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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."
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
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.
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.