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World's First 3D Printed Estate Coming To New York
New submitter Randy-tanner (3791853) writes A well known New York architect & contractor has begun construction on what is possibly the largest 3D printing related project ever undertaken. He is 3D printing an entire estate, which includes an in-ground swimming pool, a pool house, and a huge 2400 square foot home. The project is expected to take two years to complete, and if all goes as planned the printer will automatically insert rebar into the concrete.
Just because you can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that you should do that thing.
2400 square feet is "huge"? None of the houses in my neighborhood are that small, and it's not that fancy of a place.
My 3D printer is 30 Mexicans with 5 gallon buckets. You can pour a house pretty quick. Well, you still gotta build the mold
We used to just call it "pouring cement" and "laying bricks" but now that additive manufacturing is such a big hit we have to call it 3D Printing.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
While 3-D printing is suitable for making some objects, like a keychain fob, doing a huge mechanical structure seems too risky and not an appropriate application.
Take a look at the plans. Notice that everything is "printed" in strips. That does not look very flexible to me. It looks like it is constructed with cargo containers. Then there is the installation of things such as electrical, hvac, and plumbing. That may be difficult.
This guy may be taking things a bit too far but there is certainly a lot of room for potential use of 3D printers in construction. The two things I really wish already existed are a 3D room painter and a 3D Drywall Joint Compound Printer. Having a machine that can make your walls perfectly smooth (with no sanding). Then have another machine to paint it with no brush strokes and perfectly straight lines. It would be amazing for both home builders and home owners. When compared to paying someone there would be significant savings with a very quick payback if you used it often (home builder). Although a lot of people would be out of a job because of it.
Famous last words.
The rebar thing is important because the material being printed is great in compression but not so great in tension.
"...and if all goes as planned the printer will automatically insert rebar into the concrete." Actually when creating a foundation the rebar should be laid first and suspended on dobies then concrete is poured on over the metal cage like structure. One can not simply print rebar & concrete simultaneously.
Not sure if it's the first, check the Amsterdam canal house being printed: http://3dprintcanalhouse.com/
trans corpus mortuum
... would have ended the computer revolution before it even began. Keep in mind that computers, automobiles, air planes, etc. were all incredibly primitive in their days. At best they provided an incremental step forwards in some applications while being a huge step backwards in most other applications. Yet people plugged away at the technology and created something that was truly amazing in the long run.
Remember those first computers. They were unreliable number crunchers that could barely be programmed and certainly weren't programmable in the way we think of programming today. There were applications to be sure: in domains like ballistics and finance, but even then only a limited subset of problems. If a particular problem wasn't big enough, it was faster and cheaper to use traditional techniques. Now they enable complex global communications networks and are cheap enough to turn sophisticated simulations into entertainment.
And that is just one example.
I wouldn't call a 2400 square foot home "huge". It may be huge by post-WWII suburban housing boom standards, but it is not huge by modern standards. Around here, many of the high-end homes built in the last 15 years are 3,000+ square feet and 2000-2400 would probably be "average". I live in a coastal community with a large number of waterfront summer estates (not year round homes) that can be 6,000-15,000 square feet. Those are huge.
imho, whoever figures out how to 3D print structures using Roman Concrete will win.
"A most unusual Roman structure depicting their technical advancement is the Pantheon, a brick faced building that has withstood the ravages of weathering in near perfect condition, sitting magnificently in the business district of Rome. Perhaps its longevity is told by its purpose . . . to honor all gods. Above all, this building humbles the modern engineer not only in its artistic splendor, but also because there are no steel rods to counter the high tensile forces such as we need to hold modern concrete together."
Source: http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm
See also:
Businessweek Article
romanconcrete.com
Wikipedia Article
When did having a pool turn a mid-size home into an "estate?"
... 2400 square feet is "huge?" I'm sure millions and millions of people will be delighted to discover that, all the sudden, they are living on huge estates.
And
Somebody's been watching too many "tiny home" hipster cult reality cable shows.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There was no advantage of a horse over a car. None what so ever.
Horses can go places cars cannot. Horses are cheaper than most cars, especially if they have access to pasture. Horses last longer than most cars since a horse typically lives for 20-25 years. Horses make less noise and pollute less (even considering the fecal matter). A well trained horse can get you home in some cases with little input from the rider - no car can do that. You can eat a horse should the need arise - no so much with a car. I don't have to insure a horse. I can herd livestock much easier with a horse than with a car. Horses do not require specially built roads to be useful whereas most cars are fairly useless without roads unless they are specially designed. I can jump a fence with a horse.
Not to say cars don't have huge advantages but there are actually quite a few very real advantages to horses.
Good thing they're using a 3D printer then, otherwise it would have taken at least twenty to forty years!
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The word "estate" refers to the sum total of assets (including the primary residence) of the deceased. Using the word "estate" as a mere synonym for "house" is what you do when you learn your vocabulary from Keeping up with the Kardashians.
They say in the article that aside from the guy running the printer, there are no labor costs here.
Care to wager on that? Exactly how do you think they are going to get the fabricated parts in place? Magical levitation? How do you think the fabricated parts are going to be secured and connected? The labor in building a modern structure is less in fabrication than in assembly. It' common for entire walls and roofs to be delivered as preassembled framing. The expense of a foundation isn't in the fabrication but in the prep work for the site - making sure things are level and plumb and the drainage is correct. It' very cheap to pour concrete walls onsite and raise them into place. Throwing a bunch of 3D printing isn't going to reduce the labor costs much if any and it will greatly increase the materials cost.
I don't believe that's necessarily true, because there's still got to be somebody wiring the electrical and installing windows, but regardless, it could dramatically decrease the cost of building a home.
It will not even slightly decrease cost, at least not anytime soon. Quite the opposite in fact for most applications. I run a manufacturing company and I'm a cost accountant. I've also worked with 3D printing as far back as 1998. What 3D printing does is it drastically reduces setup time and tooling costs for low volume production. The downside is that it is very slow and the materials cost is very high. This makes it useful for applications like prototyping, very low volume production (Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the printer, another with all the crushed rock, setting it up and letting it go. A week later, a finished home ready for a family to move into at half the cost.
That's a nice piece of science fiction you have there. Maybe in 50 years it might begin to be possible. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see something like that but we are a LOOOONG way away from what you describe right now. Furthermore your assumption that using automation like that would be cheaper is probably very wrong at least for quite a while. Any time you have automation, the cost of it needs to be amortized over a lot of units to make sense. Machines like what you describe would be hugely expensive so they would have to build a LOT of units to cost less than whatever labor would be required to do the same job. That is a much more difficult proposition than you seem to be suggesting.
2400 square feet isn't a huge home.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...