Building houses with Giant 3D printers

[Mantaray]

my 3d printer arrived 2 days ago. man this thing is BADASS! printing out custom parts for warthammer? check. replacing that dodgy dial on the cooker? check. made an insanely small 1cm3 box that hinges open? check! building a house to move into out of plastics? give me a few thousand£ of plastic and... check!

[Nurizeko]

...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.

...lawyers to ensure local law and regulation compliance, people to transport the raw materials, people to gather those raw materials, people to manage those gathering the materials, people to transport the machine, people to set up that machine (which btw do not look that simple on the scale we're talking about), etc.

Plus relying on 3D printers and the guys that run them is absolutely the wrong way to go if you're goal is to help a developing nation, you know, develop. The third world doesn't need some gimmicky plastic resin houses by enthusiasts from the west, it needs domestic home grown construction industry as a part of a native economy.

I also hate to go back to an original point but 3D printing is slow and requires outside resources (plastics do not just magically grow on trees) whereas more traditional construction methods can get a home up with more traditional pre-fab parts/sections quicker and with more reliance on local resources. More importantly there isn't a reliance on computers to get it done either.

It' correct that given incentive one can train up developing world workers to use the 3D printing process. Why bother?

To suit some nerd-boner for the technology? Irrelevant, they want to build a house as easily as possible, not satisfy some enthusiast's vision.

Sentinel, the problem is that it's always oversimplified. 3D printing can have a role in many areas of industry. It's not for the foreseeable future ever going to BE the industry.

3D printing is just not a magical solution to every human need and problem and if people can't accept that, then fine.


What do we say to replicator technology satisfying all human need and heralding the post-scarcity economy?

Not today.

[Sentinel]

Nuri, we're talking about quick housing to get people out of shanties and mud huts. Of course there is an industry to be built around it, but you know, without 3D printing you still need lawyers, transport, materials, supervisors, tools and builders to put up a house. You also need engineers on site, brick layers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, machine hire, equipment operators, quantity surveyors, architects, quality controllers, roofers, tilers, painters. You also need to have independent engineers and officials to check and control building standards.

3D printing is much faster than traditional building, and it's doesn't have to be out of resins, since cement and steel can be used.
From your post I can only assume that you either didn't watch the video, and have no idea about what 3D printing really entails, since a lot of what you've said is quite simply wrong.

A printer can also work around the clock, constructing one house from start to finish in a day, so in a week, you have 7 houses, in a month you have an estate. Do you know how long it takes to build a house manually? It took 3 years for the estate I'm in now to be built, and even then they cut every corner possible.

Printers also remove human error from the equation which is a huge problem with current housing, and it also produces housing to a predetermined standard so once the file is cleared you don't need third party engineers or fire officials to inspect every build.

I'd also like to point out that when it's a machine bigger than a house, with a professionally trained operator using a file developed by an engineer, he's not really an "enthusiast". But hey, it's just a gimmick.

[korpisoturi]

Nuri, we're talking about quick housing to get people out of shanties and mud huts. Of course there is an industry to be built around it, but you know, without 3D printing you still need lawyers, transport, materials, supervisors, tools and builders to put up a house. You also need engineers on site, brick layers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, machine hire, equipment operators, quantity surveyors, architects, quality controllers, roofers, tilers, painters. You also need to have independent engineers and officials to check and control building standards.

Mud huts are actually amazingly good buildings for the climate they are made in.

The third world housing problems are such that all the people you listed are overkill for the budgets available. The next level after shanties doesn't have indoor plumbing, electricity, or building standards. It's built from local materials with simple enough design that more or less anyone can build it, and has a door that can be locked. And time and manpower really are not an issue in those situations.

I am an architect by education, and the idea that you could design a fully equipped building with plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, insulation, paint, tiling and roof that could then be simply printed is laughable. I have seen a marketing man hyping their design software by showing a situation where the execution of some piping was almost like it was originally designed. That's the reality in building industry today: an almost correct execution is the sign of excellent planning (and that's because despite the best efforts the different designers simply can't create a single coherent design, as everyone is changing their own things simultaneously, working with different versions of different software), and that's not really going to change. A house printer would produce a "paper jam" before it gets above the floor.

You could design it so that a machine would automatically assemble the house from prefab parts (like later in the video) but that would require even more expensive materials, and need exponentially more effort in the design phase. I mean, replacing dirt cheap rebar with milled elements that can be screwed together by the machine? Really?

3D printing might have some role in construction (probably in the backstage, inside a factory making elements), but a worker with two hands, two legs and a brain is always going to be more flexible. Instead of completely automated house printers we'll have different, better tools for individual building tasks and more efficient and clever prefab elements that are going to increase the amount of industrialization and reduce the possibility of human error in building industry. The step to full automation is just too big to happen in the foreseeable future. It's at least as far away as completely driverless cars, but that doesn't mean we can't have breaking radars, cruise control and satellite navigation.

[Sentinel]

The next level after shanties doesn't have indoor plumbing, electricity, or building standards. It's built from local materials with simple enough design that more or less anyone can build it, and has a door that can be locked. And time and manpower really are not an issue in those situations.

Right, but why would you not want them to have indoor plumbing, electricity or building standards? They don't have to wait x amount of years before they can "level up" and get a better house. Instead of going from shanty to shit hole, lets go from shanty to "meets basic living standards".

Employing all those people is a hell of a lot of work, and would never be feasible in an emergency housing situation, which is where 3D printing comes in, which was the point I originally made which you responded to.

I'm sure blacksmiths laughed at the idea of a mill or lathe, farmers probably laughed at the idea of automation too, wagon drivers laughed at cars, doctors at remote surgery, merchant vessel traders at the idea of near instantaneous global trade. The only thing funny though, is the short-sightedness on display here.

The thing is though, we can already print mechanical parts, we can already print highly detailed three dimensional components with detailed interiors, and we can already use multiple materials within the same component, with strict tolerances. You write it off as laughable, but based on what? Your lack of understanding, or have you researched this already and concluded that it will never be?

Designing a house to be printed is of course going to take more effort and resources than designing a house to be built by hand, but once that design is made it can be used to produce housing far quicker than a builder ever could.

I've always found handwriting to be more flexible than typing and printing a page, so if I need flexibility, I'll hand write, but if I need 20 similar pages, I'd be a moron not to type it. The exact same applies to 3D printers.

[Retroboy]

I've always found handwriting to be more flexible than typing and printing a page, so if I need flexibility, I'll hand write, but if I need 20 similar pages, I'd be a moron not to type it. The exact same applies to 3D printers.

This. But make it 200. Or 2000. And it's still much less onerous and labour-intensive if you have to take those sheets and stuff them into envelopes or sign them individually (analogy: bring in toilets and electrical wiring and add them to the concrete shell that the house-printer made.)

It's important to recognize that the "house printer" doesn't have to produce a finished house, and it's probably way more cost effective to have those other finishing steps performed after it's done its job. Its intention is to substantially reduce the effort and cost to produce the majority of the walls, and possibly floors and ceiling, of a highly stable, very long-life domicile building that would fit within a suburban setting. Want to add a toilet or external feeds for water and electricity? Put some PVC pipe sections down that the unit can pour concrete around/over and that will leave openings. Then add those components later.

Let's be clear that this is not a panacea. There are many, many circumstances where it's not the right solution. But it's certainly appealing if you've a need to produce a low-cost-per-unit housing development where there's a decent but not super-high standard of living, where a cookie-cutter design will permit the laying out of a high-density yet comfortable suburban type of environment with single-family-per-structure architecture as the basis, and where speed is of the essence. And it's not decades away if the demand is there and the economics prove out - and I'd expect they would. There is nothing in this that is not achievable with current technology.

[korpisoturi]

Right, but why would you not want them to have indoor plumbing, electricity or building standards? They don't have to wait x amount of years before they can "level up" and get a better house. Instead of going from shanty to shit hole, lets go from shanty to "meets basic living standards".

Because of lack of infrastructure and money? They don't say anything about the cost of the process, just that it reduces it at materials (less waste) and labor. The third world countries are amazingly efficient with materials already so that's no issue, and labor costs nothing there. So instead of building traditionally from local materials, you need to ship in massive machinery, specialist materials and people to operate the machinery. When you have people living with less than $10 a day (80% of worlds population) that's not something you can afford: the material cost alone of a normal western standard house is around $1500 per square meter. So by not eating for a year you can afford to print your family a toilet.

Employing all those people is a hell of a lot of work, and would never be feasible in an emergency housing situation, which is where 3D printing comes in, which was the point I originally made which you responded to.

What do you mean with emergency housing? One house per day without the ability of scaling the production up without massive investments in the machinery doesn't sound like something that could be used in any kind of emergency. The current emergency solutions cost next to nothing, can be built with next to no tools and can be transported en masse with aircraft. If you mean the more chronic problems with population growth and urbanization, those problems can only be solved by teaching them to build for themselves. A 3D printer which greatest strength is lesser need for manpower is not something they need.

The thing is though, we can already print mechanical parts, we can already print highly detailed three dimensional components with detailed interiors, and we can already use multiple materials within the same component, with strict tolerances. You write it off as laughable, but based on what? Your lack of understanding, or have you researched this already and concluded that it will never be?

Buildings are among the most complicated things in existence, and most of them are unique. You can't compare printing a house to printing a single part. It's more like printing a car. I think the idea of 3D printing a car is equally laughable. Let's wait until we can automatically assemble at least mobile phones before scaling up and taking the machinery outside assembly halls, alright? Until then we can do it like the Chinese in the video I posted: from elements prefabricated in factories, where you have controlled environment and ready infrastructure for different machinery. They seemed to have at least the speed down.

And again, if your house printer can only make load bearing walls it's not worth the effort to get the machine on site. There's a lot of alternatives that are as fast and need less investment in machinery, and can be assembled by basically anyone. The 3D printer is only a good solution if the cost of labor is prohibitively high.