Building houses with Giant 3D printers

[CommissarRezail]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow...224156687.html

This guy is thinking really far out man, he thinking of making giant 3D printers to make houses in 20 hours. I believe its a good idea, it give people houses however it may put people out of a job. He does put up good points in his video, not enough houses and too many slums in the world. The thing is a giant 3D printer ? how will you get the printers to those poverty areas. I find making houses at a fraction of a cost and stability sounds good. They may look different and may not be as big, but for people who don't have a house and are living in dirt, it would be a very good idea. Not to mention giant 3d printers can build anything. Hell 3D printers making cars, planes?

Also it seem it would be beneficial to mars and moon missions. Making giant prefab houses in hours. So what do you guys think? Oh it turns out you can make really curvy houses with the machien too

[Guilliman]

I'm already seeing giant 3d printer factories everywhere, including in orbit, on the moon and on Mars. That is, give it a few more decades.

As for the how to get the 3d printer to poverty places?

Modular building. Put the 3d print factories on a giant tanker and you can print homes anywhere.

[Jonny]

As for the how to get the 3d printer to poverty places?

3d printers that print components to build 3d printers, it's already being worked on with an eye to making the technology affordable for the developing world.

As for putting people out of work, new technology has always done that and as someone who recently listened to a town councilor describe housebuilding as "the engine of the economy" with Ireland sitting right next door providing a pretty clear example of why that's a stupid idea, the sooner that industry bites the dust the better.

[Retroboy]

Per Guilliman, the first thing I thought was to tie it into the Mars thread. Imagine getting to Mars and there's a whole field of prefab components laid out.

There are two questions this raises:
Is there a concrete variant or substitution formula that can be created from locally available materials, exist in malleable state in local conditions, and will chemically set when deployed, on Mars?
Is there a way to ship the prefab machine to Mars in parts and then assemble it locally?

That's probably further out than a manned visit, honestly. I think third-world applications make more sense until this matures a bit, at least.

[Carl]

Yeah I’m writing a huge post on the feasibility of mars colonies and i don't see 3d printing tech doing much. I don't believe there's a way to make concrete, and even if there way i'm not sure how airtight it actually is, (on it's own). It has great applications for a lot of other things, but not for mars colonies IMHO.

[Guilliman]

The question is, why build out of concrete? If I'm not mistaken, the poly-materials commonly used in 3d printers are pretty tough already. And Belgian Researchers already printed with Titanium! Give it some time and they'll probably print in materials that far surpass concrete or any other building material now. Cost is an issue though. But for Mars, Titanium buildings would work!

[Retroboy]

Certainly wouldn't be titanium. This works by depositing semi-fluid layers, not placing bricks. The manufacturing cost of heating any standard construction-usable metal to the point where it's malleable enough for deposition would be phenomenal, not to mention the incremental costs and weight of building a machine that could handle that much hot product without itself melting.

Cost, availability, and speed are all good reasons why concrete is the right choice for the base material. To make construction-grade concrete, you need sand, rocks, limestone powder, a few other reasonably available minerals, and water. You get most of them by grinding or sifting relatively common base materials that are available all over the world, so cost including shipping is very low once you get the machine there.

Concrete is also an excellent insulator.

-----------

Watching the rest of the video I see that at 9:25 the guy implies that construction is feasible on the moon and there's a short clip of a lunar base component being built. Pretty cool, if still visionary, stuff.

[Carl]

@Retro e.t.c: Finally got the video to play, was having some issues before so had to rely on written summary. The bit about the moon talks about using it for landing pads, roads, reinforcing walls and rad shielding, (not really needed here but might as well if you do the rest), They're not talking of building the actual habitation area's from it, just various types of large concrete structures that will contain or include other stuff fabricated more normally. Incidentally, I went into it in a bit more detail in the mars thread, but lunar rock is very different to what we know about mars rock. Lunar rocks are rich in silicone, oxygen, iron, aluminum, and titanium, whilst mars rock is mostly iron oxide AFAWK. The broader range of materials present opens the possibility of a much greater range of ways to produce a substance suitable for use directly from the soil.

[Kien]

About priniting metals, shaping it is only one part, heat treatment is a critical part of metal stuff also. Lots of materials has to go through chemical processes as well.

[Mantaray]

i've got a reprap coming in the mail, with it i can build about 60% of the materials i need to build another one.

[Fish Of Doom]

question: why fuck around trying to build entire houses from scratch when you could build smaller modular components that could then be assembled into one in a short time, thus requiring much less printer size and storage space, and perhaps even enabling housing relocation should it be needed?

extra bonus: not completely sodomizing the construction worker occupation.

[Jonny]

Complication maybe? This does the whole thing, including wiring and plumbing, plus you know the house coming out is built to spec. Modular components would require tradesmen to fit together, plumb and wire them up and there'd be no guarantee the recipient would or could find trained people to do it. In the developing world you could just end up with slums of dubiously thrown together concrete prefab modular housing blocks instead of the houses it's intended to create.

[overmind2000]

If you're putting electricity and plumbing into things you'll have to have trained tradesmen at some stage to fit things together. In theory could you could build machines to clear the ground, lay electric and water lines, build over them with road and pathways and then slot houses on top - but you'll be looking at a massive investment to set something like that up and, I suspect, you'll still need specialists to maintain those machines and the setup.

If housing is going to have services connected to it someone has to be there to hook it up and to install the main lines in the first place.

That said I don't see this as a solution to slum housing, part of a solution possibly. You've still got to tackle the extreme poverty, the lack of basic skills, the lack of basic supplies of electric and water as well as the general depravity of the area. Not to mention overcoming legal issues with land ownership and other red tape issues which can be thrown up. We already have many basic building methods and materials which don't require decades of development and masses of resources to build prototypes and we still have problems with slum housing.

It's a neat idea, but I'd kind of like to think that in 20 years time regular standard methods could be used to overcome the problems (which are not just about building materials and construction skills).

[Jonny]

Aye, you'd still need specialists and trained operators, but building house by house you'd need a single crew per machine. Run the machine, connect plumbing and wiring to previously laid infrastructure, slot in doors and windows, move next door. If you printed out modular building blocks though, you'd need a whole service industry of tradesmen available to the local populace or you'd just end up with slums of concrete boxes either haphazardly finished off by the inhabitants or just lived in as they're delivered.

[Fish Of Doom]

not necessarily. you could just take the exact same design, break it up into inter-linking blocks and have the exact same crew assemble it because it's all in place, the only difference being it produces it piece by piece instead of whole. you don't need to make it brick by brick, but a wall or ceiling could be broken up into 4 smaller segments and that alone would massively reduce the cost required for the construction machines themselves, and if plumbing and other things run through there, you segment those pieces too; at most you'd maybe need to design a connection socket for those, and design only happens one per model.

hell, IKEA does modular everything already. put them on the job and you'll have dummy-proof veritable lego houses within the decade :P

[Fish Of Doom]

and besides you'd always need servicemen for repairs and maintenance anyway, regardless of whether they're required for assembly.

[Nurizeko]

I'm already seeing giant 3d printer factories everywhere, including in orbit, on the moon and on Mars. That is, give it a few more decades.

As for the how to get the 3d printer to poverty places?

Modular building. Put the 3d print factories on a giant tanker and you can print homes anywhere.

This is how Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander/supcom2/Planetary Annihilation style commanders begin.

We send a rover to Mars with a 3D printer bay, fast forward a little while, Mars is crawling in robots.


Back on topic:

It's a nice idea but no deal.

Houses still need plumbing, wiring, glass for the windows, insulation, foundations, weatherproofing, etc etc. Plus there is reason and benefit for using materials the 3D printer cannot utilize. (This goes for space exploration to, simply put 3D printing in no way comes close to meeting the specific material need for components, structures and tools you'd want to make.)

I'm sure 3D printer technology can play some role in house construction but it will be for components rather than the whole build.

[Retroboy]

question: why fuck around trying to build entire houses from scratch when you could build smaller modular components that could then be assembled into one in a short time, thus requiring much less printer size and storage space, and perhaps even enabling housing relocation should it be needed?

Biggest answer is transportation costs. There are a number of factors that influence shipping cost and effort, including terrain, distance, mass, volume, access to loading and unloading facilities, packaging/unpackaging methods, and availability of post-processing capabilities. Once you get your giant printer to its location, a prefab house can mostly be shipped as bags of concrete which are minimal in both size and mass as long as you reserve the adding-water step to the last bit - all of the bolt-ons after the fact consume much less mass. Generally, prefab components have a tendency to be larger and difficult to ship.

Modular components are awesome but not always as practical to get to where they need to go, and sometimes not as flexible when they get there.

[overmind2000]

But if you're shipping the whole machine to the location it wouldn't' matter if it was one machine for one house or a series of machines making modular components. Also I would have thought with the realities of house building, that modular components would be far more easily varied to changes in requirements for the final house than it would to reconfigure the single house building machine each time you want even a small variation.
Also surely you would have less transportation problems locally if you're only moving around modules for each house, moving the whole house one at a time is difficult and if the machine builds in situ it would need a rail runner system built in advance so that it can move from location to location.


It sounds great for simple house building, but it also sounds expensive. The only real gain you get is the building speed (and that is excluding the time needed to build the infra structure to move the machine). Structural soundness, variation in build design and the like are all iffy areas (especially on structural soundness). Plus you've still got to go in and have all the foundations set with skilled labour.

[Paladin]

The whole point of such a process would be that there would be no variations. This would be for bringing to a location and quickly erecting 100+ identical structures.

Structural soundness would be no real issue for residential construction. Have you seen the way we build single family homes in the US? It's pathetic.

[Langy]

Look at the TED talk again. They specifically mention that it could be used to create a wide variety of structures easily, and how it wouldn't result in cookie-cutter houses.

[Paladin]

Yes, but let's be realistic about how it would actually be used.

[Nurizeko]

To be fair as cool as it is I think 3D printing is a bit fad-like.

For example, drop a team of 10 builders into a virgin landscape and drop a team of 10 print 3D proponents in another.

Watch who builds civilization first.

It's cool, it can do cool things, but it feels like a hobby for enthusiasts/rich people who already have the massive support network of more practical technologies under them.

Like I said, for construction, for technology, there's a lot of materials and stuff that 3D printing simply cannot meet.

Plus someone still has to go find the material used by the 3D printer which still costs money and time and labour at the commercial scale.


Basically why bother 3D printing out the bricks for a house, when you can access the (probably) cheaper existing brick industry.

This is more-so in the Third World where there is an idea for this kind of thing, and smacks a bit of the detached western hipster who means well but just doesn't think.
Between the electric powered 3D printer and simply using handy local materials to build a home, the third world guy is probably just going to smile say thank you but he's too proud to use your mighty western knowledge (note the sarcasm) then go make some mud bricks and throw up a sufficient (to him) hovel.

Seems more a gentlemen's hobby, a lot of stuff has started off that way (early enlightenment science etc) but far off from useful application and it's not going to turn into Star Trek style replicators where you put wishful thinking in and get starships out of (Plus even in Star Trek they have this concept that industrial replicators can't make certain things/materials).

[Mr Carrot]

Yes because the third world is blazing the path to the future with their mud huts.

I think you are missing the end goal for what this is doing, its pulling off fully built homes through an industrial mechanism - with a certain number of intergrated functioning moving parts etc. This isn't printing each component (though 3d printing of individual components to fit will be a MASSIVE market in the very near future) to built a house. It's printing the whole house to be assembled... at a much printer and faster rate than comparative technologies (Huff Hus etc.).

[Nurizeko]

I'm not saying mud huts are the future Carrot, you silly bear.

I'm saying 3D printing is essentially a gimmick.

[Jonny]

Twenty years ago, Scotland...

Nuri: Nah, who'd need to be in touch with everyone everywhere? Sure for rich guys and businessmen, but ordinary people? What's wrong with a normal telephone? Mobile phones are just a gimmick.

We're in the very beginning of this tech. It's at the level of Danny Glover's massive aerial+box+handset in Lethal Weapon. Could be that in twenty years time they're everywhere and everything but craftsmen and high tech consumer industries will be screwed by one in every home.

[Aron_DeTomado]

Nuri, this is a technology which automates labour previously performed manually. Fuck, never mind the industrial revolution, this is a construction worker which doesn't take coffee breaks. How could you possibly dismiss that as a gimmick?

[Moe]

Can I just interject here and ask who here actually knows how a 3-D printer works and what it does? It's not a magical replicator from Star Trek. I'd be more excited about tissue printing tbh.

[overmind2000]

I'm also wondering about maintenance of these houses - especially if the 3D printer is not using common building materials as the foundation for the layering. Actually trying to strip out an extensive building campaign and replacing it with printing machines could backfire easily. Just look at how many 3rd world nations build up extensive farming tool collections (tractors) during the Green revolution; only for them to dump the machines once they broke because as the overseas investment dried up the pool of technical people to fix them went home and left little to no structure back in the country to fix the machines.

Indeed its been shown many times that you can't just jump on people, who many times are very poorly educated, and give them shiny toys and tell them what to do. It works, normally when those people are also given an incentive that they understand (money - eg subsidies), but as soon as you take away that simple incentive they revert back to what they already understood before. You could very well end up with the slums simply replacing corrugated iron and mud with cheap cement. There has been a lot more longer term success when projects are combined with existing native understanding - building up in "blocks" as you were from the foundations so that the community itself accepts and understands the changes and where education "to the next stage" isn't by such massive leaps and bounds.

In that context 3D printers which can print bricks and the like could be far more readily accepted and see more use than those which print a whole house. Although at that point the question would be raised as to why you'd need a 3D printer to make what is already very feasible through existing methods.

[Jonny]

Can I just interject here and ask who here actually knows how a 3-D printer works and what it does?

Build solid objects by layering building materials such as resins currently, don't they? As far as I know a major focus of research in the area is in expanding the type of materials that can be used so objects with more varying mechanical properties and more complex structure can be printed.

Although at that point the question would be raised as to why you'd need a 3D printer to make what is already very feasible through existing methods.

Possibly a printer could churn them out faster, they'd all be absolutely identical and you could make them of more diverse materials.

[Moe]

Build solid objects by layering building materials such as resins currently, don't they?

That's one type. There are those that use lasers to photoactivate crosslinking agents in a liquid resin (photolithography), there are those that spray glue onto a powdery base, there are the ones that squirt out resin like toothpaste. All have their pros and cons, and all are very limited in the materials that they use, and all of them are significantly larger than the objects they can print. You are much better off rapid-prototyping components and then assembling them, prefab-style, but even that seems like a step back from conventional methods.

you could make them of more diverse materials.

Quite the opposite. Conventionally you can make a wall out of wood, stone, concrete, glass, carbon fiber, and a million other materials. With printers, you are limited to materials that can be hardened rapidly either through glue, through chemical reagents, or through photoactivation. You can't just pour whatever material you want in those things and out pops a house.

I'm not sure why you guys want to print bricks. It's easier to just cast them out of concrete or whatever material you want - you do realize that these printers operate layer by very fine layer, right? It takes a lot of time to print just one of these bricks, and you're wasting time with layered precision that is absolutely not necessary for constructing a brick.

Seriously, if you want to rapidly produce cheap dwellings, use concrete canvas shelters made from concrete cloth. Those things are fucking magic.

[Mr Carrot]

Moe given the current complexity of 3d printed objects and the industry forecast rate of improvement then actually this is leading towards a 'magical replicator' of sorts at least according to the industry specialists we had in. It's just speeding the process up dramatically. The biggest problems with conventional house building is time needed and cost. Hence why Huff Hus' and the like have been such a major commercial success in Europe.

Now if you can demonstably slash the price of house building for larger projects, and enact it fast enough to take advantage of political winds in the country concerned - you can revolutionise brown field redevelopment. Which is currently held up due to the cost of construction - combined with the environmental cleanup costs is pushing developers to use up every single scrap of developable land outside of brown field.

[Aron_DeTomado]

Whose printing bricks? That video in the OP clearly showed houses being printed in full. Am I missing something?

[korpisoturi]

The video used special high strength extra-viscose concrete for the process. I really refuse to believe that would be anywhere as cheap as the regular stuff. And the end result was pretty much awful esthetically. You'd still need a battalion of workers for the finishing work, not to mention any ground work that needs to be done before your printer can start it's work. For cheap, rapid construction prefab wall elements or lightweight building blocks that can be easily assembled by hand is going to always be superior to transporting what amounts to a factory to the site to "print" the house. If there's some fatalities involved in the process, that's more to do with poor supervising and methods than any real reason.

I'd say 3D printing has a future in construction, but mostly for special curved elements (that are exceedingly difficult to make molds for) printed in factories and transported to be assembled on site. For wood construction there's already factories that can automatically assemble needed laminated beams and other elements from CAD-drawings and trees straight from forest that can be easily and rapidly assembled on site, and I'm aware of at least one building where a free-formed large wooden surface was created from CNC milled elements. Gehry probably uses some similar process for the construction of his projects.

The biggest advantage of 3D printing is that you can make more or less whatever you want without extra cost for the configuration of the production line. For mass production the traditional methods are going to be better, faster and cheaper for the foreseeable future.

[Retroboy]

I really refuse to believe that would be anywhere as cheap as the regular stuff.

But that's somewhat irrelevant.

The business case isn't "is it cheap as regular concrete?". It's "Is its combination of efficiency and logistics cheaper than other ways of reaching the same end goals?"

For wood construction there's already factories that can automatically assemble needed laminated beams and other elements from CAD-drawings and trees straight from forest that can be easily and rapidly assembled on site, and I'm aware of at least one building where a free-formed large wooden surface was created from CNC milled elements.

What type of wood, how available is it in the area in which it's deployed, what do you do with the wastage, do you need different sizes of wood cut to different lengths and measures or can a standard 2x4 be the basis of all of the work, how is insulation handled, how do you join together the finished parts, etc.

These types of questions all factor in to the comparative business case. It's not, and honestly is hardly ever, so straightforward as saying one solution is uniformly better than other solutions. This has its place in some applications and does not in others.

And as for aesthetics, Maslow's hierarchy of needs kicks in big-time. A solid concrete cookie-cutter design would probably look pretty darn good to these folks when the next hurricane comes in.

The biggest advantage of 3D printing is that you can make more or less whatever you want without extra cost for the configuration of the production line. For mass production the traditional methods are going to be better, faster and cheaper for the foreseeable future.

This view neglects the benefit of streamlining mass production and introducing that capability to geographic areas where it might otherwise be difficult to deliver.

[korpisoturi]

If you're aiming for some sort of minimum shelter, prefab solutions from lighter materials than concrete are still more efficient. Having a house built from concrete is such luxury that aesthetics do matter at that point: a 3D printed house isn't anywhere near the solution that would be economically feasible to help people in slums like in that picture.

If logistics are the biggest issue, then again the 3D printer is completely unfeasible: the machinery is huge and bulky, the cement needed needs to be transported from cement factory that's probably far away, and you would need highly trained personnel to man the "printer". Even water needed for mixing the concrete might be an issue. A lightweight solution that can be assembled by hand without special tools is better in those situations. In developing countries manpower is never an issue, infrastructure needed for supporting the house-printer might be. Not to mention that in the case of developing countries a solution that takes away from the local construction industry might actually do a lot more damage than good.

So: for a basic shelter a house-printer is too expensive, for remote areas it requires too much infrastructure, and for rich enough people the quality is too poor to actually cut the costs. The only niche where 3D printer truly shines is difficult shapes, but that's not really an issue for 99% of buildings.

If you want to build something fast, here's how it's done.

edit: besides, the idea that you could design a building that could then be just printed is laughable. In real world situations the drawings will change many times during the construction, and a lot of problems are solved in situ during construction. A house-printer would realistically work for only one or two different building types that are tested well enough, negating the advantage of flexibility a 3D printer has. Unless you print barely the shell, in which case there's a fuckton of stuff that needs to be done before the house is suitable for living, requiring the same manpower and infrastructure than conventional construction does.

[Paladin]

Honestly, there's no reason you couldn't make a house out of resin. The current pine frame + plywood (Though most builders are so cheap they use OSB) + drywall + stucco standard of construction isn't really that solid or long-lasting. It's just really cheap and easy (Compared to other methods already in use). Old school timber framing + masonry + plaster and lathe is actually much more solid. But it costs more to erect a house that way.

A simple structure made entirely of solid resin would probably be stronger.

Also, fabbers can produce metal objects (At least in theory), and a fabber designed specifically to do it, with the right mixture of minerals and resin in the liquid base, could actually fab the walls and all the wiring and piping inside them in a single pass.

The concept is honestly not that different from solid concrete homes, which are much stronger than normally constructed homes as well.

[Jonny]

There's also possible advances in material science which could make printed houses stronger and more efficient, for example I ran across this the other day http://www.gizmag.com/cellulose-nano...-kevlar/23959/ which seems to my untrained eye as an excellent material for this sort of application if it could be used in a 3d printer.

[Nurizeko]

Twenty years ago, Scotland...

Nuri: Nah, who'd need to be in touch with everyone everywhere? Sure for rich guys and businessmen, but ordinary people? What's wrong with a normal telephone? Mobile phones are just a gimmick.

We're in the very beginning of this tech. It's at the level of Danny Glover's massive aerial+box+handset in Lethal Weapon. Could be that in twenty years time they're everywhere and everything but craftsmen and high tech consumer industries will be screwed by one in every home.

Nuri, this is a technology which automates labour previously performed manually. Fuck, never mind the industrial revolution, this is a construction worker which doesn't take coffee breaks. How could you possibly dismiss that as a gimmick?

I get your point but it's a cute fallacy to assume because one technology has hit it big that all technologies merely need time to mature into their global dominance.

Fact is a lot of ideas just die off the launch pad. Sometimes literally.

I've read up a little more on this 3D printing stuff and it does seem to have some useful applications, but only within the manufacturing industry as a whole, the idea this technology is going to replace primary construction and end up everywhere is a bit wishful to say the least.

Most people on Earth simply don't know how to use 3D Max, not every need is met by plastics/resins and yeah, I'm just not seeing the bulk of the consuming public get into what is industrial prototyping at best and a specific skilled hobby at least.

3D printing is too inflexible materials wise, too time consuming, and simply not as easy and simpler (usually the driving force behind human endeavour) than just getting the building materials and tools from the existing construction industry, especially in the developing world.


3D printing may have a future, I stress may. It's not today.

[Sentinel]

Most people on earth couldn't mix cement, let alone build a house. That's why we have people trained to do it.

3D printing is probably the biggest breakthrough in manufacturing since robotics, so to dismiss it as a gimmick for enthusiasts is a bit naive. We can already print in metals, ceramics and polymers, and we can also print moving mechanical components.

Right now we use 3D printers for once off components and prototyping in the design/concept stage, but in the coming years we'll start to see them coupled up with robots in manufacturing and production lines because of their versatility. You might not think that many know 3Ds Max or CaD, but I can assure you that far fewer people know how to reprogram a robot or re-purpose a CNC lathe.

Although building a house might seem like a stretch now, considering the rate the technology has been advancing since it was conceived, the only barrier it'll face in the next couple of years will be cost, and not feasibility. There have also been huge advances in polymer and alloy development, so a low cost high strength material popping up between now and then isn't out of the question.

[Jonny]

Most people on Earth simply don't know how to use 3D Max

I'm not sure that's relevant, I don't know how to use photoshop to make a picture but I can download it and print it out. As long as the materials technology advances to the point at which they can print out durable and useful every day items then people in the developed world at least are already well used to downloading and using data created by somebody else.

[overmind2000]

Most people on earth couldn't mix cement,

If you've got access to the basic raw materials the time it takes to tell someone how to mix it is around 5 mins or less. Then you'll probably need half an hour to an hour of practice to get the rough ratio of water amounts right and from then on its just a case of adding more to the mixer/barrow and mixing it up (and yeah you can do all that by hand no need for machines at any stage - just a barrow and a shovel).

Heck its just cement, sand and water that you need to mix together.

[LoCo]

Heck its just a single download that you need to... erm... not mix together?

[overmind2000]

True but I've yet to see a wheel barrow bluescreen

[Nurizeko]

Heck its just a single download that you need to... erm... not mix together?

With what?

The thread started off on the premise of housing for the developing world correct?

I mentioned my previous statement of dropping 10 builders and 10 3D printing enthusiasts into a virgin landscape for a reason.

The third world simply doesn't have the kind of infrastructure and local know-how to make use of 3D printing.

They can be taught to mix some concrete, and independently and with more ease get into the business of building homes/structures.

[Retroboy]

Okay, I have to ask if we're giving the people of the "third world" enough credit because it seems like they're perceived as marginally trainable monkeys in some of the earlier posts.

Take some starving small-community uneducated young men and assure them of a livelihood and means of supporting their family. Some of them will LEARN - and quickly - how to do complex tasks beyond "stirring some concrete".

Will any of those people be able to design and architect a house after a one-week course and one month of mentorship? Unless one was exceptionally gifted, likely not, because they wouldn't have the contextual educational background.

But they don't need to in this kind of operation. And in a very short timeframe an intelligent local could easily operate - and likely maintain - a well-programmed machine like this house printer if they didn't have to interact with its programming. And they would be damned eager to.

[Sentinel]

I mentioned my previous statement of dropping 10 builders and 10 3D printing enthusiasts into a virgin landscape for a reason.

The third world simply doesn't have the kind of infrastructure and local know-how to make use of 3D printing.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make with this "virgin landscape". Are you implying that it's somehow common knowledge that 10 builders could construct more than 10 3D printers? Based on what may I ask?

The entire Third world doesn't need to know how to operate a printer or design their own home. The idea behind house printing is that they're template constructs, so you import the house1.stl, make sure the printer is stocked with material, and hit print. You don't need to have professionals trained in CaD in the area, all you need is someone with the know how to operate the machine, and a file on a USB stick.

[Retroboy]

all you need is someone with the know how to operate the machine, and a file on a USB stick.

...and someone that knows how to maintain that machine, and someone who can manage the logistics of the raw materials supply so the printer stays stocked, and the payroll process for the workers, and the scheduling, and the process to assess and prepare the foundation groundwork so the result won't crack in two,...

An operational model isn't too complex, but we shouldn't oversimplify it either. It will require local training and assistance to be economically successful by minimizing the cost of importing the necessary non-regional labour.

[Sentinel]

I did oversimplify, but what I meant was that the only real specialised position would be the operator, who would also be able to carry out most maintenance on site. As you'd be using a standard house file, you'd be able to calculate the resources required easily, since there would be no variation between houses. If it takes x to build one, then six houses is simply 6x. All you'd need to account for is tolerances, which again, would be pre-calculated.

Could the Printer not also lay the foundations for the house, presuming the ground has been prepared by unskilled labour?

[Retroboy]

That implies the house actually needs a "foundation". If you're on tectonically stable flat and dry ground (e.g. the typical movie view of the dry Australian far outback), I'd bet this thing could lay a decent concrete framework right on bare ground. For rocky or hilly terrain, muddy or swampy areas, low-density loamy soil or sod, or other similar conditions, I'd expect some prep would be necessary but a full concrete slab foundation would not, as long as you're not trying to "dig in" your house.

So, yes, some workers and tools to dig, level and tamp would be all that's probably needed in many locations.