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."
Cookie Cutter Concrete (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.
impractical (Score:4, Insightful)
So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?
There's a reason a lot of things are still done by hand, and a lot of the time, the reason is money.
You can make a concrete house in BFE with only concrete, rebar, water, and humans, with some plywood for forms. Doesn't even need electricity, but that would speed it up. Seems to me that would be considerably easier to mobilize during a disaster, than a huge robot... no?
Something like this would be more suited to printing trailers in a factory (but not concrete..), or possibly a whole new subdivision, I'd think. But I'm sure the guys hanging out in front of home depot will do it cheaper.
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a machine shop and every time I do finish
carpentry at home I think about what a pain it is
coping all of those joints. It would be nice to have a little CNC surfacing router that can measure the joint and cut the cope.
Why bother printing a home? (Score:5, Insightful)
A proper built home will last 100+ years, feck it the one I'm in now lasted about 400 years before it needed to be rebuilt, 6 weeks or humans doing the work is not a big deal, its just that shoddy construction is a big problem or at least was until the recession hit. Now people want things to last and are more careful with resources.
Not that I have anything against 3D printing but I don't think a house is the ideal application for it. I'd much rather print the stuff that currently comes out of China or out of large automated factories. Hopefully one day everyone will be able to print open source objects like engine parts, electronic components and the like. A massive house-printing robot will most likely be owned by some megacorp who will charge you the same and ensure the construction is just as shoddy as a Mexican-built house except they'll make more money from it.
Never happen here (Score:5, Insightful)
The construction companies are tied into the building licensing/standards agencies. See how easy it is to get a building permit and bank loan for a dome.
And by 1973 (Score:4, Insightful)
Prefab home... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite yet (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that we'll never 3d print a house, but their proposal shows a lack of understanding of the basic premise.
Re:Can it do the plumbing? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the rub with these 3D printers. People see some form or other of extrusion printing of various objects then jump to irrational ideas. The most common being that it will either scale easily, and/or that adding the ability to print wiring, plumbing, circuits, etc. along side and within the structure is trivial (complete buildings, machines, self-replicating robots and such). Nothing can be further from the truth. Material properties seldom scale, and going from layering plastic/metal/etc. to fashion an object to fashioning a fully functional machine, house, etc. is a bit like discovering flammable liquids for the first time then going on to implement the internal combustion engine. Inventing present day 3D printers was the easy part not the hard part.
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (Score:4, Insightful)
Er, reinforcing. Won't the concrete structure need steel reinforcing? That will take a lot of labour to erect and the process would have to work around it. Maybe build in a MIG head and lay the reinforcing as you go. Oh and lay steel rod for where there is nothing to add weld to. And .... What I'm saying is good idea but I think it needs a bit more work. Maybe it will be OK for some sort of monolithic concrete construction. Currently flat prefab panels with built-in wiring etc seem to be at least more viable but underused in domestic construction. Well at least in Australia. No doubt countries with their heads in the 21st century will use rapid build techniques like that.
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (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.
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (Score:5, Insightful)
Houses within a 100km radius of here average between $450k and $800k
With an average wage of about $40k, paying off a home and actually having enough money to.. you know, live. Can be difficult.
Reduce that cost to even $250k, and young people will be able to buy homes again. I'd take a house that looks the same over no house.
Re:Why bother printing a home? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (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.
Re:impractical (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny, we've got 20 years on a shingle roof that dad and I installed, and it appears that it will last well beyond the 30 year warranty. I suspect that the reason your "old houses" aren't made of wood is that it's been expensive since the industrial revolution in Europe, where here it grows on trees. Steel framed construction is still much more expensive than wood framed houses here, and even for non-bearing walls, it's only coming close to cheap due to the Chinese manipulation of the steel markets. (Good job you Aussies have done getting rich on that one). Brick construction is significantly more expensive, again, because most of the cost is in labor, and here we have lots of trees. Not bagging on Europe, again, it's just a different set of natural resources and population densities.
To get to the fundamentals, though, we have a rapidly expanding urban population, and people expect to be able to afford a house. If you ignore the whining snobs, almost everyone with a steady income can afford to buy a house. They can't afford to buy the 300 m^2 (3,200 sq ft) house that they feel they deserve, but hell, you can buy a house for less than $150K in all of our major metropolitan areas. Compare that to Europe, well, with a much more stable population and a society where moving away from home is not the expected behaviour, the dynamics of home prices are different, and the economics of buying a centuries old house are very different. It's not wrong, it's just different.
Re:Cookie Cutter Concrete (Score:5, Insightful)
I would never consider "resale value" whan buying a house. I buy a house to live in. I buy it for ME. I've never once bought or even rented a house I ever planned on moving out of. You buy a house usually with a 20 or 30 year mortgage, that's quite a while in the future for your crystal ball to tell what will and won't sell in twenty years.
That's one reason the housing market crashed -- too damned many people buying houses not to live in or rent out, but to hold for a couple of years until the price rose. Pretty stupid, considering that whatever you make from the price inflation when you sell it, you will have lost when you replace it.
"Starter home" is marketspeak from realitors, whose jobs are to sell houses, and as many as possible. Buy the best house you can afford and stay there!