3D-Printed Public Housing Unveiled in France (reuters.com)

Researchers have unveiled what they billed as the world's first 3D-printed house to serve as a home in the French city of Nantes, with the first tenants due to move in by June. From a report: Academics at the University of Nantes who led the project said it was the first house built in situ for human habitation using a robot 3D-printer. The robot, known as BatiPrint3D, uses a special polymer material that should keep the building insulated effectively for a century. It took BatiPrint3D around 18 days to complete its part of the work on the house - creating hollow walls that were subsequently filled with concrete for insulation. The 95 square meter (1000 square feet), five-room house will be allocated to a local family which qualifies for social housing, authorities said.

Comments

The only thing you care about

[Anonymous Coward]

The pictures and short construction movie:
https://www.3ders.org/articles...

Re:The only thing you care about

[GameboyRMH]

Came here to see how similar this stuff is to Terrafoam. Answers below:

Materially: Somewhat. It's a set of foam building materials used for automated construction, but not fired brick panels in a single do-it-all material. They're also still using regular wooden frames for the doorways and roof.

Architecturally: Still a good ratio of windows and bathrooms to bedrooms, so no...not yet.

Re:The only thing you care about

[thinkwaitfast]

Why no use a robot to stack blocks? Or even better, the future tenants to give them something to do?

Re:The only thing you care about

[TheRaven64]

It doesn't look too different from a system that I remember seeing on Tomorrow's World 20-25 years ago and the time to make the house was similar.

"world's first 3D-printed house"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"World's first 3D-printed house"? Hardly. Do they even know how to use Google? There's at least half a dozen "house printers" that use a variety of printing material like concrete, to print a house. Clickbait.

Russia Russia Russia!

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia beat France, again

Disruptive

[PopeRatzo]

If they can figure out a way to work "machine learning" and "blockchain" into this story, I could win jargon bingo and it's barely noon.

Re:Disruptive

[mjwx]

If they can figure out a way to work "machine learning" and "blockchain" into this story, I could win jargon bingo and it's barely noon.

May as well... Because the house is as "3D printed" as it is "machine learned" or "block chained".

The frame and foundation were still built the old fashioned way. only the walls and part of the roof were constructed using a robot instead of a person directly in control of a machine. Basically they just robotised a concreter's job. After that the fit out and rendering on the walls was still done by manual labour.

Sure, you may say that is some progress, I would agree but we can hardly call it "3D printed".

Besides, where I live in the UK, a house like that would stand out like dogs testicles.

Re: Foamed concrete could be a good insulator

[Anonymous Coward]

All in how itâ(TM)s done.

i wished 3D printed houses would happen here

[FudRucker]

i seen where China was doing it, printing an entire house in a day with a portland cement mixture extruded in a large 3D printing machine,. and the walls were two layers with a zigzag pattern in between the layers, looked quite strong, and another good thing about portland cement is termites cant eat it, print a house, install electric & plumbing and it would be good to go in less than a week, thats far better, quicker and less expensive than the for a wood frame house to be built.

Re:i wished 3D printed houses would happen here

[FudRucker]

check this vid, 10 houses printed in 24 hours
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
there are others, i think extruded portland mix would be strongest and would more than likely survive in areas where tornadoes and hurricanes are a hazard, wood frame houses usually get torn apart in such areas

Hmm

[b0bby]

Aside from the curving walls (which I doubt would be used at scale for social or any other kind of housing) this looks just like what you can already do faster with Insulating Concrete Forms (ICF). I'm more interested in the machines which they can use to print the concrete directly; those could be useful in areas which don't require heavy insulation.

So basically....

[Luthair]

They "printed" concrete forms that you can readily buy that snap together like legos. Hard to see how moving giant spools of filament and large industrial 3d printer(s) to a job site can be more effective both from a cost and time perspective than simply buying them.

Re:So basically....

[Mr D from 63]

Heck, an average framing crew can dry in a 1000 SF simple house in a few days.

The question I have is what is the cost? And once the structure is in place, how much harder might it be to run the electrical and plumbing, and do the finish work vs a wood frames structure.

And what is the environmental impact of concrete and foam construction? Wood framing is a carbon capture node. Grow more trees, cut them down and hold that carbon in our structures.

Re:So basically....

[Luthair]

Or.... someone that recognizes that technology buzzwords like 3d printing doesn't make something interesting or useful.

I'm an American

[rsilvergun]

and when I tell people I'd want to give free housing to the homeless they look at me like I've got lobsters crawling out of my ears. Thing is, unless you're gonna let the poor die in the streets (and do terrible things when they show up at your neighborhood to loot because they're dying) or you're gonna ship them off to gulags then giving the homeless housing is cheaper than the current patchwork nightmare of social services and short term prison.

Re:I'm an American

[apoc.famine]

There's research behind this too. Of all ways to try to solve homelessness, it turns out that the most effective one is giving people homes. Why? (And to head off snark, we're talking about people being self-sufficient and able to hold down a job and rent an apartment as the end goal.) Because you can't solve the rest of your problems if you're living on the street. You can't get mail, you can't get treatment, you can't reliably field phone calls.

Once you give the homeless a place to stay, suddenly they have all of those. They have an address to put on a resume. Social workers can come visit. Their mental stress goes way down (mental issues are often the cause of homelessness and also exacerbated by it) and that in turn reduces the need to turn to substance abuse. All of that puts people in a much better position to find work and get off the streets.

Sure, there will always be people who just can't get off the streets, but for most, it's doable with support.

An address and a place to sleep at night are bootstraps. No reason to deny people those, when it's near impossible to put their life back together without them.

Re:I'm an American

[Gravis Zero]

when I tell people I'd want to give free housing to the homeless they look at me like I've got lobsters crawling out of my ears.

While yes, this can be a shock to some people, I would also contend that the looks you get may be due to the fact that YOU DO HAVE LOBSTERS CRAWLING OUT OF YOUR EARS! ;)

Re:I'm an American

[q_e_t]

There are some outliers, often people with significant mental health issues, or other issues which may mean independent living won't work for them, unfortunately.

Re:I'm an American

[mvdwege]

No, what happened in the UK is a rapacious Tory party waging a merciless class war on anyone below middle class level.

So slower than traditional building methods?

[ravenscar]

It took the machine 18 days to complete its work. The article was pretty low on information, but it sounds like its work consisted of something roughly equivalent to framing (no electrical, plumbing, insulation, finish work, etc.). A regular crew could frame a 1000 square foot home much faster. I'm seeing things like this on other sites: "On average, crew of three experienced carpenters and two helpers able to complete framing of a new 1,900 ft2 – 2,100 ft2 two story simple house in 7 – 8 days." (rempros.com).

This is cool and all and I'm always glad to see investment in promising new tech, but it doesn't sound like it's any sort of end-all solution to housing problems.

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[quantaman]

It took the machine 18 days to complete its work. The article was pretty low on information, but it sounds like its work consisted of something roughly equivalent to framing (no electrical, plumbing, insulation, finish work, etc.). A regular crew could frame a 1000 square foot home much faster. I'm seeing things like this on other sites: "On average, crew of three experienced carpenters and two helpers able to complete framing of a new 1,900 ft2 – 2,100 ft2 two story simple house in 7 – 8 days." (rempros.com).

This is cool and all and I'm always glad to see investment in promising new tech, but it doesn't sound like it's any sort of end-all solution to housing problems.

At this point it's just a prototype so I'm not sure it's fair to compare it on time. And the big money question isn't the time involved but the manpower required.

But yeah, there's a lot more to building a house than just the framing.

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[apoc.famine]

I really don't follow your logic at all. If you actually look at man-hours, 5 people working 7 days is about 35 days of work, whereas this robot did it in 18. And this is one of only a couple such machines in the world at this point. It's brand new tech. It's not refined, there aren't generations of iterations built on it yet....it's a proof-of-concept done by a prototype.

It's already about as fast as a human (you listed 2x the square footage at about 2x the number of days), and will likely only get faster in the future.

Not to mention that as soon as someone starts manufacturing them on a larger scale, those 5 people who it normally takes to build one house can each be running a robot building a house. That's 5 houses in the same amount of time, with the same amount of humans involved. Or 4 of them are going to get laid off.

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[ravenscar]

This printer took 18 days. A standard crew of people frame a much more complex house in 7. A standard crew probably frames a single story house on a slab foundation (like the one in the article) in 4 days. In terms of time to completion (the number of days until the frame of the home is finished) a standard crew is still dramatically faster. Yes, the tech will progress and will probably be far superior to human builders some day, but that day hasn't come.

In addition, measuring the project in man hours isn't a superior measure. Framers aren't a scarce nor expensive resource. Given that, it would make more sense to use cost. This site indicates that a 3 person framing crew costs about $87 per hour. That said, let's say a 5 person crew runs $150 per hour.
http://www.norbord.com/na/blog...

Do you think that this printer costs less than $150 per hour to run (including the running cost, amortized capital cost, and the cost of the person(s) running the equipment)? I doubt it, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt. My 5 person crew can complete a simple house in 4 days at a labor cost of approximately $4800. This machine takes 18 days at a cost of $21,600!

This is like someone saying they can have a group of 5 kids deliver 100 newspapers in 1 hour at a total cost of $15. You then come along and say you can use a person operating a machine to deliver the same 100 newspapers in 4 hours at a cost of $100 then contending you are using less man hours so you currently have the superior solution. It doesn't work out.

So...the tech will get better and will probably make sense eventually, but for now it's research-phase stuff that doesn't make sense to employ on any sort of large scale.

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[q_e_t]

What level of insulation is in each of the two types of house, and how long is each expected to last?

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[q_e_t]

You are discussing a US housing construction method not typically used in France, and not likely to be adopted in volume, unless it meets the 100 year lifetime requirement and uses good insulation, e,g, SIPPs.

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[mikeiver1]

The amusing part is that there is still the exterior and the interior walls to be built and attached to the basic foam and concrete structure. In the end I am willing to be that the cost for material and labor is on a par with traditional building methods. A factory built home is faster and far better built than this thing and can be dried in in less than a day for a basic home. It will also be about 90% finished at that time. An alternate is to use something like the Smartblock system or the like. A good crew and lay all the blocks and rebar in a day and pour them the following day with High/Early concrete.Trusses and roof on the third and you are done. There are allot of different systems and all are likely faster than this. Oh yah, the foam parts A and B are expensive as all hell!

Re:So slower than traditional building methods?

[cascadingstylesheet]

It took the machine 18 days to complete its work. The article was pretty low on information, but it sounds like its work consisted of something roughly equivalent to framing (no electrical, plumbing, insulation, finish work, etc.). A regular crew could frame a 1000 square foot home much faster. I'm seeing things like this on other sites: "On average, crew of three experienced carpenters and two helpers able to complete framing of a new 1,900 ft2 – 2,100 ft2 two story simple house in 7 – 8 days." (rempros.com).

This is cool and all and I'm always glad to see investment in promising new tech, but it doesn't sound like it's any sort of end-all solution to housing problems.

I'm guessing they paid the robot a lot less??

..About 10% built by 3D printer.

[mrthoughtful]

Well, the video helps to see what they used the 3D printer for. It's pretty cool - but there were a huge amount of traditional building techniques used. Foundations, fillings, doorways, windows, roofing, interior walls cabling, drainage and water supply - all done by pink goo beings. But the insulation was 3D printed - and it's quite fun.

Re:..About 10% built by 3D printer.

[turp182]

Robots could probably handle foundations.

Doorways and windows, get Amazons warehouse robots involved with a human to handle fit and finish. Electric, if the 3D printed part is designed correctly, should be able to be routed about, humans to setup the electric board/connection and finish plugs and other.

Water supply and nat. gas, meat bags.

For a simple house, this could remove 30-40% of the human labor.

Or just go straight up manufactured homes. Here's what's available for under $30K USD near me:
http://claytonfestus.com/Homes...

Make it off site, efficient. Deliver, and, weird for a house, install.

Problem with an existing answer.

Re:..About 10% built by 3D printer.

[mrthoughtful]

@turp182, as you say, the process of house-building could be far more automated; I assume you got that my point was that the 3D printed house claim was a bit far-fetched for a single (important) component of a house build.

Nice link to the house factory website.. Pretty hideous - but also pretty cool, I guess.

There are so many approaches to really cool house-building. Where I live, amongst the endless terraced houses of North London (UK), all built in the late 19th Century during the massive London population acceleration, the main material is brick - all of which were made pretty-much on-site from the local earth, and big kilns. So the energy and wood were transported in - but the main building material was taken from on-site.

It would be really cool to use the existing materials of an area - to build the site automatically. Yes - glass, etc. may need to come from further afield.

I rather like the idea of a semi-autonomous house-building machine wandering off into the desert creating endless variations of house and residential area, based on some elegant fractal algorithm, using what materials there are, and the sun and wind for it's energy supply. I guess one could start off looking at adobe - basically something not much more complex than a giant sandcastle robot.

1,000 words

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Hard to believe an article like this wouldn't have a link to a single picture. Here's an article from last year with some pictures and more details of the process.

Simple Structures

[WoodstockJeff]

It's relatively easy to build a "one level home" that sits on a concrete slab.The walls only have to carry the weight of the roof, and curved designs can deal with wind loading, especially if you're dealing with areas where high winds are mitigated by surrounding structures.

Let me know when they can 3D print a multistory house that can survive in an open field in a snowy environment.

Re:Simple Structures

[apoc.famine]

Last year. Ask your favorite search engine about "china 3d printed houses".

Re:Simple Structures

[martinX]

Even better, 3D printed high rises. In many parts of the world, especially cities, the cost of housing is not the problem. The cost of land is the killer. Single storey houses made by robots sounds like a plan, but it ain't.

ICON (USA)

[Aero77]

https://www.architecturaldiges... and https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

I'm from a town in Germany

[Dirk Becher]

We have basic unemployment aid which also includes rent for a moderately sized habitation. We still have homeless. Every couple of weeks a social worker drops by and asks whether they wouldn't want to move to something more permanent. It has been three years since someone took the offer.

Re:What?

[Nos.]

It's essentially an ICF house, which are typically very well insulated. http://buildblock.com/how-to-b...

Circa 2014

[hAckz0r]

Then obviously none of this never happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

An earlier one, fills in cement

[kbahey]

Here is an an earlier 3D printed house, from a year ago.

Seems that the Russian one lays out cement directly, rather than a polymer to be filled later with cement (by humans), as the French one does.

Is that because of drugs/alcohol?

[rsilvergun]

In the States we've got a lot of homeless shelters who won't take folks with substance abuse problems. So the social workers get blown off. Maybe if we had more help to kick addiction, but we've mostly got "Faith Based" 12 step programs here. We also have a nasty habit of cutting folks off from assistance the moment they've got $200 USD in their bank accounts. So as soon as you're on your feet you're on your own, no matter how woozy you are.

That's ridiculous

[rsilvergun]

any fool can see they're crayfish.

They certainly will need faster and cheaper homes

[AbRASiON]

When civil war breaks out in France, which it almost certainly will in the next 20 to 30 years, hopefully they can rebuild shelter relatively quickly.

Walls, floors, countertops, electrical, MATERIALS

[raymorris]

$5 is the labor cost, for a small house. The wood, nails, brackets, etc cost money. As does the foundation, before you can even start building the framing. Then you have plumbing, electrical, drywall, painting, flooring, countertops, sinks, showers, toilets etc, air conditioning, hearing ...

To give you a rough idea, flooring alone costs $1-$20/sq foot just for materials. Granite countertops cost much more.

In some areas, the land costs more than building the house also.

Similar to ICFs (Insulating Concrete Forms)

[ClarkMills]

The basic construction is similar to ICFs (Insulating Concrete Forms) in that there are 2 outer layers of foam with ties (manually placed in this robot build) and rebar/reinforcing-bar in the cavity.

While the robot arm does place the foam it looks like there is a lot of manual interventions... typically ties are placed 150mm (6") to 200mm (8") horizontally & 300mm (12") to 450mm (18") vertically. The ties are to resist the pressure of the concrete inside the foam walls from splitting the walls apart. Even so you only fill the walls 1m (3') and let the concrete set a bit (~20-30min) before doing the next lift (layer). Also you generally put horizontal rebar in every 450mm (18") to 600mm (2') though it's not uncommon to use little stainless steel toothpicks (eg Helix) mixed in the concrete to save the hassle esp in curved walls.

Foam is a good insulator & concrete is solid/quiet/fire-resistant/storm-resistant. There's could be good thermal mass too but it's inaccessible because of the dual foam sandwich.

Yes, I'm researching building a house out or ICFs... :) The blocks can be done by anyone though you need to understand all the pitfalls (of which there are many).

Here's a rough outline of what ICFs are (low quality video but gives you the idea in a few minutes):

Pointless

[Not-a-Neg]

A traditional crew of home builders can build an ICF home over twice the size of this one in 1 day, this robot takes 18 days??

Long Way To Go

[Thelasko]

Thanks to a pair of very gifted architects, there is some incredible public housing in France. Sure, this technique can produce some basic housing, but nothing like what the Breitman's are creating.

Re:What?

[AutodidactLabrat]

The French are big on aluminum powder expanded geopolymer concrete, densities less than 30 Kg / m^3
Could, indeed likely ARE using that instead of rigid throughout single floor homes.