Editor's Note: This story was originally published 27 March 2018. It was recently announced that ICON, the construction company leading the project, has successfully raised $9 million in seed funding for the project. A new video of the project is included below.
Tech gets a bad rap for serving developed economies in the interest of money-making. It often takes a few cycles for the technologies that are truly helpful to reach the developing world, hence the unfortunate, slow-draining term called the “trickle effect.”
AI SpaceFactory has released details of their proposed cylindrical huts for the Planet Mars, designed as part of the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge organized by NASA. Project MARSHA (Mars HAbitat) was endorsed by NASA with a top prize of almost $21,000, one of five designs selected from a field of seventeen.
The competition asked participants to design an effective habitat for a crew of four astronauts to be located on the Red Planet, using construction techniques enabled by 3D printing. The submitted schemes were then ranked based on their innovation, architectural layout, and level of detail in BIM modeling.
The Dutch city of Eindhoven is to host the world’s first commercial housing project based on 3D-concrete printing, with the first of five planned houses due to start construction this year. The units were developed by a collaborative team including local firm Houben & Van Mierlo Architecten, and the Eindhoven University of Technology. The pods will be purchased and let out by a real estate company upon completion.
The first house will be a single-floor, three-room house measuring 1000 square feet (95 square meters), to be followed by four multi-story units. The irregular shape of the buildings is based on “erratic blocks in the green landscape,” made possible due to the flexibility of form permitted by 3D-printing.
https://www.archdaily.com/895597/worlds-first-3d-printed-concrete-housing-project-to-be-built-in-eindhovenNiall Patrick Walsh
WATG Urban's first prize design for The Freeform Home Design Challenge in 2016 is now moving one step closer to becoming a reality. Since winning the competition, WATG's Chicago office has been developing the winning design, dubbed Curve Appeal, alongside Branch Technology. Curve Appeal is now undergoing the "wall section testing, research and development phase" with an anticipated goal of breaking ground later this year. This revolutionary project could change the way we construct complex, freeform structures.
Once again, Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co has expanded the capabilities of 3D printing. After constructing ten houses in under twenty-four hours last year, now they are back with both the world's tallest 3D printed building - a five-story apartment block - and a 1,100 square meter mansion with internal and external decoration to boot.
On display in Suzhou Industrial Park in Jiangsu province, the two buildings represent new frontiers for 3D printed construction, finally demonstrating its potential for creating more traditional building typologies and therefore its suitability for use by mainstream developers.
Almost everything around us is made automatically: our shoes, our clothes, home appliances and cars – so why not buildings? Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, the Director of the Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California, has set out to change that through the development of an automated construction process known as Contour Crafting. “Contour-crafting is basically scaling-up 3D printing to the scale of buildings. What we are hoping to generate is entire neighborhoods that are dignified at a fraction of the cost, at a fraction of the time, built far more safely and with architectural flexibility that would be unprecedented,” Khoshnevis says in this TedxTalk in Ojai, California.
The architects of Emerging Objectshave devised a scheme for a 3D printed house made from locally harvested salt and concrete. Known as the “3D Printed House 1.0,” the case study residence was commissioned by the Jin Hai Lake Resort Beijing. It integrates traditional construction methods with renewable 3D printed materials, manufactured by Emerging Objects, to build a house that is sustainable, structurally sound and beautiful.
Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering has constructed a set of ten single story, 3D-printed homes which it produced in under 24 hours. The homes, printed in prefabricated panels which fit together on site, were created using WinSun's custom-built 3D printer which measures 10 meters by 6.6 meters, and took the company twelve years to develop.
Formed with a cement-based mixture containing construction waste and glass fiber, each of the houses cost just $5,000 to build. Read on after the break for more on the development.
In an age when 1:1 3D printed buildings are becoming ever more commonplace from the Netherlands to China, it's important to pause and assess the existing built fabric of our cities, towns and villages. If we want to maintain and preserve them whilst protecting the inherent craft imbued in their construction, the importance of nurturing and promoting these skills should be recognised.
In the UK, the Heritage Skills Hub(HSH) push to see "traditional building skills, conservation, restoration and responsible retrofit" included within all mainstream built environment courses. In a recent conversation with Cathie Clarke, CEO of the HSH, we discussed the obstacles faced by an organisation dedicated to conserving and teaching skills like stonemasonry, roof thatching, glass making, traditional brick construction to a new generation.
Villa Asserbo, a house whose printed pieces "snap" together, by Danish architects Eentileen. Photos via Fast Company.
UPDATE: This post originally stated that Villa Asserbo was 3D Printed, when in fact its pieces were printed using rapid prototyping technology (a subtractive, rather than additive process).
But today we heard a story about an alternative to 3D Printing‘s capabilities in the here and now - and its implications are pretty exciting.
In a small town outside of Copenhagen, Danish architects Eentileen joined forces with London-based digital fabrication and architecture specialists, Facit Homes, to create Villa Asserbo: a 1,250 square foot, sustainable home made from Nordic plywood fabricated via CNC miller and easily “snapped” together.
No heavy machinery, no cranes, no large labor force. Just a couple of guys, a few easily printed pieces, and six weeks.
Get more details about this sustainable, printed House, after the break…
