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Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting

Posted by samzenpus on from the those-who-live-in-printed-houses dept.

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."

4 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Cookie Cutter Concrete by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    1. Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete by hirundo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Prefab home... by xzvf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.