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I think that an important missing piece in realizing the full benefit of machines that print houses is software that does automated building design. The way mo
by elihu 6y ago
I think that an important missing piece in realizing the full benefit of machines that print houses is software that does automated building design.
The way most suburban residential construction is done these days (at least in the U.S.) is to start with a large area, split it up into relatively homogeneous lots, and flatten them out as much as possible so that they fit the requirements of one of some set of floor plans that were designed without regard for any specific lot.
The alternative to this is to do custom designs that take the considerations of particular lots into consideration, like the position of the sun during the day, the direction of the best views, layout of the yard, etc.. This is expensive and hard to do on a large scale, because you can't amortize the cost of the architect over multiple buildings.
Another alternative is to have a software package that takes a given lot and generates a floorplan optimized for that lot (and the needs of the buyer, if known). This is a hard problem, but I think it gets easier, or at least more interesting, when combined with machines that can build houses. With 3D printing, the design can be as complicated as you want, with little impact on cost. You can have funny-shaped walls that aren't at right angles with each other, vaulted ceilings, gothic arches, flying buttresses, or any kind of ornamentation or functional feature without regard for having to consider the difficulty of expressing the design to human workers. If done well, it could be a major step forward for well-designed residential construction -- you get a custom building on every lot that's optimized to match the site rather than forcing the site to match the builder's requirements, and the marginal cost of the design work is low (probably more than zero, since you'd need a human to review the design and possibly negotiate with customers).
- lazyasciiart 6y ago> You can have funny-shaped walls that aren't at right angles with each other, vaulted ceilings, gothic arches, flying buttresses, or any kind of ornamentation or functional feature You're going to have to allow for a lot more negotiation with customers once you start adding "frills" - one reason that houses built in bulk are so plain is that tastes vary hugely and you have to bet on what flavor is going to be popular right when you want to sell them all. Flourishes are the kind of thing that will rarely make a sale but will easily break it.
- elihu 6y agoSure, but if one were to design the software to construct houses in a distinctive style that a lot of people like, then it probably won't be too hard to find people willing to buy. Part of the developer's "brand" could be to invent new and interesting styles without getting too carried away with ornamentation for its own sake, or adding features that most people don't want. Flying buttresses and gothic arches were kind of a silly example; probably most houses wouldn't benefit from looking like Notre Dame (especially if everyone started building their houses to look that way), but there may be other styles that would look nice and would fit well into their environment, but which wouldn't catch on now because it's too complex and therefore too expensive to build.
- notahacker 6y agoIt's not difficulty in planning that's responsible for the ubiquitous right angle, it's the tendency of people to like familiar features and want their furniture to fit (they're also often fond of materials not particularly amenable to 3D printing). Architects would love to design the sort of curvaceous things from concrete, steel and glass they went to architecture school to admire, but the need to sell the houses gets in the way. I'm struggling to see procedural generation of the designs as doing anything but subtract from the ability to conceive 'distinctive style a lot of people like', given that architects are people with likes, can talk to prospective purchasers about their likes and understand at a high level how people might use [or not use] particular design features and what designs regulators might reject. Neural networks, on the other hand, produce outputs which are just a function of their inputs. Procedural building generation is what designers of 3D worlds use for the bits whose appearance they don't care enough about to detail by hand. The one place software design might lead to improved efficiency is randomising features for McMansions on a street from a simple library of squares and automatically generating the docs...
- alteriority 6y agoWas just listening to a podcast today that went over this, a different pre-fab house startup whose killer app sounds like basically the software you're describing, or at least the first steps towards it. (Full disclosure, I haven't looked any further into it or even finished the podcast, so I'm not sure how much of that description is straight hype). Episode: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/founders-fund/anatomy-of-next-utopia/e/76505727 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/founders-fund/anatomy-of-ne... Company in question: https://www.buildcover.com/ https://www.buildcover.com/