[MUSIC PLAYING]
Virginia San Fratello: We were interested in using
3D printing, and we couldn't afford
the printers or the materials.
And so we hacked the printer and developed our own materials
using very inexpensive, very ubiquitous materials.
One of our goals is to make this technology
accessible to more people.
We have a bit of an activist agenda about that,
and that is something that underlies a lot of our work.
Ronald Rael: Most 3D printing is plastic,
and while we've done a lot of experimentation with plastic,
our main interests are to think about how
we can use materials that are recycled
or up-cycled or sustainable.
Voila!
3D printed curry.
We were speculating on what the future of building with earth
would be.
We started trying to print clay.
So that led us into 3D printed ceramics.
Here in the print farm, we have an array
of different kinds of 3D printers.
We have printers that can extrude clay,
and you can see a range of our experiments
that we've created over the years.
The thing that we get most excited
is how the tool allows us to think
about new possibilities for endangered species habitat
and coral reef restoration.
Virginia: What I'm printing right now
is one of the coral seeding units.
It's printed out of what will be a very strong clay so
that it won't break easily when it's dropped onto the reef.
This is a very rapid method of printing, just maybe
five or ten minutes.
This was a collaboration with SECORE,
and they have a unique perspective.
Instead of making gigantic coral reefs,
their idea is to make these small seeding units
so that the coral will have genetic diversity
and you won't have the same species growing on the reef.
It's printing these loops, and this
is the part where we hope the coral
larvae will settle into the loops
and be protected from predators.
And amazingly, they only need one larvae
to survive on each one of these for success.
Ronald: There's a housing crisis in the Bay Area.
That prompted us to say, well, here
is an opportunity to think not only about how
3D printing might be able to respond to that housing
emergency, but also it opens up the possibility for us
to test the novel materials and techniques.
Virginia: We'll design a block or a tile or component
and think about how those blocks and tiles aggregate together
to make larger occupiable structures.
We are now at the Cabin of 3D Printed Curiosities.
These are local materials.
These dark brown tiles are printed out
of Chardonnay that comes from Sonoma.
The lighter brown tiles are printed out
of sawdust which comes from the Sierra Nevadas.
And sometimes we recycle all of our materials
together and print tiles out of a mixture of materials as well.
Ronald: But whereas the front's made out
of recycled and up-cycled materials,
the sides and the roof are made out
of locally harvested ceramic.
The beautiful thing is that they are like the tree bark starting
to take on moss and lichen.
We like that part of architecture.
We like the way natural materials behave over time.
The house is very much, I would say, a California house.
It is a kind of vernacular.
It's a really nice example of the way
we think about the future by looking at the past.
Virginia: Ultimately, we won't see the ceramic objects
that we made.
And we won't really care that they were 3D printed.
All of that will become invisible,
and I think that's the definition of success.