17 ms·
A $10K tiny house 3D-printed in 24 hours
- milesf 10y agoI'm so surprised that people have not heard of the late R.G. LeTourneau. The man was a mechanical genius, and the father of modern earth moving machinery. Here's a video of his Concrete House Machine from 1946: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWjyZO2lPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWjyZO2lPU This was 70 years ago! I read about them in his autobiography "Mover of Men and Mountains". He went with concrete because it was cooler in the summer, and warmer in the winter. Seems to me the "Not Invented Here" mentality has been around for a very long time.
- hutzlibu 10y agoThe machine is impressive, but not really comparable to this. As it could only do fixed shapes. With this printer you can do any shape, and also change the inside struxture of the walls. And while this one is quite limited in its range, it is still impressive and a glimpse, of what will come, soon ...
- sitkack 10y agoShape diversity is often a requirement that is specified but not needed. It comes down to a flexibility vs quality and bandwidth tradeoff. From the looks of it, a different mold could be swapped out in the vehicle. How many molds would one need? Kitchen, School, Light Manufacturing, House 2-4 bedroom, etc. 3d printed parts are great because of zero RE costs, but quality is reduced and cost is high for a single part. Some economics hold for this technique as well. I see both having broad applicability.
- Animats 10y agoThe idea goes back even further, to Edison in 1908.[1] His system used a large set of metal molds which latched together to make a house-sized mold. Then just pour in the concrete and go. The houses were quite elaborate, with lots of architectural detail, all the way down to bathtubs and picture frames. A few are still around. There's no problem mass producing concrete houses. Or apartment buildings. Building shells aren't really that expensive. The interior parts cost more. [1] http://www.concreteconstruction.net/_view-object?id=00000153-968d-dbf3-a177-96bdeb600000 http://www.concreteconstruction.net/_view-object?id=00000153...
- Lazare 10y ago>Building shells aren't really that expensive. The interior parts cost more. And land in a desirable location with a building permit costs even more, if it's even available.
- branchless 10y agoCan't beleieve I had to scroll this far down. Land prices in urban areas are set by ability to pay, so with cheaper construction you can pay even more to the land owneer! Prices won't fall in urban centres one cent. The problem of expensive housing is man-made: by bakers lending enough fiat credit to match your surplus value.
- sokoloff 10y agoIf land prices are set by ability to pay (rather than willingness to pay), that could be a good thing for buyers. A reasonable model for the seller is to sell to the highest willing buyer. Each individual purchaser has an ability to pay and willingness to pay and will presumably only offer the lower of those two prices. If land trades on ability to pay rather than willingness, that means that the highest bidder would have been willing to pay more but was only able to pay what they settled on, and I don't see a significant problem. The buyer is presumably quite happy, having paid less than they were willing to pay. The chief downsides I see in such a system is that either the buyer is not actually able to pay (they misjudge their ability to pay), or for the non-buyers who are out-bid by other buyers with a greater ability to pay. (It could be frustrating to only be able to pay $X while land or properties change hands at 1.5 * $X, but no reasonable seller will sell for 2/3 the market price, so...)
- branchless 10y ago> If land trades on ability to pay rather than willingness, Banks create fiat on request for a loan. It's infinite. You have to bid all your surplus value or someone else will, either a dweller or a speculator.
- noonespecial 10y agoI went to LeTourneau University. You are preaching to the choir, brother. (Yep, he founded an engineering school too. If you built a giant hacker space, and university classes suddenly broke out, LU is what would happen. Even the campus itself was hacked together out of an old army base.) The sheer amount of things he was involved in back in the day is mind blowing.
- milesf 10y agoI would love to hear more about your experience there (my email is miles at coderpath dot com), and would like to learn more about R.G. My only knowledge about him was through his autobiography.
- mysterydip 10y agoNot sure how much of it overlaps, but I've been going through the biography "God Runs My Business" which is from the 40s and might show more detail from that time in his life. It's definitely a product of that era, too, just in the way different subjects are brought up, so I think it's interesting for that glimpse into the USA as well. There are lots of pictures as well. A very interesting man.
- milesf 10y agoI'll have to read that as well. Thanks for the tip :)
- ehnto 10y agoUnrelated, LeTourneau was a name from Old French, meaning The Starling, and is the origin of the surname Turner. I only mention it because I had been taught that Turner came from the profession of wood turning, but it turns out that was unlikely to be correct after all!
- saalweachter 10y agoMultiple origins?
- orless 10y agoVideo of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo
- closed 10y agoThat was the first video I've ever had to play at 6x its original speed!
- jedberg 10y agoWhen people say, "All the manufacturing has gone to China!" show them this video, and say, "No, they've gone to robots".
- jasonkostempski 10y agoI was just thinking this morning how all the stuff we get from china should be the first things we try to automate so we can't stop contributing to child labor.
- whelp 10y agoYeah you are so smart. You are the first one who can think of automation.
- bigbugbag 10y agoChina has been replacing human worker with robots for a while now. The reason stuff is made in China is not child labor but supply chain availability.
- aidenn0 10y agoWalmart has been pressuring vendors to move more SKUs to the US. This has mostly resulted in the most easily automated SKUs moving to the US.
- kalleboo 10y agoGood, send them back to sustenance farming
- bitmapbrother 10y agoI hear Bill Gates wants to place a tax on robots in the USA. An interesting idea, but they'll just move the work to countries with tax free robots.
- bigbugbag 10y agoThen put an even heavier tax on what comes out of these countries. See how the tax workaround can be easily worked around (if there is political will to do so) ?
- Flammy 10y agoDiscussion on reddit from 2 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5xf7sf/a_russian_company_just_3d_printed_a_400/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5xf7sf/a_russia... Apparently the $10k includes electrical, windows, etc.
- anotheryou 10y agoThanks! I was already thinking that 4 people with a bunch of bricks can quickly raise a wall too. edit: 2 people, 7h (including a 40min break), one wall: https://youtu.be/gSM70WGbTiA?t=25 https://youtu.be/gSM70WGbTiA?t=25 This is what the innovative part of the project is competing against.
- sien 10y agoOr one robot brick layer: http://fbr.com.au/ http://fbr.com.au/
- IgorPartola 10y agoLaying brick is very quick. And if you are willing to do a full brick width as the wall thickness, you don't really need much further insulation IIRC. Stick built houses are not as durable and take longer, but as long as wood and labor are cheap, they will be popular. Drywall is also cheap, though takes multiple passes to finish. Personally if I was constructing my home with my own hands, I would go for brick.
- pmiller2 10y agoI'd be interested to see how the process scales up to larger structures. That house is smaller than my apartment!
- dbg31415 10y agoCool tech, but... Curved walls only look good from the outside. Design looks like something someone who has never built a house before drew up. Things like a sofa that can't face the TV screen, or ostensibly a bathroom that you have to walk through the bedroom to get to. Also everything looks very narrow. I want to see them build a real house this way, something with full-sized doors (36"), full-sized washers and dryers, something with 2 levels, something with actual electrical outlets (I see none in the video or pictures). I can slap together a shed without plumbing or electricity in a day. Boasting about the price, showing electrical appliances, but not including the electrical wiring... let's be kind and just call that some "optimistic marketing." I mean... It doesn't even look like they have a real foundation... And small point... if they are going for speed, why are they using a roller to apply paint? Spray would do a better job and cut the painting time more than 50%.
- Eridrus 10y agoHere's a video of them making a larger more traditional structure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqzfPW6TFo Though part of the point is that you can use this to make more complicated structures with less effort and error; whether they are always appropriate is sort of a separate question. I think they have included wiring costs based on comments here & on reddit, though their site seems to be down after the HN hug. Personally I'm more interested in modular construction than 3d printing since it's much clearer how you scale that up to larger buildings, but this is still neat.
- dbg31415 10y agoI don't see any electrical outlets in the photos or videos. I also don't see the cost of the foundation included... looks like they built on top of an existing concrete slab but didn't add that into the cost. I don't want to rip on them too much, but if they start talking about time and cost (literally as the headline) and they aren't being honest about what it really costs... it's hard to trust anything else about the article. Can it even be called a "house" without a heater? I mean... they aren't following any sort of industrialized nation building code at all here. No sinks, no bathrooms (can't tell), no insulation in the roof, no smoke alarms... Calling it a "house" and bragging about the time it takes to build and cost... it's moot if it's not really a house. That's all I'm getting at.
- horsetranqs 10y agoNeat, but I think with sufficient planning and management you could also build a traditional house of that size and complexity in a day. It would probably be a box rather than this unusual shape, though.
- orless 10y agoI think this should be primarily interesting for buildings with special form which are hard or expensive to build with traditional methods. The price is not the selling point here, at least not in Russia. Russia has a lot of cheap labor from the southern ex-USSR countries like Tadjikistan. So $10k for 38qm is not really cheap. You can build a 150qm two-floor house for around $25k. Also $277 for the foundation seems a bit suspicious, should be much more expensive. "the radius of curvature of the TV matches the house wall curvature" pretty much looks like a PR stunt for Samsung. I wonder if they've actually chosen curved walls to somehow justify curved TV.
- ghostly_s 10y agoYes, if those figures are converted to USD (I presume so as they're using the '$' sign without specification?), then they are so manipulated as to be worthless. There is no way to pour a foundation, even a small one, for $277. I agree the formal implications are the interesting aspect. Creating an exactly equivalent design, with curved walls everywhere, would be phenomenally expensive with conventional practices.
- astrodust 10y agoIt's actually astonishing how much good concrete costs. You can barely fling $20 bills off a stack as fast as the truck is pouring $20 worth of concrete into your foundation.
- brianwawok 10y agoI doubt a 10k house in Russia is "good" concrete.
- djrobstep 10y agoWhat's the point of cheap housing if the landowning rentier class keeps extorting everybody through higher and higher rents? The only way to get actually affordable housing is to tax land so hard that it stops being an investment at all and becomes merely a commodity, like it should be.
- darawk 10y agoNobody is extorting anyone. Rents are set by the market price just like anything else. Landowners can only charge what people are willing to pay. If there is a problem, it's with the availability of land for building new housing. Zoning laws and NIMBYism artificially constrain the supply side of the equation, which drives up rents. There is no extortion happening - just supply constriction.
- dukeluke 10y agoThere can be more than one problem at once, you know. Zoning laws do keep new houses from being made in some places, and investors buying houses and doing nothing with them or raising all local rents in the area to increase the average rent paid are both problems that need to be fixed. At least with the housing tax, we'd see a wealth redistribution, which I could argue is highly needed at the moment.
- conanbatt 10y agoYou have to decide if what you want is to provide people housing or want to raise revenue to do wealth redistribution. IF you add a tax to owning a property, you make it less interesting for people to buy housing, since it will be sold for less, and thus creates less supply for the future renters.
- mistermann 10y ago> Rents are set by the market price just like anything else. This isn't technically incorrect, but it overlooks some important details. Historically, prices typically reflected local supply and demand, but recently throughout the world we are seeing tremendous external demand from people with massive wealth entering local markets and driving up prices. In other words, in your statement "Landowners can only charge what people are willing to pay.", "people" is not the same thing it was 10 or 15 years ago. Of course, this has always been the case to some degree, it's just much more widespread now.
- whelp 10y agoCute beautiful house. I like it. But they are 3 years late to the 3d printed house game: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-printer-builds-houses-china-video https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-... Moreover, housing crisis has never been due to construction material & labor. It's the land that is the most expensive part. You can 3d print a house in Siberia and give it out for free, but nobody would want to move and live in there
- mschuster91 10y agoI have a slight feeling that this won't become very widespread on Earth - simply put, the thing is too small to be able to construct a house larger than a typical 1-family house. However, taking such a thing and sending it up to Mars or the Moon, now there's a potential for "real" prefabricated housing.
- brianwawok 10y agoWhy couldn't you use 3 or 4 of them to make a larger house? Seems like as long as it can print your largest room you are Golden.
- m0llusk 10y agoThis isn't useful because the printed house lacks wiring, plumbing, and finishes and is also an example of wasteful land use. The occupant of this house will indirectly demand roads, power, water, and sewer systems and most likely parking for a car as well. If we accept that housing has become critical issue then we need to take it seriously and look at the whole problem and what aspects are the most costly. Currently planning, infrastructure impacts, and labor intensive details are where most of the money goes. Basic construction is already competitively cheap.
- kelvin0 10y agoYou must be fun at parties.
- Spooky23 10y agoHousing isn't a critical issue at all. Housing is large cities is a critical problem. With the internet and modern transport infrastructure there's no reason to live in a big US metro area like SFO or NYC. The quality of life sucks and the cost of living is outrageous. I can be in midtown Manhattan with a trip about 20 minutes longer than the average Long Island commuter, and live in a bigger, nicer home in a better place that would be possible in the metropolitan area. It's kind of ironic that we pay people on the other side of the planet to run our IT systems, but the average technology company insists on locating much of its stateside operations in a small number of ridiculously expensive places that increase cost and almost certainly decrease the quality of output. Car companies figured this out 100 years ago.
- crowbahr 10y agoI mean part of that is what kind of tech CEO wants to live in Kansas? They want to live in NYC or SF or maybe Seattle. The companies are sometimes built where they want to live, sometimes relocated but in the end people like cities.
- ams6110 10y agoGetting off the main subject but there are lots of midwest towns that are pretty cool. Especially those with universities. Culture, things to do, good public schools, low cost of living, low crime rate, low tax rates, people not defecating on the sidewalks.... I think could be attractive to a lot of people.
- Spooky23 10y agoLooks cheap to build, impossible to modify or fix.
- Turing_Machine 10y agoYeah, that's typically the case with concrete construction. :-)
- fiatjaf 10y agoWhat's the point of cheap housing if people are going to spend all the money that is saved into unneeded new electronic devices or new cars?
- bigbugbag 10y agoAt first it seemed to me to be expensive for a little not really practical house to live in. Then I figured out this is a tech demo and PR stunt and not an attempt to make affordable housing for people to live in. I wonder how this compare to a yurt or straw bale construction.
- adevine 10y agoBut with this technology it seems like it would be straightforward to build a slightly larger, more practical house. Though I agree, I think building a house with at least one actual bedroom would have made a better demo.
- sandworm101 10y agoCarpenters roofers painters and plumbers are safe. This "printed house" seems to have required lots of hands. It is also so small that any reasonable team of humans could have built it in as short a time. A better approach would be to have the robot print the concrete forms, allowing for humans to erect and fill them on the site. That might actually save on manpower.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y agoRight, I don't see them bringing this machine on site and having it print something. You have to move materials on site anyway, so I bet they simply prefab modular components and then assemble somewhere else. They just want to show they can build any shape and even take electrical and plumbing into account as they build.
- VLM 10y agoThere is the technological achievement that not too many years ago most concrete came in trucks and was wheelbarrowed by hand and leg into forms. Then came the era of boom trucks where a crane like machine squirts out of a hose into prepared form. The logical extension is getting rid of the prepared forms. That's what this technology demonstrator shows. I agree the "any shape" aspect is key in that they're probably going to do more engineering and repair work than anything else. So dig up a sidewalk for a repair they'll print in place a new sidewalk faster than someone can build a sidewalk form, minimal as that is, after all a sidewalk is pretty small compared to an entire house LOL. Or your cellphone tower taken out by tornado they'll print a foundation for a backup tower as fast as rebar can get tossed in, sit a couple hours, toss a tower on the foundation, and you're back on the air. Or exotic repairs to civil engineering accidents, maybe that dam in CA needs a herd of 3-d printers to make a new spillway faster than they could even construct the forms. This also might come in handy with tunnel boring machines, rather than making pre-made panels fit, you could print panels to fit the as dug hole, which is interesting to think about. The CivEng side of the conversation with the concrete factory probably sounds like: There's some damage, we're not even sure how bad it is yet, no obviously we haven't built a form we haven't even hauled out the big rubble yet the crane just got started, OK send out your 3d printer to patch, we should be done demolishing and hauling out the broken chunks by the time your truck arrives. Even better if they can print nicely enough to make it residential grade appearance, perhaps they can patch things to look nice, not merely be physically strong enough.
- Keverw 10y agoOh wow, pretty neat and surprised it took just 24 hours. For some reason it reminds me a bit of the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland. I wasn't even born yet when they took it down, but randomly found videos of it on YouTube once. But it was a whole house made of plastic. Probably molded I'd guess since they didn't have 3D printers back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qUkNZ5aJWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qUkNZ5aJWE
- spraak 10y agoI wonder about 3d printing with cob like materials.
- ctack 10y agoI image using a similar jig, but with wider tubing and possibly mixing the straw in as clay mixture is being poured out. But how would keep the cob mixture consistent? Pre separated components, like the sand, clay, straw? Depending on how wet you apply it, you might need to take timeouts for layers to dry.
- spraak 10y agoYeah, lots of questions to get it right.
- ryankupyn 10y agoThis is really cool, but I'd love to know how durable a printed house is over the long term. Right now though, I think that there's a profitable niche for this sort of portable and low-labor-intensity construction in the defence and disaster-relief fields, where speed and cost are a higher priority than aesthetics. I could easily see the US government (or rather, their contractors) using this technology when constructing bases overseas, especially in places in Afghanistan where workers don't just need to be paid, but fed, housed and transported at great expense.
- smarx007 10y agoInventor: https://angel.co/nikita-cheniuntai https://angel.co/nikita-cheniuntai
- skookumchuck 10y agoAround here houses are still built on site, stick by stick. The only things built off site are the roof trusses. I don't understand why all the walls, at least, aren't built in a warehouse and then trucked in. It could be built cheaper, more precise, with far less wastage. Holes for electrical, plumbing and HVAC could be already put in. Even windows can be pre-installed. (I know that part of the problem is architects under-design houses, leaving it up to the contractors to figure out how to route electrical, plumbing and HVAC on-site.)
- ams6110 10y agoPre-built walls are commonly used in tract houses.
- jfroma 10y agoSame here, there are pre-built houses but they are ugly. It is even forbidden in some neighborhoods to put a pre-built houses. I guess this is just because there is no company doing it properly and maybe no market for it.
- skookumchuck 10y agoThere's no reason the factory cannot build walls for custom houses. The jigs and all will be computer controlled, anyway. Nor does that imply cheaply built or poor materials. It's got to be an industry ripe for disruption.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoExactly. They already do custom roof trusses in factories along with standard sizes.
- galago 10y agoNear where I live in Cambridge, MA a four story apartment building was recently built/assembled over a weekend. They moved in modular components that were built in a factory in Maine. I think it was done on the weekend because they could briefly shut down the street (Mass. Ave.) to truck in the pieces. The interiors took longer, and are probably customized for the buyers, but the structure itself appeared in a couple days.
- alexro 10y agoPrint the walls and let this guy to do the rest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Uoq6JYKbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Uoq6JYKbw
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI find the notion of 3D printing a house intriguing but it seems ultimately impractical. There are better ways to manufacture homes that can be componentized and transported for final assembly on site. One where I visited the factory was the BluHomes[1]. You can automate much of the construction of walls and wiring and finishing if you do it in sections. [1] https://www.bluhomes.com/ https://www.bluhomes.com/
- mapmap 10y agoPricey. How are these competitive with traditional construction?
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe price is artificial, much like the Tesla Roadster pricing they have been focused on really high end homes that someone can truck up into the Sierras and 'poof' your mountain getaway is there. They are developing a core competency of creating the fixturing to mass produce homes. The cost per house should drop well below that of a traditional house with equal square footage when they go for volume. They do that by removing construction labor, site/weather variability (so site delays), economize material transport cost, and reducing time to construct (labor hours). Things that don't change, the cost of basic materials, the cost of land, the cost to prepare the site (foundation/leveling etc), and permitting/access. For the absolute lowest cost with on site materials the 'sand' homes [1], that provides the framing (much like the 3D printed house in the article). [1] https://www.niftyhomestead.com/blog/earthbag-homes/ https://www.niftyhomestead.com/blog/earthbag-homes/
- justinph 10y agoAll of those homes cost nearly or over $1M. A garage is $60k. How is this even remotely similar?
- bane 10y agoPrefab houses have been around forever. I grew up in one. I think my parents paid about $100k in 1989. The construction was: - dig a hole - pour a foundation - truck in the house in two halves - bolt the house together - do final wiring, plumbing move the family in I have no idea how much these kinds of homes are today, but their latest zillow zesitmate puts it at around $300k (on an acre of property)...so YMMV. 3d printing, in general, is expensive and better for one-off, or low-volume things. Mass manufacture techniques are hyper-optimized and beat 3d printing most of the time when you need to make >10 of the thing almost every time...this includes houses.
- donald123 10y agoThis is not new. China already has company that can 3D print a real two-story house. See this https://3dprint.com/138664/huashang-tengda-3d-print-house/ https://3dprint.com/138664/huashang-tengda-3d-print-house/ This article also mentioned another Chinese competitor can 3d-print 6-story apartment and a mansion.
- TheGRS 10y agoThis product immediately reminded me of that 10-story (maybe it was larger) apartment building in china that they were able to put together in a day. Every floor was ready-to-go and all they had to do was plop them down on top of each other.
- mortehu 10y agoIn the article you linked, they say the rebar had to be positioned ahead of time. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
- dear 10y agoAnother one here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-printer-builds-houses-china-video https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/apr/29/3d-...
- dahart 10y agoWhat is the outcome of housing this cheap? This is one more option in a growing list that includes inflatable concrete structures, and Tumbleweed houses, prefab cabins, etc etc. Is this cheap enough to house people in third world countries. Probably not yet, but could it be on the way? And I'm sure construction costs aren't even the primary economic factor to solve... Is it possible this trend could make vacation housing for affluent people disposable? I love the idea of having a tiny house or even two I can move around, but I suspect, knowing me, that it wouldn't get used and would take more maintenance than I'm really truly interested in.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoThe third world isn't a good target; there's no permanent dwelling shortage. The reason why you often see people homeless or living in squalor in the third world is because they were uprooted by war, famine, or natural disaster. They often need short notice temporary dwellings, rather than new permanent ones as this would produce. So there's a market for "popup housing" in some of those countries (and even in the US for natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina), and the Red Cross and similar international aid charities make some use of those. Erecting concrete structures that would be hard to disassemble is likely a non-starter (in particular as it requires a plentiful supply of water which may be unavailable in an evacuation zone).
- beagle3 10y agoThe source of homelessness is true for many places, but not all; Mumbai/Bombay, Kolkatta, Delhi and I would guess most other indian cities have crade-to-grave homeless communities. I know some of them do not consider themselves homeless, because they have a piece of corrugated metal to put their head under at night which is "theirs" - but would probably be considered homeless in the west. Your statement about the 3rd world not being a good market is, of course, correct.
- jacquesm 10y agoIt will only be cheap if the finishing of the house becomes cheaper. The raw materials + labor for a 'casco' (that's what we call them here) are not the biggest factor in creating a space that you can live in. It's all the wiring, plumbing, window sills, insulation and so on that make up the bulk of a construction project. That's also why those 'built in 24 hour' structures then need a lot of work (far more than the initial 24 hours to lay the base) to finish them.
- rootsudo 10y agoAmazing. Concrete is also amazing. I can't believe how wood and stick frame took over traditional housing methods.
- phamilton 10y agoEarthquakes
- chjohasbrouck 10y agoI'd be surprised if this house meets state regulations for residential construction in any US state. That'll be one of the biggest obstacles to 3D printed housing in the US. Even if you somehow get efficiency gains through 3D printing, it's going to require a different configuration depending on the regulatory environment, which varies by nation and state and county and city and topography, and changes every year. These regulations affect every detail of the construction of your house, from the foundation to the window panes. Even details as innocuous as sink depth are regulated.
- microcolonel 10y agoIf you open the link, you'll note that this is in Russia; a lawless land where the government is constantly struggling to prove that you can run a business which isn't gazprom.
- lucaspiller 10y agoEurope is also relatively lax in terms of building regulations, it's only the North America which is hung up on having a rule for every little thing.
- XJOKOLAT 10y agoI'd beg to differ. From personal experience, in the UK you cannot breathe without getting planning permission. Although, these days, not sure whether to legitimately include UK as part of a European discussion, sadly.
- lucaspiller 10y agoYeah I'd agree about planning permission, but inside you can do pretty much what you like without issue. The US has rules such as the number and type of sockets you need to have in closets.
- XJOKOLAT 10y ago
- jmspring 10y agoTiny houses are great and all, but most articles, tv shows, etc two basic issues: - land - hookups Had this discussion today with someone enthused about a tiny home community until the land use rental fee came into play.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vadym909 10y agoGreat to build a large and long wall /s
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hossbeast 10y agoWe need Elon Musk to ship a few of these things to Mars
- m3kw9 10y agoA house without plumbing
- saeranv 10y agoA lot of people are commenting (correctly) that any cost savings achieved here are trivial relative to the land cost. I think this is looking at this tech too narrowly though. There are many areas of architecture that can be revolutionized by cheap, accurate mass-customization. One example would be energy. Right now heat transfer and the transmission of daylight through walls/windows can be theoretically optimized to reduce energy costs simply by customizing the geometry of the windows and walls relative to their orientation and local context. We don't do so in architecture because the costs of customizing the geometry is too expensive. Architecture has a history of attempting mass-customization since the 1960s[1], but it's always been limited by the technology and realities of integrating multiple subcontractors and consultants. Those problems still exist, but the industry is changing pretty fast and I feel automated form generation, simulation, optimization, and production technologies are converging to a point when this could be achieved. [1] i.e John Habraken.
- flexie 10y agoNot to mention that once this industry is mature, they will print upwards. Taller buildings spread the cost of land on more units.
- lostboys67 10y agoI seem to recall (from my thermo fluids course) that its the thermal efficiency of the materials that determines that ticker walls triple glazing etc. And not all house can be built with an ideal orientation
- saeranv 10y agoYes, and traditionally, the biggest contributor to thermal inefficiency is the window to wall ratio (WWR) b/c windows have a very high conductance relative to walls. So if you can reduce the window area, or mitigate it's thermal inefficiency in some way (i.e compensate heat loss through passive solar gain), you can have a huge impact on overall thermal inefficiency. Beyond thermal performance, optimizing windows for lighting potential is also interesting because electric light is a huge contributer to total energy consumption for offices, and outdoor light reflection and transmittance into interior areas depends a lot on geometry and material selection.
- teslaberry 10y agoit's all about delaboring. that is it.
- kriro 10y ago"""The construction cost of the printed house amounted to $10134, which is approximately $275 per square meter, taking in account that partners have provided the highest quality materials""" Due to the wording of the sentence I'm not sure if the material is included in the calculation or not. But assuming prices going down and technology improving a building like that for 10-20k in 24h is an interesting proposition for on demand housing (even if it is just destroyed afterwards). Embedded sponsoring by Samsung aside I think the wall printed to match the curvature of the TV is an interesting example. This could be interesting for events/marketing booths etc. Edit: This could also be very interesting for Hollywood for set building :)
- amelius 10y agoRelated: This House Costs Just $20,000—But It’s Nicer Than Yours [1] [1] https://www.fastcoexist.com/3056129/this-house-costs-just-20000-but-its-nicer-than-yours https://www.fastcoexist.com/3056129/this-house-costs-just-20...
- jlebrech 10y agothe housing crisis needs vertical buildings, I hope 3d printing can got in that direction soon.
- jlebrech 10y agowe should print on the moon using robots with no human aid. this is what elon musk must send, not just an orbital tour.
- london888 10y agoGreat but I dont think it's the walls and roof that take time usually. It's the planning consent, foundations, utilities and internals.
- ensiferum 10y agoAnyone read the short science fiction (soon to be non-fiction) story Manna. Is this the prototype of cheap "terrafoam" housing for the poor ppl displaced from the society? ;)
- rodionos 10y agoAwesome! Finally, Flintstone on HWY 280 will have some competition http://www.flintstonehouse280.com/ http://www.flintstonehouse280.com/ I can see artsy architects thinking up a whole new range of designs that escape the constraints imposed by established manufacturing and construction practices. Probably not as much not for permanent habitat, but for a garage, or a playhouse for kids.
- wiz21c 10y agoGiven the fact that climate change is the big deal, how much energy did it take to actually build such a house versus the energy needed by a regular brick & mortar & human workers house ?
- tpaschalis 10y agoWell, I suppose it's not meant to replace traditional building methods/materials, but as it gets better, imagine the usability of such tech eg. for building a base on the moon.
- djaychela 10y agoWhile this is clearly an impressive technical feat, I can't help thinking of the carbon footprint of creating a house out of concrete, which is notoriously un-environmentally friendly, and difficult to deal with when the structure is no longer required. Hopefully a more environmentally-sound material will be used. There's not a single mention on that page of the carbon footprint of the building method used, and I think it would be interesting to compare physically identical (as much as possible) buildings of different construction (3d printed like this, bricks and mortar, pre-fab wooden/osb panels, etc), particularly when the tag line of the article is: "We Are Building the Future Today."
- MayeulC 10y agoIt is an interesting fact that concrete itself is a carbon sink, and that it mitigates a bit the emissions associated with its production. That said, I agree that it would be interesting to have a independent study of the complete environmental impact of such a building, from its erection to its disposal. I would instinctively expect a smaller impact from this kind of "lean" approach, though this might also create problems due to the economy of scale not necessarily being present.
- theon144 10y agoOh man, I'd sure like me some Samsung Nano Crystal Color Revolutionary Super Ultra High Definition TV and a Samsung refrigerator with No Frost system, a Samsung induction stove, Samsung dishwashing machine, Samsung electrical oven, and maybe even a Samsung microwave oven. Not to forget the innovative Samsung AddWash washing machine. I wonder why that is.
- logfromblammo 10y agoAt last! A house-sized 3D printer that automates product placement as easily as wall placement.
- willyt 10y agoOther people have mentioned the high embodied energy of concrete but there is also a problem with insulating this structure. I hope the PIR wasn't just injected into the cavity because that is a recipe for disaster. The zigzag cross bracing you can see will be a massive cold bridge which will cause cold spots that will develop mould patches inside. Concrete is not breathable (it is mostly impermeable to water vapour) but hairline cracks develop which make it capillary active and will allow water to be wicked into the interstitial space containing the insulation and then through to the inner face to cause damp problems. A standard concrete wall needs to be a minimum of 300mm of solid concrete to remove the chance that a localised crack will form right through the wall. Usually when concrete is used it is purely for the floors and structural frame for this reason. You do see concrete clad structures but these are typically decorative panels with a capillary break behind, or they are damp and leaky old 60's buildings. Paint systems are not the solution as they tend to fail within 3 - 10 years and then they just trap even more moisture in the construction. Conventional houses get around this problem with a capillary break, basically just an air gap between the outer wall and the internal insulation which is on a block or in between timber structure. The alternative, which is well understood in central Europe, is to use breathable materials such as calcium silicate blocks and wood fibre insulation. It looks like it forms a structure that only works in compression because of the way it is laid down. Even if it is glass reinforced concrete I don't think there could be a good structural interface between the printed layers. This is why it doesn't print the roof and they don't show how they dealt with the lintels over the doors and windows. These must have been installed manually. If the window openings had been 3d printed then they would have needed gothic arches to get around the 45 degree angle corbeling problem which is inherent in compression structures and the roof would have looked like a gothic vault for the same reason. Another thing that is needed to make this into a dwelling that won't go mouldy, is some kind of vapour control layer on the inner concrete face. You then need to wire the place up, but there is the problem of how to hide the wires internally. You don't want electrical cables to go through the vapour control layer where possible and you definitely don't want any cable junctions where there is a risk of interstitial condensation making the electrics 'go fizzy'. Did they have to manually install dry lining over the cables? Are the internal faces rendered over conduit and then plastered? I think their costs are suspicious as well, I don't know about Russia but in europe $227 would barely cover one day of time for 1 groundworks operative let alone machine hire and materials for foundations. A recent project we worked on had £20,000 installed cost just for the gravel fill for the groundworks for 2 small houses. As an Architect, I think CNC machined cross laminated timber panels are more interesting because the embodied energy characteristics are much better and they are capable of forming diaphragm structures that experience tension such as floor and roof planes. In general flat vertical surfaces are not going away any time soon, because they are ABI compatible with Furniture v1.0.
- pascalxus 10y agoFinally some real innovation! This is awesome. Now, let's get this over here in CA - I know I'm just dreaming.
- nikolay 10y agoYou don't have to print a house - it better be built from Lego-like blocks.
- SnowingXIV 10y agoI'm working on buying land some land and building a house right now. The prices for a typical traditional way of building a house aren't that astronomical. I looked into some prefab but for a split entry or two story it's pretty hard to bring my costs down much lower. I wish I could get my land prepped and then print it out cheap or dropped off but haven't found anything that can get me to the price point I want with ~2500 sqft other than doing the typical way.
- loa_in_ 10y agoToo bad that the article doesn't mention any electrical nor water/sewage installation. No wonder the appliances are depicted turned off.