Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting 253
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."
Re:Warning About Organized Trolling Campaign On Sl (Score:0, Informative)
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.
Re:impractical (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:impractical (Score:4, Informative)
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:Cookie Cutter Concrete (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:impractical (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [fao.org]
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.