and marked, you assembled it as it were a LEGO house. Pipes: same thing, whether it's copper, plastic, PEX, you name it.

This would still allow a more-or-less traditional style of building, but all the jobs would take much less time since you have no guesswork, all the pieces go where you want them to, and all the tolerances are tight. Of course the order of assembly would be important so that tolerances wouldn't stack the wrong way, but this can all be pre-engineered in advance. There should be further tools that I normally don't see used. Say, for putting framed walls together, you'd want a quick-release clamp to square the stud to and press it against the plate, then you drive screws or nails through the guides. Every joint is then repeatable. You'd probably have many such jigs for different jobs that call for precision/repeatability.

I remember in the elementary school we were doing some crafts projects that involved cutting and nailing wood together. With my dad we'd draw everything out, cut all the pieces on a bandsaw so that they didn't look like crap, pre-drill all the nail holes as I didn't really have the nail-driving fu as a 10 year old, and so on. In the classroom it'd take me maybe 15 minutes to put it all together and it was reasonably pretty. Everyone else had it done in 4-6x as long, and the results were worse looking, and they were dead tired at the end of it. There's nothing fundamental about framing that says the cuts have to be done on site. It's cheaper for a machine to do it. Not only because the cost of operating a fast machine may be lower than the labor cost of a framer who cuts every piece on site, but also there are no mistakes, and cut patterns can be globally optimized across the whole project to produce least amount of wasted lumber. I presume that if you'd optimize it over a whole subdivision, there could be significant savings in lumber that way.

Same goes for carpeting: imagine the savings when you can industrially pre-cut carpet for say a dozen houses, the scrap would be minimized, and the carpeting folks

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[cusco]

It depends on how the adobes are made. In the US I've seen them pouring it out of cement mixers directly into frames, just dirt, water and straw, which is of course going to be pretty weak. In Peru they use a binder called 'paja', an extremely strong Andean grass for binder. Paja is so strong that if you try to yank some of it as you would a normal clump of grass it will cut your hands like fishing line. The dirt used for adobe has to be very carefully selected, the right mix of clay, sand, and gravel, and it's carefully wetted, turned, wetted, turned, and then allowed to sit ("sleep") overnight. It's never as wet as they use in the US, the blob of mud actually stays a mound until morning. Then more water is added and the binder is stomped into the mix. More turning, more stomping, more paja, and then a chunk is sliced off (it's about the consistency of bread dough at this point), stomped into a form, and the form is immediately lifted off. The adobe dries a couple of days, then is turned on its side so that the bottom dries for another day or two. Then they're loosely stacked and finish drying over the next several weeks. The mud used as mortar is made the same way, except the gravel has been screened out.

The civil engineering students in Peru actually have to take a course in the creation and use of adobe, possibly the last place in the world where it's a requirement.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Baron_Yam]

The Romans would like a word with you, as they designed waterproof concrete some time ago.

Modern concrete cracks because it's exposed to the elements which often includes freeze/thaw cycles, and because it contains iron. Small amounts of moisture make it to the iron, which then rusts, expands, and basically blows the concrete apart from the inside out.

Use the right concrete mix, don't expose it to freezing, and don't use rebar. For a two-story house wrapped in insulation and siding, that shouldn't be a huge deal. There's a reason that (once it settled) the floor in my basement hasn't had a new crack in 20 years, but the 12" of exposed foundation around the outside needs patching once in a while.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[hattig]

Unfortunately a large amount of the cost of a house is the land it is built on. Hence why cities have apartment blocks - the land they're on is tens of millions, so they needs tens of houses on that land, and you would only fit a few houses on that land area. This solution isn't meant for that type of development - at least not now.

Admittedly manual bricklaying work does take time and money which this could reduce - although I expect that the cost of hiring the machine will probably come to the same overall cost. Also I'm unsure as to the cost of bricks versus concrete as a raw material.

This will be useful in disaster zones, where you want to rapidly build a lot of small dwellings (of the 200sqft variety). I also wonder if the printers can use a mud/concrete mix, or adobe - I guess you don't want fields and fields of empty hard-to-demolish concrete huts ten years after a disaster. Alternatively, if the disaster buildings are created to be a useful 'base' of a home that can be extended later on then this shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who also work as a lead carpenter for several years, you sir are full of shit. I have personally built over 200 homes and the only time I saw people build that fast is when they put together shit. If I hired you and you dried in a 3000 sq ft home in three days with three men, unless it was a barn I would not trust the work and never hire you again.

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not see problem with this 80% of people get diploma/work as engineers and 20% that are not intelligent enough work on remaining "simple" jobs or work in sports/entertainment industry, classical division of labor

Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete

[Eli Gottlieb]

No, actually, those are social-democratic countries. Social democracy has proven vulnerable to regulatory capture and, thereby, rollback of all social-state policies.

impractical

[Formalin]

So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?

There's a reason a lot of things are still done by hand, and a lot of the time, the reason is money.
You can make a concrete house in BFE with only concrete, rebar, water, and humans, with some plywood for forms. Doesn't even need electricity, but that would speed it up. Seems to me that would be considerably easier to mobilize during a disaster, than a huge robot... no?

Something like this would be more suited to printing trailers in a factory (but not concrete..), or possibly a whole new subdivision, I'd think. But I'm sure the guys hanging out in front of home depot will do it cheaper.

Re:impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that making stuff in concrete could be very cheap if only you didn't still need humans to mock up all the rebar for anything but the simplest things like sewer pipes and such

Re:impractical

[gandhi_2]

While we will never run out of Mexicans to do all the labor (or Arabs if you are European), we may need to explore alternatives to the massive amounts of wood we use for tinderbox McMansions.

Re:impractical

[hedwards]

Why? What precisely is wrong with building hoses out of wood? It's relatively cheap, easy to put up, it doesn't bend or twist if there's a fire and if something happens where the firefighters need to cut somebody out of it because they've become stuck, it's easy to do.

Steel has advantages as does concrete and stone, but none of them are really appropriate for even sizable homes.

Re:impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

imprecise, doesn't last, labor intensive, generally poor energy performance, greatly varying quality, not very cost effective...

Re:impractical

[Hadlock]

There are more trees on earth since the advent of modern forestry than before it. I am all for "save the forests" in Brazil and whatnot, but the wood used in home construction is grown as a crop (a 13-30 year crop, but a crop nonetheless). Home building materials are about as green as green can get. Even brick is made with 2-3% ash from coal power plants.

Re:impractical

[Redbaran]

we may need to explore alternatives to the massive amounts of wood we use for tinderbox McMansions.

I think you're underestimating how fast Southern Yellow Pine that is used for framing grows. I live around many acres of tree farms and it's impressive how fast they grow. Also, this is what wikipedia has to say (emphasis mine):

Green building minimizes the impact or "environmental footprint" of a building. Wood is a major building material that is renewable and uses the sun’s energy to renew itself in a continuous sustainable cycle.[20] Studies show manufacturing wood uses less energy and results in less air and water pollution than steel and concrete.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_lumber#Environmental_benefits_of_lumber

Re:impractical

[aXis100]

You've never lived in country where steel, brick or concrete houses were the norm have you?

Personally I can get over how flimsy the American system of timber frames, pitch and felt waterproofing, and shingles/sidings seems. By comparison, external brick or tilt-up concrete will last for hundreds or years with no maintenance, corrugated zincalume steel or clay tiled rooves last 20 years without any maintenance. Steel frames are termite proof. None of them are expensive.

If you need a way out a a fire I suggest there's better alterntives than cutting holes out of your wall. Maybe like windows?

Re:impractical

[aXis100]

PS - wood has no merits in a fire. It might not bend and twist, instead it just adds to the fuel load and collapses.

Re:impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are cutting down trees and making 2x4's yourself then yes. Anything other than that and nothing you said is true.

Re:impractical

[Electricity Likes Me]

That's not really a thing worth worrying about. It's not like we're building coal power plants to make bricks. The production method adapts to the environment - if solar took off tomorrow, then you'd see concentrated solar brick making factories soon after that.

Same with concrete really.

Re:impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, we've got 20 years on a shingle roof that dad and I installed, and it appears that it will last well beyond the 30 year warranty. I suspect that the reason your "old houses" aren't made of wood is that it's been expensive since the industrial revolution in Europe, where here it grows on trees. Steel framed construction is still much more expensive than wood framed houses here, and even for non-bearing walls, it's only coming close to cheap due to the Chinese manipulation of the steel markets. (Good job you Aussies have done getting rich on that one). Brick construction is significantly more expensive, again, because most of the cost is in labor, and here we have lots of trees. Not bagging on Europe, again, it's just a different set of natural resources and population densities.

To get to the fundamentals, though, we have a rapidly expanding urban population, and people expect to be able to afford a house. If you ignore the whining snobs, almost everyone with a steady income can afford to buy a house. They can't afford to buy the 300 m^2 (3,200 sq ft) house that they feel they deserve, but hell, you can buy a house for less than $150K in all of our major metropolitan areas. Compare that to Europe, well, with a much more stable population and a society where moving away from home is not the expected behaviour, the dynamics of home prices are different, and the economics of buying a centuries old house are very different. It's not wrong, it's just different.

Re:impractical

[Altus]

If you really want an emergency shelter, you want one of these

Up in 4 ready to move in in 24. Just add water.

Re:impractical

[Adrian Harvey]

OTOH I guess you haven't lived in an earthquake zone. Brick and concrete houses tend to fall down without rediculous amounts of reinforcement. Wood flexes and springs back.

Having owned and lived in both 100 year old brick and 100 year old wooden houses, I would say the maintenance level required is fairly similar.

Re:impractical

[camperdave]

They have concrete with inch long plastic fibers added to the mix, which act as rebar.

Re:impractical

[gandhi_2]

Unless of course you take into account that wood buildings tend to catch fire after the earthquake.

Re:impractical

[Fjandr]

There are more trees on earth since the advent of modern forestry than before it.

This is patently untrue. Even the most conservative counts put current forest populations at about half what they were in the 1800s. Globally, there is a loss of roughly 32,000,000 acres of forest per year. The modest modern increases in forest size in North America and Europe are vastly outweighed by deforestation in South America and Africa. Between 1990 and 2005 alone the Earth lost roughly 309,500,000 acres of forest. Adding the next 6 years at the estimated rate brings us to around half a billion acres lost in just the last two decades of modern forestry.

I'd like to see even a single authoritative source claiming the Earth has anywhere near the forest area that existed 200 years ago.

These numbers have been called into question since they don't count areas of selective logging. If there were still trees standing, it was counted as forest:
http://www.fao.org/forestry/32033/en/

There are hundreds of other studies taking into account other time periods, all of which show declines. The only argument is about the extent of the decline, not whether or not one exists.

Re:impractical

[sourcerror]

On the other hand reinforced concrete can last pretty long, and isn't prone to pest infestation. You need quite a bit of chemicals to properly treat wood.

Re:impractical

[Oligonicella]

"You've never lived in country where steel, brick or concrete houses were the norm have you?"

No, but we've seen the postcards. That's why we build like we do.

Seriously though, you never heard the phrases "red brick" or "brown stone"? Both refer to housing, even houses. My first house had a brick first floor and a friend of mine had one with the first floor of cut limestone. In Kansas City, those are called "gray stones". Get out more.

It's taste. I very much like modifying my dwellings. So I like wood framing because that's easily done. Not so concrete or brick. I've worked with all of the above.

As for durability? Aren't there some 7-800 year old wood frame houses in Britian? I know we have a number of two hundred plus year old ones here in the US. In good shape, too. That first house of mine I mentioned is a hundred and ten right now.

Re:impractical

[couchslug]

The US has a different reality with unlimited land. We can afford to abandon obsolete cities such as Detroit and just walk away.

We can afford to demolish inconvenient buildings, and customers don't need long-term durability in structures they are likely to sell off.

Re:impractical

[Anonymous Coward]

To get to the fundamentals, though, we have a rapidly expanding urban population, and people expect to be able to afford a house.

Houses in America are built to last about 30 years because everyone in America expects to throw away stuff when they're done with it. We start by throwing away disposable diapers when we're 0 days old, and keep throwing everything away for the rest of our lives. Nobody in America wants to move into an old house; they'd prefer to throw away the old house and get a new one.

There's absolutely no reason to build a house that will last 50 years if nobody wants a 50 year old house.

Re:impractical

[tibit]

Not really. There is no alternative to rebar. Those are crack-prevention techniques, rebar is actually carrying structural loads, you'd need a heck of a lot of plastic to carry those.

Re:impractical

[tibit]

You need proper, specialized tools for working with and modifying either construction.

With wooden framing, you need, for example, a flexible drill/puller and snake to do wire pulling behind drywall. You need a proper knife and straight edge / square to score drywall properly. You need a manual drywall saw ("knife"). You need a sawzall (reciprocating saw) to cut fasteners when modifying framing. You need drywall finishing tools.

With brick/concrete construction, you need a percussion drill, a hammer drill/chisel combo, some hand-held chisels, and masonry working tools, perhaps a wet saw would be nice too if you want finished cuts on brick or blocks.

I wouldn't call either construction necessarily less involved when modifying things, you probably need same amount of experience to properly frame and finish a partition wall as you'd when doing a brick or plaster block partitions.

Re:impractical

[tibit]

You can build a perfectly sound and long-lasting home out of untreated wood. There's plenty of novice mistakes that handymen and unskilled people do when maintaining wooden frame homes. Watch some Holmes on Homes and Holmes Inspection, you'll see a whole gamut of what people get wrong.

Re:impractical

[venril]

One word: Haiti.

Re:impractical

[hattig]

Europeans use Polish workers (and other East European nationalities) for building work. Not Arabs. Where did you get that from?

The reason they're used is that they get the job done quickly and efficiently, and they do it well. Due to a lack of investment in construction workers by the government the home-grown 'talent' is few and far between.

Re:impractical

[Oligonicella]

I'm aware of all that. I said I've done wood, brick and concrete. Wooden is less labor intensive, cheaper material and tool (especially) wise and it's faster.

Re:impractical

[tibit]

I think that brick is particularly expensive in the U.S., while in Europe you'll find that lumber may be more expensive I'd think. That was my experience, at least.

Not impressed.

[jd]

The Canary Wharf project, as much as I detest the lousy architecture (it's a ruddy eyesore), was constructed extraordinarily fast. Twenty years ago. I don't see this being 20 years worth of improvement.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new Mexican overlords.

Wait, that's not right.

Why bother printing a home?

[ickleberry]

When you can just come over to Ireland and there are plenty of unused homes to choose from and just as few jobs as there are in the US?

A proper built home will last 100+ years, feck it the one I'm in now lasted about 400 years before it needed to be rebuilt, 6 weeks or humans doing the work is not a big deal, its just that shoddy construction is a big problem or at least was until the recession hit. Now people want things to last and are more careful with resources.

Not that I have anything against 3D printing but I don't think a house is the ideal application for it. I'd much rather print the stuff that currently comes out of China or out of large automated factories. Hopefully one day everyone will be able to print open source objects like engine parts, electronic components and the like. A massive house-printing robot will most likely be owned by some megacorp who will charge you the same and ensure the construction is just as shoddy as a Mexican-built house except they'll make more money from it.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[0100010001010011]

That's old world thinking. I doubt there's been a house built in the last 20 years that is going to last even 50 years. (Aside from the guys that like the monolithic domes). As fast and as cheap as possible. You're just going to live in it for 10 years and flip it when it starts having major problems, that's the American way.

Hell you guys have pubs that are older than some of our city halls and in much better condition.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, maintenance of pubs is the #1 priority over there. Comes before feeding the kids and way way way before maintaining city hall.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been a few building industry studies documenting the reduced structural integrity that has come with fast track building techniques, deskilling of the building trades and 'fashion' trends in architecture. housing has become a disposable fashion item. As cities grow it has become policy to encourage demolition of single story homes for multistorey apartments. This in addition to building quality self regulation. The building inspectors previously performed multiple inspections on every house, now even plumbers and electricians can get away with dodgy work for years until their work becomes so dangerous owners or other trades complain in sufficient volume and number to drag an inspector out for a site visit.

with improvements in technology we should be INCREASING structural design life of housing.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[cusco]

I worked in remodeling with my dad and brother for a long time, and when customers would say to him, "They don't build them like they used to" his retort was, "Thank god!" Until you've ripped open the walls of a couple of 100 year-old houses you really have no idea how poorly constructed they were, slapped together by barely-sober laborers working for $1/day, whose only tools were a hammer and a saw. In comparison a modern stick-built house constructed according to building codes and properly inspected is a marvel of engineering and science. Agreed, there are plenty of schlocky companies doing shit work and paying off inspectors, but you certainly can't say that's all the construction going on, or even the majority.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Rakishi]

A proper built home will last 100+ years, feck it the one I'm in now lasted about 400 years before it needed to be rebuilt, 6 weeks or humans doing the work is not a big deal, its just that shoddy construction is a big problem or at least was until the recession hit. Now people want things to last and are more careful with resources.

And all the other shoddy houses built in the last 400 years have long since burned down, collapsed or been torn down.

That's like saying that since all the people born in the 1800s are now over 100, all the people back then used to live to 100.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[russotto]

That's old world thinking. I doubt there's been a house built in the last 20 years that is going to last even 50 years. (Aside from the guys that like the monolithic domes). As fast and as cheap as possible. You're just going to live in it for 10 years and flip it when it starts having major problems, that's the American way.

Common claim, but nostalgiac nonsense. I live in a house built in 1960, built basically the same as one would be built today. Except one built today would have better sealing and insulation, much better windows, and vinyl siding instead of wood. There's tons of them around here, and very few are in any danger of falling down.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[0100010001010011]

I'm not talking about 1960. Think 1860.

I grew up in a house built then, they DID build them different. The house I have was timber frame home. Meaning the entire house is supported by 2'x2' beams running through it. The walls were plaster. They had little 1' wide and very thin boards that covered every wall, then they slathered on what was more or less a thin concrete. I've looked at dry wall funny and gotten holes in it. You could hit the wall as hard as you wanted in my house and it wasn't going anywhere.

Yes the insulation, windows and siding are sub par. But those can easily be upgraded, and even if they weren't the house (unless termines invaded) would probably stand for a much longer time than anything new.

This is how stuff was built in England. They also used much more stone and mortar. Look at how the Romans built stuff. The stuff they built has lasted much longer than anticipated and the stuff that is still around isn't framed wood, it's the heavy duty stuff.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[JoeMerchant]

I had one of those 1936 homes, constructed by the barely sober laborers for $1/day. When you've got that cheap labor, you can construct wood lathe to go under the browncoat and two layers of plaster, you can afford an oak plank floor with mahogany inlays, and you can make Art-Deco architectural sculpted walls with built in shelving, and you can sell the thing for less than $3,000.

Building codes are good in theory, but the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew proved that the law isn't always followed, in-fact at nearly every un-inspectable opportunity, corners are cut to increase profits.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a certain amount of selection bias going on here... For every solid-as-a-mountain 200-year old farmhouse still standing today or 400-year old pub or 800-year old cathedral or 4000-year old monument, there were probably 99 more built at the same time that have since fallen down. We only see the survivors, so we think that those survivors are 100% representative of the time they were built. Truth is, you pick any time period and you'll find there were well-designed and built buildings (or, in the case of really old stuff that predates a meaningful understanding of structural engineering, luckily-designed buildings!) and shoddy ones.

Just like everyone nostalgically thinks music from X years ago was better because nobody ever bothers to replay the endless dross from that era, they only play the good stuff.

100 years from now people will be saying how the people in the early 2000s really built to last, just because a tiny minority of today's McMansions actually will be well-designed / well-built / lucky enough to survive a century.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, UK here - we don't really do wood houses ... all brick or concrete basically.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the house.

My brother owns a late Victorian terraced house and the walls between the terraces are little more than rubble held together by the plaster on them.

My parents have an early Edwardian semi-detached house built for a professional family and their servants. It was built to a very high standard. The structure is entirely new brick, and the outside is entirely clad in red engineers. It has hardwood window-frames, floors and 12-inch skirting boards throughout. The rebuild cost (according to a professional assessor) is double its market value, and a good proportion of that market value is the land it sits on, not the house.

People have been building quality structures and people have been building hovels since the beginning of time. But it you want high quality and you're not rich you're more likely to find it in an old house.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[AdamThor]

I don't know about Ireland, but the labor market around here couldn't take the termination of all those construction laborers.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Hognoxious]

Hell you guys have pubs that are older than some of our city halls and in much better condition.

And the people in the pubs are probably more sober, and certainly talk more sense.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[elvis the frog]

Not that I have anything against 3D printing but I don't think a house is the ideal application for it...[]...A massive house-printing robot will most likely be owned by some megacorp who will charge you the same and ensure the construction is just as shoddy as a Mexican-built house except they'll make more money from it.

yeah, it's cool but kind of silly because it optimizes for things we don't really need. Solution looking for problem. Of course, if someone needs to quickly throw up tracts of enslavement hives this could come in handy.

The smaller units working with ceramic clay could be extremely useful for industrial scale work, but that's not as sexy an application...

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[DerekLyons]

I had one of those 1936 homes, constructed by the barely sober laborers for $1/day. When you've got that cheap labor, you can construct wood lathe to go under the browncoat and two layers of plaster, you can afford an oak plank floor with mahogany inlays, and you can make Art-Deco architectural sculpted walls with built in shelving, and you can sell the thing for less than $3,000.

The problem is that while $3k sounds cheap to modern ears - it wasn't in 1936. That $3k house was solidly the province of the upper reaches of the middle class - the top 10-15%. Not to mention, those details you list weren't created by the $1/day laborers - they would have been done by skilled labor just as they are today.
 
And no, you can't perform a simply minded inflation calculation to come up with the cost of that house today either. Costs are affected by other than things than just inflation - and the costs of skilled labor in particular have skyrocketed since the 1930's. There's a reason why you don't find those details in any but the highest end bespoke houses today.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[JoeMerchant]

The problem is that while $3k sounds cheap to modern ears - it wasn't in 1936. That $3k house was solidly the province of the upper reaches of the middle class - the top 10-15%. Not to mention, those details you list weren't created by the $1/day laborers - they would have been done by skilled labor just as they are today.

You could also earn $1 a day and live with a decent roof over your head and have enough food to eat. These were "toy houses" in Miami for (rich) winter transients from the North, in the 1930s, those people would have a 1200 square foot house they could get away to when it was just too cold up North.

Appetites for opulence have expanded considerably since 1936, witness the top 0.5%:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIyn3KjhrjE

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[russotto]

I'm not talking about 1960. Think 1860.

I grew up in a house built then, they DID build them different.

My point is that in 1960 they didn't build them differently. And 1960 is more than 50 years ago, and there are many 1960 homes around today. Ergo, there is good reason to believe that homes built within the last 20 years WILL last 50 years.

The walls were plaster. They had little 1' wide and very thin boards that covered every wall, then they slathered on what was more or less a thin concrete. I've looked at dry wall funny and gotten holes in it. You could hit the wall as hard as you wanted in my house and it wasn't going anywhere.

Plaster has problems of its own; it cracks, and it pulls away from the lath. It's certainly a lot stronger than drywall, though.

Yes the insulation, windows and siding are sub par. But those can easily be upgraded, and even if they weren't the house (unless termines invaded) would probably stand for a much longer time than anything new.

Why? Not because it has plaster instead of drywall; that's not structural material in either case. Not because its structure is timber instead of lumber frame; either one will do the job.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Bob-taro]

There is a certain amount of selection bias going on here... For every solid-as-a-mountain 200-year old farmhouse still standing today or 400-year old pub or 800-year old cathedral or 4000-year old monument, there were probably 99 more built at the same time that have since fallen down. We only see the survivors, so we think that those survivors are 100% representative of the time they were built. Truth is, you pick any time period and you'll find there were well-designed and built buildings (or, in the case of really old stuff that predates a meaningful understanding of structural engineering, luckily-designed buildings!) and shoddy ones.

Just like everyone nostalgically thinks music from X years ago was better because nobody ever bothers to replay the endless dross from that era, they only play the good stuff.

100 years from now people will be saying how the people in the early 2000s really built to last, just because a tiny minority of today's McMansions actually will be well-designed / well-built / lucky enough to survive a century.

I'm sure there is a selection bias, but don't get too biased the other way. Houses sometimes burn down, get torn down, get neglected, etc. The fact that few make it 100 years doesn't necessarily mean that the rest weren't built well enough to last that long. I suspect many fall to neglect. I used to own a 150 year old home, and was surprised at what some previous owners had done to it, but then it occurred to me that at some point before it became a rare historic house, it was just an old house.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[hattig]

Of course a lot of the houses remaining from 1860 are the houses that were built well.

Again, it doesn't mean that every house built in 1860 was built well, it's just that with such a lot of redevelopment and some destructive wars, a lot of the shoddy buildings aren't around any more.

Solid walls - yes, but the lack of an air gap means water can penetrate straight through, and insulation is rubbish. Furthermore screw that wireless signal.

And enjoy having mice running behind those 1ft high skirting boards, because to save money they didn't plaster behind them, and with an inch or more of plaster those mice are having parties.

Good things: Cellars. Quality Floorboards. Period Features (unless stripped out by some nobber, turning the house into a faceless, boring, cold, unappealing thing).

Personally I'm moving from a Victorian villa (converted into flats, screw sound protection, insulation, etc) into a decent 60s house.

Re:Why bother printing a home?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you did say " I doubt there's been a house built in the last 20 years that is going to last even 50 years. "

A house built in 1960 is over 50 years old.. So, wtf are you on about?

Re:Warning About Organized Trolling Campaign On Sl

[Anonymous Coward]

To the Douchebag posting these everywhere:

Go. Fuck. Yourself.

That is all.

Signed,
The Internet

PS: Oops. Somebody forgot to click off their anonymous checkbox. Guess somebody *cough* Bonch *cough* will have to make another.

Never happen here

[Vinegar Joe]

The construction companies are tied into the building licensing/standards agencies. See how easy it is to get a building permit and bank loan for a dome.

Re:Never happen here

[Sponge Bath]

See how easy it is to get a building permit and bank loan for a dome.

These guys seem to get by, plus they built a cool space-ship type dome.

Re:Never happen here

[Polo]

A friend of mine actually built a dome (in texas), but it was next to impossible to get a permit.

So... He built the dome in an unincorporated area just outside town. After it was all built, the town immediately annexed him, which was amusing.

Re:Never happen here

[JoeMerchant]

The construction companies are tied into the building licensing/standards agencies. See how easy it is to get a building permit and bank loan for a dome.

These people can help, a little, but lots of places just don't like the way domes look, so you'll be fighting that battle even though they will say it's about engineering analysis, etc.

http://www.aidomes.com/

And by 1973

[idbeholda]

... We'll be building these houses on the moon.

Good news, bad news.

[LostCluster]

Good news is that the consumable components will be available at office stores nationwide, bad news is that a full set of consumables will cost exactly the same as the printer.

Can it do the plumbing?

[wisebabo]

If these machines could simultaneously form the conduits and pipes needed for plumbing (is the concrete waterproof? Can it be laid down in a seamless fashion?) then that could really be useful. Of course, the fastenings (the metal hardware) would have to be affixed afterwards.

I guess there would be no practical way of making electrical (or fiber optic!) cables using this "additive" construction but at least you could provide for the necessary openings and channels.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Nethemas the Great]

That's the rub with these 3D printers. People see some form or other of extrusion printing of various objects then jump to irrational ideas. The most common being that it will either scale easily, and/or that adding the ability to print wiring, plumbing, circuits, etc. along side and within the structure is trivial (complete buildings, machines, self-replicating robots and such). Nothing can be further from the truth. Material properties seldom scale, and going from layering plastic/metal/etc. to fashion an object to fashioning a fully functional machine, house, etc. is a bit like discovering flammable liquids for the first time then going on to implement the internal combustion engine. Inventing present day 3D printers was the easy part not the hard part.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The channels is what is done already with SIP. Frankly given how much trouble my home from the 50s has with the right outlets, and putting more in, I can only hope that they leave enough overhead in for the future.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[antifoidulus]

A lot of the hype comes from the researchers/builders of the printers themselves, partly because they want to sell stuff, partly because they want 3d printing to be "sexy", and thus want to target the more "sexier" areas, building houses, spaceships etc. But as you say, those things are really hard to print, and the sacrifices that must be made often outweigh the benefits.

However, 3d printing WILL revolutionize some industries, but for those industries aren't very "sexy". One of those things is retail, or at least certain segments of the retail industry, namely those low-volume, low-margin products that most stores have to sell in order to be able to sell higher volume, higher margin items.

One such example is the lowly spatula. How many spatulas do most people have, one? two at most. Spatulas are also pretty "commodity" and thus have really low margins. And since most stores are not Spatula City and do not specialize in spatulas, they cannot get discounts in bulk. Now most stores would love just to not sell them, but if they do they risk alienating customers who want "one-stop shopping" for their kitchen needs. So the store has to maintain a whole logistical chain just to supply spatulas, and have to tie up capital in having large #s of spatulas sit on their shelves. Now enter 3d printing, all you have to do is maintain the supply chain for your 3d printer ink, and since there are tons of items in any given department store, you end up with a vastly reduced supply chain. And since you can link the printer in to the stores inventory system so you only make these items when you absolutely need them, reducing the amount of capital you have tied up in them.

However, saying you are "revolutionizing the spatula industry" isn't likely to impress a lot of chicks, so most 3d printer enthusiasts focus on much bigger, if impractical, applications....

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Anonymous Coward]

We can poke holes into walls to make ventilation work. We already have wireless network, wireless power, all we need is wireless plumbing and sewage!

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[JoeMerchant]

You could lay in fiber or electrical cable as the layers are being printed, but servicing it later would be... problematic.

Something larger like a flexible conduit might work, but as the conduit becomes a significant fraction of the size of the "bead", it will get tougher, and the junction boxes would likely require some "hands on" work to set, or a much more complex robot.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[RegularFry]

You couldn't do the plumbing directly, but you could make holes for it which you could line with a flexible membrane after the fact. The water industry already does something like this for rehabilitating old pipework.

Putting in a wiring harness would be an utter sod, though.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[khallow]

OTOH, we already know the materials that would be used here, already work on the scale of a house. I see rather the long term problem being much as the case for Edison's concrete houses. How do you make repairs on such a building?

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[El Torico]

You're not just "revolutionizing the spatula industry", you're revolutionizing manufacturing.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[DerekLyons]

Wow - you're understanding of the "spatula industry" is so far off base, I don't even know where to begin.

To take just *one* glaring error - no store maintains an 'entire logistical chain just to supply spatulas'. They order them a handful at a time from the same vendor they get the remainder of their kitchen tools from. Ditto for the capitol... etc... etc...

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Kadagan AU]

Would you think it's better if people stop dreaming and trying to come up with new ideas? Yes, we don't have the technology yet for this to be useful/possible. In the future maybe they'll figure out a method to print metals or some sort of composite to use for the plumbing and wiring.. I don't know how it will all shape out in the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years.. But I'm excited that they are investigating and trying to create new things!

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Nethemas the Great]

Learn to accept analogies, metaphors, etc.as not necessarily reality but good for illustrating ideas. The underlying idea is reasonable. If you can print at home (or store) basic kitchen utensils and other implements whose composition is simple and traditionally cast from moulds you do have the potential to eliminate logistical expense. Whether the 3D printer is cheaper to purchase and maintain than the savings gained due to simplifying logistics is another issue.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Nethemas the Great]

Actually, we know that concrete works with the present manufacturing techniques--pouring into forms with rebar. We also know that concrete has great compression strength but little tensile strength--hence the rebar. If these 3D printers were to see use in construction it would be far more likely to see them put to use manufacturing custom concrete forms used to pour the walls.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Nethemas the Great]

Nothing cuts off the venture capital funds to an entire industry quicker than an over-promised technology that fails to come even close to promised goals and delivery. This guy is promising the Moon--literally--within 5 years. He's not alone.

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[DerekLyons]

Learn to accept analogies, metaphors, etc.as not necessarily reality but good for illustrating ideas.

Learn the difference between analogies, metaphors, etc. and fantasy. The former are indeed good for illustrating ideas, the latter isn't.
 

If you can print at home (or store) basic kitchen utensils and other implements whose composition is simple and traditionally cast from moulds you do have the potential to eliminate logistical expense. Whether the 3D printer is cheaper to purchase and maintain than the savings gained due to simplifying logistics is another issue.

If that's what you meant, why didn't you say that in the first place rather a bunch of bloviated bullshit?

Re:Can it do the plumbing?

[Nethemas the Great]

Do you get enough fiber in your diet...?

Prefab home...

[xzvf]

I'm an advocate of 3D printing, but wouldn't it me more effective to build container sized housing components in a factory and ship them to the building site? It seems like a lot of work to ship in the concrete and its printer. A typical 2000 sqft house in the US could be put together from six standard 40' containers, all wired, plumed and finished at the factory.

Re:Prefab home...

[DanielRavenNest]

Check out Broad Air, a Chinese construction company. They can put up a 30 story office building exactly that way: http://www.broad.com:8089/english/product/bsb/bsb.asp

The modules are what fits on a tractor-trailer, and most of the work is done in the factory. The modules bolt together, and the supplies for the finish work are delivered shrink wrapped to the module, so it's all right there without having to haul it up a construction elevator.

Re:Prefab home...

[Carnildo]

Headroom is a bit of a problem with shipping-container architecture. At the very least, you'd need to use 9-foot-6 high-cube containers rather than 8-foot-6 standard containers. The standard eight-foot width is also awkward: it's too wide for a hallway, while a standard room is ten feet wide. If you offset the walls so that a room takes up all of one container and part of another, you'd need to stiffen the roof or lose the ability to stack containers.

Re:Prefab home...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm part owner of a concrete company. Shipping pre-fabbed concrete is not a good idea. Even assuming anchor points are designed into the 'components', you're still risking significant reduction in structural integrity with each movement. Also, concrete can't just be glued together once it's cured.

Sticking shipping containers together to make houses & whatnot, though, is reasonably straightforward.

Re:Prefab home...

[aXis100]

The structural integrity of an integrity reduced concrete panel is still about 10 times that of a timber or brick wall.

No need to glue either: install steel anchor points, bolt it together and fill the gabs with a flexible sealant. Works a treat and is ridiculously strong.

Re:Prefab home...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm an advocate of 3D printing, but wouldn't it me more effective to build container sized housing components in a factory and ship them to the building site?

You're talking about modular homes, which is a well-established industry. I just got done managing a $3M modular building project. Modular saved 20% on cost.

Ceiling height is the main drawback with them - 9' is as high as you go without major contrivances. But they can be any size and nearly any shape, which is good. The walls tend to be straight, and the workers operate in good weather all the time, so they tend to be plumb construction jobs.

Even still, it's largely manual labor. They have jigs, but not really construction robots. I guess the cost differential isn't worth it at this point.

Also, some shoddy companies are in the business. Go to the factory and verify the quality yourself first hand and get plenty of references. Don't rely on your general contractor.

Re:Prefab home...

[Polo]

Couldn't you put the wall sections on their sides? Like 4 sections 8' wide and 9 or 10' tall?

Re:Prefab home...

[Polo]

or... tilt up homes.

Re:Prefab home...

[sourcerror]

9' seems plenty for a family home or an office. I guess nobody wants a theater made from containers anyway.

Not quite yet

[theIsovist]

This is assuming that a house's wall is a singular item, which is a silly thing to think. Walls contain space for insulation, space for water to drain, wiring, plumbing and HVAC space. Yes, we could build a shelter with this machine, but 3d printing a house would be like 3d printing a maker bot. It may look similar, but until you have the insides built, it won't function. There's also a big issue with reinforcing the concrete. The walls will be primarily in compression which is fine, but if you tried to create multiple levels, the floors in tension would quickly crack under their own weight.

I'm not saying that we'll never 3d print a house, but their proposal shows a lack of understanding of the basic premise.

Re:Not quite yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they have dedicated much of their work eliminating your shallow amateur criticism. Your comment shows a lack of understanding of what they are actually doing. or probably, you saw fit to criticize an a decade long research program from a prominent research group based on an 800 word blog post. No where else can we find such an cadre of idiot armchair experts. Thanks /.

Re:Not quite yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know the R value of 2 ft of concrete? Its pretty high.... Like R20 and higher. It also has a high specific heat load holding ability.

There is a reason people do not make houses out of it though. Continuous pour concrete has been around a long time. Hell its just a matter of putting up the forms and filling the troughs.

Cost. Yep that much concrete costs quite a decent amount to pour, work, mix, make, transport. You then end up building another house on the inside. Because most people do not like concrete walls. So you frame another house on the inside to cover it up.

You can get to 5-10 stories with concrete. Its not that difficult and well understood engineering problem.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rac8/5205848122/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

Also most stick frame houses are put up in under a week. The other 6 months is spent putting up dry wall. Waiting on the electrician to show up. The carpet guy is late by 6 days... and so on. It is all the finish work that takes *much* longer than the outside skin of the house.

Re:Not quite yet

[JoeMerchant]

This is assuming that a house's wall is a singular item, which is a silly thing to think. Walls contain space for insulation, space for water to drain, wiring, plumbing and HVAC space. Yes, we could build a shelter with this machine, but 3d printing a house would be like 3d printing a maker bot. It may look similar, but until you have the insides built, it won't function. There's also a big issue with reinforcing the concrete. The walls will be primarily in compression which is fine, but if you tried to create multiple levels, the floors in tension would quickly crack under their own weight.

    I'm not saying that we'll never 3d print a house, but their proposal shows a lack of understanding of the basic premise.

You're referring to "Modern Western" houses, not too long ago, lots of people would have been thrilled to have walls, a roof, and maybe a door. Some places, the still would.

Re:Not quite yet

[JoeMerchant]

Two printed walls can enclose an arbitrary thickness of the insulation of your choice. With some refinement, the wall printer might learn some finish plaster skills...

Re:Not quite yet

[spitzak]

the floors in tension would quickly crack under their own weight

The animation clearly shows the robot adding beams over the windows and some kind of beam + flat pan objects that completely cover the ceilings before putting concrete atop them.

Wont happen -- gov't will be against it

[Anonymous Coward]

jobs jobs jobs jobs taken away by robots

Re:Wont happen -- gov't will be against it

[JoeCommodore]

That's OK, with all the IP laws and SOPA in place, everyone will be happily employed by retail/computer/internet/entertainment/mining industries or that's how the lobbyists portray America's future.

Edison tried it.

[Geoffrey.landis]

Concrete houses was Edison's great dream a hundred years ago; cheap and mass producable.

They never caught on then. Why would we think they'd catch on now?

-some of the Edison houses are still around.
http://www.google.com/search?q=edison+concrete+houses

Re:Edison tried it.

[Polo]

Yes, in the USA, with it's plentiful wood supply, there are not very many concrete houses.

But in other countries, concrete construction is the norm. Just about every house in mexico city is a concrete block structure. (Yes, I know, not poured concrete)

Re:Edison tried it.

[couchslug]

Wood is cheap and houses are disposable.

Concrete block and ICF (Insulating Concrete Form) construction cost more than pine. Game over.

I personally would prefer a poured concrete or block home, but a used wooden home was much less expensive.

Re:Edison tried it.

[westlake]

Concrete houses was Edison's great dream a hundred years ago; cheap and mass producable.
They never caught on then. Why would we think they'd catch on now?

Edison displayed a model of an attractive and plausible middle class home --- which was too expensive and complex to build. The final design was charmless and dispiriting.

The simplest sort of remodeling or repair work was difficult.

WHY DOLORES CHUMSKY HATES THOMAS EDISON

Re:Edison tried it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, perhaps in USA concrete is the exception and wood the norm. In Europe is the other way round.

Cement block

[Anonymous Coward]

You can make a concrete house in BFE with only concrete, rebar, water, and humans, with some plywood for forms. Doesn't even need electricity, but that would speed it up. Seems to me that would be considerably easier to mobilize during a disaster, than a huge robot... no?

Cement block houses are all over the place in Florida and I really like them. And Frank Lloyd Wright has a house where he ran the electrical and plumbing in the block - that way you don't have conduit attached to the walls.

Also, looking at the process, it's one thing to make little designs and whatnot, but a building? I see the weight of the cement falling in on itself, sagging, slumping, - unless he's adding some sort of hardener to quicken its setting.

Yeah, I don't see it either - at this time.

I really think it more work should be done because there could be some other appilcations where this process would be better suited than building homes.

Re:Cement block

[The Grim Reefer]

And Frank Lloyd Wright has a house where he ran the electrical and plumbing in the block - that way you don't have conduit attached to the walls.

I knew some people who lived in Pittsburgh that had something similar w/ reinforced concrete. It's really great as long as you don't have any problems or want to upgrade anything. Then you need to spend an insane amount of time drilling, or chiseling out the wall. Constantly hitting steel rebar makes it extra fun. That conduit looks pretty good after that.

Re:Cement block

[couchslug]

"And Frank Lloyd Wright has a house where he ran the electrical and plumbing in the block - that way you don't have conduit attached to the walls."

Not that he gave a shit about practicality, though I find his work beautiful.

Custom block or ICF (Insulating Concrete Forms) would allow conduit in which replaceable plumbing could be run. Potting plumbing where you can't repair it can backfire, especially in cold climes.

Re:Cement block

[Altus]

Even my hundred year old wood frame house with the three layers of plaster and board on the walls and plumbing and electrical that would give you nightmares sounds good compared to that.

Re:Cement block

[tibit]

Any house that has brick or concrete walls is the same in this regard, and such homes are all over Europe and noone gives it much thought. You just learn how to use a jackhammer. I re-did plumbing in my mother-in-law's apartment -- it was of precast concrete construction. Sure it was a dusty job, with every hole and recessed run having to be chiseled out. With experience it got much quicker towards the end of the job. Yay for glued PVC pipes, too.

Better uses in space

[geek]

Send the robot to Mars with the materials needed and small group of astronauts and "print" up a Mars base for future missions to reside in.

The uses for this on Earth are few and far between as I see it but in space where work environments for humans is hostile to say the least, the process could be monumental.

price of house vs price of land

[decora]

we had a massive over-inflated real-estate bubble for 8 years, and instead of everyone getting cheap houses, we got the Great Recession, massive numbers of vacant, rotting empty lots, and millions of unemployed people declaring bankruptcy.

alot of the 'price' of land has nothing to do with reality. its fake. its manipulated by investment banks like Goldman Sachs with fake money and fake loans and fake derivatives.

lets say you could churn out houses for 5 cents. a 1/2 acre lot near a metropolis will still cost $500,000 + taxes + sewer + water + etc etc etc.

Re:price of house vs price of land

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh go baseless uninformed speculation. 1) In a real "metropolis" we don't do 1/2 acre lots. In my metropolis of 3 million I can find 0.1 - 0.25 acre lots in the city proper in great neighborhoods for 30 - 50k. If I was a scumbag like you evidently are I could move into the burbs and get a 1/2 acre lot for 70 - 110k, again in great neighborhoods. If I move out to the xurbs I can get 10acre for 100-200k. All of them with road/electric/sewer. I could build a great house on top of that as an owner/builder for 100k or contract out the work for 140-160k. Annual taxes would be under 3k unless you're on a body of water, exceed 2000sq ft, or build multi-family dwelling. In short, you have no idea what your talking about and the land and taxes are not the main cost, unless you are constructing some kind empty pole barn on a concrete pad or live in one of a *handful* of expensive metro areas in the US. Even then, the costs still evaporate when you move away from the yuppies. LOL. Another excellent showing for the armchair experts of /.

Re:price of house vs price of land

[Anonymous Coward]

Price of land is mainly overinflated by city and county inspectors, the higher the value the more property tax base there is. Hence why you see counties supporting Homeowner Associations and frowning upon newly established Church properties.

Re:price of house vs price of land

[Anonymous Coward]

Ron, shouldn't you be in South Carolina prepping for a primary?

Re:When did Slashdot jump the shark?

[Anonymous Coward]

roughly 2002

1 word

[ElitistWhiner]

Union labor

That printer better be carrying a Union Card or there will never be UBC changes to allow jobs to be taken over by machines in the US construction industry.

Germany has for 30+ years been able to erect styrofoam building blocks in a day, pump with concrete then set windows and doors next day. Of course, unlawful in the US. There's no UBC code approved for that type construction. Why?

1 word

Re:1 word

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of tract housing is built by non-union labor. When the builder discovers a cheaper, faster competing bid that will radically change his margin, he'll drop his current supplier faster than the house goes up.

Re:1 word

[HornWumpus]

Styrofoam forming has been used in the USA for many years. Usually on foundations though. We don't like crete houses outside hurricane territory. When they are built, they are disguised.

What is old is new?

[YrWrstNtmr]

I remember seeing this concept in Popular Mechanics decades ago. The only difference is a CPU driving the cement layer vs one human doing it.
br.And as others have said...this is just the walls. It is all the rest that takes the time.

Re:What is old is new?

[Nethemas the Great]

It's also faster and cheaper to setup forms and pour concrete walls than to setup a robot and build it up layer by layer. The only thing this robot has on the former is the ability to more easily produce curves.

Re:What is old is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

Famous last words: "a robot could never do what I do." "What I do requires human skills; or at least, skills which would be too costly for a robot to execute."

Re:What is old is new?

[Polo]

Actually, it's that it can build curves, and is customizable from the start.

We've has this discussion before

[wjcofkc]

A couple of years ago we had a story like this. I can't seem to find it so if anyone else can... (maybe it wasn't even slashdot) Anyway, that story had linked to it a video of an actual full scale "house printer". It was a time lapsed video of an experimental home printer building a two story house complete with wiring (but I don't think plumbing at the time) in about a week. The end result was a rather fantastic two-story house made largely of concrete. It was rather impressive. The downside was the technology of the time was expensive and was really still alpha.

Anyhow, I appreciate why there will be a lot of naysayers; it's understandable for something so dramatic. The bottom line is that this technology is inevitable one way or the other. Five to ten years? I say yes.

Re:We've has this discussion before

[wjcofkc]

I should also point out that Edison first had the idea of mass produced concrete homes. For a lot of reasons it didn't work out. Since Wikipedia is still blacked out:
http://flyingmoose.org/truthfic/edison.htm

Re:We've has this discussion before

[norpy]

The wiki blockout is defeated by noscript (since wikimedia.org normally doesn't serve up javascript it isn't whitelisted for me)

Or just hit escape before it redirects you.

Re:We've has this discussion before

[cusco]

Edison claimed to have had a lot of ideas first, until you actually do a little research into them and find that he just stole it, or (if he was feeling generous) hired the actual inventor and then took the credit. Thomas Edison was the Steve Jobs of his day, a master marketer backed by a vicious legal team.

Re:We've has this discussion before

[Anonymous Coward]

And Nikoli Tesla was the Dennis Ritchie of the era. He did more to found the raw architecture that modern society is built on, but both have had very low name recognition. Sure, Tesla is getting more famous since Westwood's 'Red Alert' where Tesla Coils were the ultimate base defense, so hopefully there will be some honor of Dennis Ritchie in 50 years that actually recognizes him as more important than Steve Jobs.

Re:Man builds a 3D printer

[viperidaenz]

You'll just need to surround it in something pressurised while it dries so the water doesn't evaporate. Or develop a new building material.

Re:Warning About Organized Trolling Campaign On Sl

[Bucky24]

Who cares? If you have a problem with it then go get your own mod points and mod as you see fit.

Re:Warning About Organized Trolling Campaign On Sl

[Anonymous Coward]

PS: Oops. Somebody forgot to click off their anonymous checkbox. Guess somebody *cough* Bonch *cough* will have to make another.

I didn't post it, nor am I associated with it in any way.

- bonch

Re:What now?

[c0lo]

Marsellus: What now? Let me tell you what now. I'm gonna call a couple of hard, pipe-hitting niggas to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.

What? (that's still English, don't shoot... yet) Between me and you, going medieval on the home owner's ass only because the drafts included infringing copyright elements seems excessive. But it doesn't mean it won't happen.

Rebar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Concrete houses without rebar become concrete rubble.

Never happen

[p51d007]

I'm sure the following will have a problem with this idea. Plumbers Union Electrical workers Union Carpenters Union Sheet Metal workers Union This Union That Union Politicians that cater to unions As long as "big labor" has a stranglehold on the United States, don't look for any cool hi-tech to come to the United States, we shipped most of our manufacturing to China.

Re:Never happen

[cusco]

Don't you long for the Good Old Days (TM), before unions? Damn, I really wish we still had child labor, 10-hour x 6-day work weeks, no holidays, none of those pesky safety or exposure regulations, and if someone is is careless enough to be injured on the job just fire them. I'm really looking forward to the Libertarian takeover of Congress.

Re:Never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only people like Newt Gingrich who want to go back to those times. But sane people recognize the good that unions have done. Still, look at what (some) unions have become today - ever more focused on enrichment of the union leaders and self-perpetuation instead of worker protection and advancement. I don't have any suggestions for solutions, but we shouldn't let past achievements obscure current problems.

- T

Seem to need a big shipping crane + tracks

[Joe_Dragon]

Maybe this will work in a open area building stuff in a line but trying to fit that in to a area with other stuff in the way? Maybe to build / puttogether parts of the crane on site.

What hills and and places with uneven ground?

I noticed from the comments....

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the comments here are either how current building techniques are fine or how a giant house building robot is to big a bulky to be much use.

From the article this is not meant to a replacement for current house building but for mass producing housing for poor i.e. slums where there lucky if there home is made from sheet metal never mind proper plumbing or electric or water supply and for building in places where builders can not usually work like in disaster areas or the moon.

Also all prototype tech is always large and bulky compared to the finished product.

I think its a great technology if it finds its place in the world.

An all concrete house?

[Charliemopps]

An all concrete house? Lol, they've tried that every decade since the 1800's and it's never caught on. Why? Because nobody wants to live in an above ground basement. The fact of the matter is that houses can be built very quickly with the meathods we already use. Back in 1981 the house my parents live in was built in 3 days as a tech demonstration. It's a large ranch style home filled with all sorts of custom trim work, wood beams, etc...

Re:An all concrete house?

[Polo]

In many other countries, everyone lives in concrete block housing.

Re:An all concrete house?

[Anonymous Coward]

Single-family residential construction using concrete blocks is common in parts of Florida. They seem fine, no basement feel. The midwest and northeast are largely stick-built homes, sometimes with brick facing (also trailers/modulars in the midwest). I don't know what's common in other parts of the US.

- T

Re:Organized trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked for a company doing this exact type of astro-turfing that GreatBunzinni is referring to, I can attest to both the fact that it happens pretty much exactly like he is describing, and that posts like this one that I am responding to are the typical form of retribution that rouge employees would inflict on those who fucked with their performance statistics.

They even have trade associations for this shit.

For the haters, it was a job and it's a recession.

In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[Colin Smith]

Have a look at "fertighaus" builds on youtube.

8 hours:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vexbKmmPw8M

All designed, manufactured, tested in a factory. Built on site on a standard base with facilities in place. This particular one is a passivhause, which means the level of insulation is such that it doesn't need any heating, or cooling.

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[Nimey]

Absofragginlutely. If I ever have a house built, I want it to be a prefab factory-built unit that only needs to be assembled on site.

Sears (the catalog people) used to sell those in the old days. You'd spend between a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars (a long while back!), the house would get shipped via rail and then road to your site, and if you were reasonably handy there's your house.

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[cusco]

Remodeled one of those houses once. The entire thing was designed to fit in a single rail car. The original builder had done a crappy job on the foundations but the house was still solid because the sections were bolted solidly together. As long as you keep a good roof on them it will last forever.

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[JoeMerchant]

Remodeled one of those houses once. The entire thing was designed to fit in a single rail car. The original builder had done a crappy job on the foundations but the house was still solid because the sections were bolted solidly together. As long as you keep a good roof on them it will last forever.

They have been "cost optimized" now, they're called "trailers" and usually closely associated with trash.

You can also buy "Exposure D" prefab modules that withstand 135mph winds (better than most custom built homes), but they aren't much cheaper than a custom built home, unless you also build the custom home to Exposure D...

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[gatzke]

They do modular homes in the US too. Not your typical mobile home, they can look like a normal home but they are factory made. Not sure on record times for deployment...

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[TheLink]

In China there's a company that's done a 30 storey hotel in 15 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY
The foundation probably took some time, but it's still impressive to me.

Just wonder how much it cost to do that versus the "conventional" approach. And whether it's actually going to be used. They did a smaller one in 6 days before, I think as a tech demo.

Combine this concept with 3D printing advances and things might get interesting for the construction industry...

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[b0bby]

You should also check out the LV series by Rocio Romero - www.rocioromero.com. It seems to be the only affordable modern prefab house available in the US. You see lots of concepts out there, but these you can actually buy & build. They ship the main parts to you on a flatbed, all the other parts (drywall, windows etc) you source locally. You should be able to build one for $150-200k, plus the land; that's pretty good for a cool modern house.

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[couchslug]

That's completely superior to "printing" a house onsite.

If there is a defect in prefab panels they can be fixed or replaced prior to shipment, and they allow for REPLACEMENT and MODIFICATION.

Great vid, thanks for posting it!

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[wiggles]

Menards does this today. linky-link

Re:In Germany they'll put a house up in 8 hours

[hitmark]

30 story hotel in 15 days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY

Perfect for aged geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

The basement feel will make a very homey place to live, even if you can see the daystar through windows for a change.

Shoot for the moon

[Roger W Moore]

So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?

I agree it might not be the most cost effective, at least initially, on Earth but what about environments where humans cannot easily go to build shelters e.g. ocean floor, surface of the moon etc. Having a robot construct the initial external structure which can then support a more human friendly environment might be far more efficient that having humans do it.

Re:Shoot for the moon

[Electricity Likes Me]

No reason you couldn't modularize the fabrication. Or the robot. Or build the house in a factory, then truck it out, finished, to it's final location.

Re:Shoot for the moon

[Roger W Moore]

Yes there is a reason - the cost to ship a prebuilt house from the Earth to the moon and then assemble it. It would be far cheaper if you could ship a robot which can use materials already on the lunar surface to make a "concrete" house, run off solar energy and not die from long term exposure to radiation.

Re:Shoot for the moon

[Electricity Likes Me]

I was referring to "too expensive to be worth doing on Earth under normal circumstances".

The dirty little secret of capitalism

[Colin Smith]

If you could churn out houses for 5c, they would have to knock other houses down to destroy the supply.

Here's the problem. The price of anything is a function of supply and demand. If there is too much supply the price falls. If there is too much demand the price rises, and vice versa.

If all the demand for housing is ever met by the supply, the price of a house would fall to effectively nothing. This causes a problem with capitalism because the money to buy the houses, is borrowed into existence. Your neighbour bought his house, 5 years ago for 500,000 and now houses are worth zero. He has a half million dollar debt to pay on something now worth zero. The bank has lent money into existence on something worth nothing.

So. What do you do? You make damned sure that demand for housing (any product) is never met. Think about that for a second. Put another way, you make sure that there are not enough homes for people. That homelessness exists. Houses must be scarce to have value. They will literally bulldoze houses to make sure that remains true. [1][2]

You guarantee that homelessness and poverty exist because if they didn't, the banks wouldn't have anyone to lend money to and without money being loaned into existence, the economy would by definition, decline, not grow. "The economy" being the growth in credit.

You want to know why after 2000 years and the vast progress we have made in every other endeavour there is still poverty, still homelessness? The answer is, it's the nature of how money is created.

We rely on moneylenders to create our money for us. Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard?

[1] http://rt.com/usa/news/bulldozing-america-bank-america/
[2] http://www.newser.com/story/124793/why-banks-are-knocking-down-foreclosed-homes.html

Re:The dirty little secret of capitalism

[Pfhorrest]

Money being created by moneylenders is hardly surprising, as money is essentially an I.O.U. If nobody owes anybody anything, there is no need or money. Of course, until everyone has their own personal TARDIS (its drive can be broken, just needs to be bigger on the inside) with a holodeck/replicator in it, so they have all the time, space, and material things they could possibly want, someone will always want to something from someone and money will be useful for facilitating those exchanges.

But, yeah, when everyone can get their basic needs met reasonably, then there will be much less wanting of things from other people and so much less owing of things to them in exchange for that, which means many fewer I.O.U.s, i.e. much less money.

Although, I think that might not even be an accurate prediction; it's probably what the people with the wealth, lending it out so as to accumulate more of it, are thinking, but it strikes me as the same kind of backward managerial thinking that floods workers with busywork so that you're not "wasting money" on paying them for "doing nothing", when all the great advances in history have come as people had more free time, and then found useful things to do with that free time, to improve things that they never had time to get to or even notice the problems with before.

Then again, society seems to be strongly encouraging people to waste every ounce of free time they get, even while at the same time making sure they have as little of it as possible. Cumulatively it seems like someone somewhere pulling the strings wants everyone to be as unproductive as possible, but I can hardly see the benefit to anybody from that.

Re:The dirty little secret of capitalism

[RegularFry]

The fractional reserve system is what makes money not quite like an IOU. If you have unregulated reserve rates, then the GP is literally correct - money is created when it is lent. The money did not exist before the bank decided to lend.

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

Behrokh Khoshnevis

Sounds like the good prof is more a industrial engineer than a civil engineer.
How about some specification such as the strength of this rapid concrete that he "invented"?
Does his invention also lay rebar, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc...?
From the picture of the tiny model he's holding in his hands on his website, he's suffering from a major bout of overcompensating for his shortcomings.

Heard about this a few years ago..

[jcr]

I hope he gets the funding he needs to get it on the market soon. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs there is, and the more of it we can automate, the better. Plus, I love the incredible flexibility that this technology makes possible.

-jcr

This is vastly different from Edison's approach.

[jcr]

Edison was working on re-usable steel formwork, which didn't offer much flexibility in design, and required quite a lot of labor to assemble, pour and strip. The contour crafting system could potentially be run by a single operator.

-jcr

concrete has to cure

[Anonymous Coward]

Get it up in 3 days, fine, but my poured concrete basement walls had to cure 2 weeks before the above ground 2 stories could be added.

Same with the poured floor in my shop--two weeks before machines could be moved in.

So 3 days then wait two weeks? Won't immediately help flood or earthquake victims as OP talked about.

Re:Man builds a 3D printer

[couchslug]

"Also, concrete on the Moon would never solidify without an atmosphere."

Concrete cures by hydration, even under water.

Can we add a drill?

[aaronb1138]

With a drill added, I can have my dream of a home chassis built into the side of a hill. The limited exterior and full interior I can take care of myself.

For the curious, my dream is two fold. First, I think houses carved into the side of a hill look amazing when done correctly. Second, they are unbeatable in most climates for energy efficient climate control. It's actually amazing how few alternate construction styles they allow for in Texas given the need for better insulation here.

Re:seems overly expensive

[camperdave]

Picture it on the moon, using lunar regolith based concrete. Other than that, it's a bust, as you point out.

Re:Warning About Organized Trolling Campaign On Sl

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Bonch, can you quit trolling with your exomondo account as well? You're wrecking all the useful discussions.

Totally missing the point

[istartedi]

Until housing is regarded as a consumer item that is desirable to make cheaply, this will not happen. Our ENTIRE FINANCIAL SYSTEM is predicated on the notion that a house is an investment which must appreciate. There is no intrinsic need for this of course, it's just the way things are. The idea is so ingrained in people's thought processes that it just doesn't occur to them that it's wrong. I'm tired of re-hashing this on Slashdot. Even most people here don't get it.

This, like all other ideas that are supposed to make housing affordable, will run into the same brick wall: Nobody actually wants affordable housing because our system is designed to force all but the wealthiest consumers to have leveraged real estate as their largest investment. When leveraged investments decline in value, those who hold them experience amplified losses.

concrete not very practical

[Anonymous Coward]

So, IAAA (I Am An Architect), and this is, as many have pointed out, just laughable. Unless you are in a very hot climate - tropical or arid - you don't want the walls of your house to be made of a material with a huge amount of thermal mass and no insulation. Although it works great in, say, Arizona - at least, until the sun hits it.

Current construction methods for housing, the so-called "balloon construction" utilize insulation and layers of vapor or moisture barriers, depending on the climate, to keep the occupants inside dry and the walls from growing mold. Mold and lack of any retention of heat would be a huge issue in northern climates, where millions of Americans live.

Plus, remodeling homes made of concrete would be a complete joke - you would need a concrete saw to cut holes in the building. I've done work like that in renovating concrete tilt-up buildings, and it is very expensive labor-wise to do.

What the industry IS moving towards, however, is prefabrication of either building components - breaking a house into one or several box sections that can be shipped via truck - or prefab wall, ceiling, and floor sections which can be quickly erected on site. With new advances of materials and HVAC systems, we can even build airtight "passive homes" which use virtually no energy to heat or cool throughout the year.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

Re:concrete not very practical

[tibit]

As with anything, where there's demand, there'll be affordable solutions. You'd expect a larger selection of percussion drills and electric hammers/chisels in, say, German home improvement store than in American one. Heck, in a German store you'd also find a couple decent concrete saws, too. It doesn't have to be labor intensive if everyone around knows how to do it properly.

Re:Man builds a 3D printer

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it hydrates under water, but zero pressure would cause the water to evaporate before hydration could take place.

Reality called, they want your fantasy back

[mangu]

Houses must be scarce to have value. They will literally bulldoze houses to make sure that remains true

There are cities in the US where whole city blocks are being bulldozed, but that's not to create scarcity, it's because they could find no buyers for those homes.

You guarantee that homelessness and poverty exist because if they didn't, the banks wouldn't have anyone to lend money to and without money being loaned into existence, the economy would by definition, decline, not grow.

You should find yourself another crack dealer, the one you have right now is selling you really bad stuff.

Money saved represents work whose output wasn't consumed right away. Investments are a way to use the results of that work immediately. It has nothing to do with poverty, in fact poor people are exactly those customers that banks try to avoid.

Money is a unit of measure of value. Without markets and money how would you know how many bales of cotton to exchange for a bushel of wheat? Banking depends on money only for that, to have a way to compare the value of different things. As a matter of fact, in the last decades governments have done their worst to destroy the usefulness of money by making inflation, but banks have some ways to cope with that.

The way the economy works is that people do more work than they need for their immediate needs. They save for a day when they may not be able to work anymore. The result of that extra work that has been saved would stand idly if everyone were by himself, but why not use it by lending it to someone else?

I have a tool that I'm not using right now, I will lend it to you under the condition that you bring it back to me tomorrow when I'll need it. That way one tool can be used by two people. Investments and lending work exactly like that, only they do not refer to one specific tool, but to everything that people have created and haven't used at once.

Re:Reality called, they want your fantasy back

[AkkarAnadyr]

I have a tool that I'm not using right now, I will lend it to you under the condition that you bring it back to me tomorrow when I'll need it ... Investments and lending work exactly like that

Except that they don't, at least not any more.

With the repeal of Glass-Steagal (Gramm et al 1999), and especially reserve requirements (Paulson 2004), banks were now free both to lend out money they did not have (they only have your promise to work up the money and pay later, and the (tee-hee!) "collateral" of the property), and to speculate in hedges and derivatives to pretend that the risk had been negated rather than just moved out of sight.

Huge chunks of credit (NOT money) were inflated into existence in this way, with everyone believing in the existence of this new "wealth" that would surely come in as loans were paid off by the newly "wealthy". Result:a runaway bubble in RE prices (NOT values).

If things worked as you say, the current Depression (NOT recession, NOT recovery) could not have happened. Instead we have the .gov and Fed pumping up 12% p.a. of GDP with *more* credit, worsening the result when the inevitable reversion to the mean happens, the creditors discover they've been sold an empty promise (a slowing in credit expansion now causes GDP contraction and unemployment, and unemployed people do not pay back loans OR pay taxes).

Banks (creditors) have been scrambling to put off that day by counting HELOCs on defaulted houses at par (Kanjorski 2009), dawdling for *years* on foreclosures, and borrowing from the FED at 0% interest then sitting on the money (remember all those "waah, banks aren't lending the stimulus money" stories?).

I'd love to live in an economy that works as you describe, but its capital has been hollowed out and replaced with credit, with real wealth replaced by claims on an uncertain future, claims which have ballooned to many times what even sovereign nations can pay (Iceland, Ireland, Greece, with Italy,Spain, France, England, Germany, and the USA on deck).

The banks aren't just knocking houses down to create scarcity - they're knocking them down (after letting them go moldy) to be able to account for them differently so they avoid eating the loss, and *still* avoid local taxes.

Re:Reality called, they want your fantasy back

[mangu]

Why pick on Glass-Steagal? This crisis was triggered by MORTGAGES. Get it? It was the junk mortgages that started everything. Mortgages. Not general credit extension.

Now, why did the banks give so many mortgages? If you want to learn a bit about this, go and study redlining and the regulations the US Federal Government has created restricting the ability of banks to deny mortgages to low-income people.

It's not the banks that make inflation, it's not the banks that give bad credit. It's the federal government that regulates banking and forces them to give ghetto loans to people who are unable to pay back.

Runaway robots?

[jwdb]

Anyone else think of Blame! when they read this?

The setting's the very distant future, where among other things this kind of building robot has been put into use. Unfortunately, humans have long forgotten how to control them, and as a result the single structure the Earth has become now extends past the orbit of the moon, which was itself consumed as building resources...

Always makes my hair stand on end.

It's The Money

[Anonymous Coward]

A complete robotic build may be more practical in factory built modular housing than on site at this time. Robots can do all kinds of construction and assembly procedures but one must hafe staff to keep the robots working correctly. That staff is expensive as are the robots.
            Still, it will work and probably take over the construction industry completely. As far as the end product goes we need to adapt to new designs and concepts just as the robots need to adapt to the chores at hand. In my area frame built homes are not really allowed anymore. We need solid concrete and good insulation. Wind and heat are huge issues here. Forming metal mesh and spraying on concrete are both chores that robots could adapt to with relative ease. Compare that to that cute wooden home is like a joke. The first decent hurricane here will usually turn a stick built home into tooth picks.

We can do this with technology today

[bridgey655]

Take a look over at www.thevenusproject.com, slashdot readers will love the concepts. Why haven't you featured them on here yet?

It will increase unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

So, just as robots have displaced human workers from factory jobs, this will displace human construction workers from building homes. How exactly is that a good thing for the economy?

Re:It will increase unemployment

[WindBourne]

In America, more than 3/4 of the workers are illegals who do not pay taxes, but make heavy use of resources. Sending them on their way is NOT a bad thing.

Re:When did Slashdot jump the shark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, that's the year I joined.

Unnecessary

[JobyOne]

We're not short on housing in this country (the USA). We're short on money to appease banks so that they'll let people actually live in said housing. Banks are currently tearing down forclosed houses in an attempt to drive real estate prices up, to get their gigantor loan money machine running again.

The truth is that we've already got a plethora of ways to build cheap houses, many of which are more environmentally friendly and durable than modern stick frame construction. The bank/developer/contractor/lumber cartel won't have it, though, because they've been making a lot of money off overvalued, shoddily constructed McMansions -- and they're the ones who write our building codes, so it's gonna be a tough nut to crack. Regulatory capture, anyone?

This -- along with many other great ways to build houses -- won't ever be used here, as long as we let mortgage brokers and McMansion contractors continue to define our building codes.

It's a hell of a machine, yes, but it's a solution in search of a problem.

well, that's just like, your opinion, man!

[Thud457]

Bah!
I double-dog (sic) dare you to name one contribution Tesla made to the science of electrocuting small household pets and circus animals to scare little old ladies.
one.

Brickwork

[zigfreed]

The #1 tedious job that this machine is working towards is brickwork. You'd need an extra machine trailing to place the bricks and fill the gap between bricks, but I'm thinking the ideal case would be that after the foundation, get the entire outside wall placed and pointed overnight.

Locks up a little atmospheric carbon though!

[Medievalist]

What precisely is wrong with building hoses out of wood?

I imagine they are leaky, inflexible and get splinters in your hands.

Not what I'd buy

[Anonymous Coward]

First: what do you do in five or ten years, when you want to upgrade something? Oh, sorry, it's all one piece.
Next: what do you do when something breaks? See previous response.

Send it back to the manufacturer? Have them spit out another home, with the fix? Will they offer replacement/maintenance/upgrades? And if so, how much will *they* charge, vs. the contractor of your choice, or doing it yourself?

Don't forget to wait till someone sues you for cloning *their* fancy digs.

                  mark

Just A Comment About Using Concrete

[LifesABeach]

Do not ignore the Steel Re-Bar. One only has to ask the children of Sichuan, and the Haitian's what they think of it. Building Codes can be obstructive, but the problem is, is that they are written in blood.

Re:Just A Comment About Using Concrete

[JobyOne]

Some building codes are written in blood. Many others are written in money. Specifically money from lumber companies who want everything to be made of wood, cement companies who want everything to be made with cement, contractors who want everything to be big and labor intensive to build, developers who want to market over-blown McMansions, and banks who want everything to be as expensive as possible so they get to write bigger loans.

concrete. great.

[roc97007]

Completely automated brutalism. Great.

I'm not sure how this works for temporary shelters, as concrete structures tend to be relatively permanent, getting repurposed instead of torn down.

Someone mentioned that it's the interior plumbing, sheetrock, molding and so forth that's most of the work, not the shell. I worked as a laborer for a building contractor in college, and I can vouch for this. The shell goes up surprisingly fast, and then the real work begins.

But one possible solution for the time and energy required to provision interiors would be to keep the insides as unadorned as the outside, with exposed pipes and wiring. (This isn't as dangerous as it sounds -- modern wiring is quite well sheathed, and wall plugs and switches are completely enclosed in metal or plastic.) This would also allow more convenient access to utility conduits should repairs be necessary. Residents will soon get used to the hollow echo of bare concrete. Or acoustic tiles could be attached in key spots.

Ok for a temporary shelter, but again, if temporary, why concrete? A test balloon for new techniques in resident housing, perhaps?

I always wanted...

[Dareth]

I always wanted to mow my roof!

Self-replicating space habitats & seasteads

[Paul Fernhout]

someday... From 1929:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant. ..."

Re:Self-replicating space habitats & seasteads

[__aaltlg1547]

I guess I can modify that to "you can't print land yet.

Not good enough YET ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The SMART way to do this is to spray the concrete over straw bales.

Several thoughts....

[WindBourne]

1) Can this be modified to work on the moon and mars?
2) What about all of the illegals that are in the US? Will he then give them citizenship and have them collect welfare?