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Nowadays you can use 3D printing for producing pretty much everything. Vegan meat, fancy
shoes or even a wall-climbing robot. ...Wait...a what? Anyway, what if you could print your
house? That would be a life-changer, right? The winner of NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge
developed a living environment for Mars. So, what about on Earth?
I'm Matt Ferrell ... welcome to Undecided
NASA’s challenge was trying to boost construction technologies and create sustainable housing
solutions for our planet and beyond. AI SpaceFactory's winning project, Marsha, is a vertically oriented
egg-shaped 3D printed structure. Made of basalt and renewable bioplastic, its configuration
is optimized to resist the difference in pressure and temperature between the interior and exterior
Martian environment.
But what if you’re not willing to relocate 34 million miles away?
Good news! You can now buy a hot off the press house without going on an interstellar trip.
SQ4D is ready to build the first 3D printed house for sale in the US. You can customize
it and they’ll print it scan by scan in a couple of days thanks to their Autonomous
Robotic Construction System (ARCS). You can get 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a garage,
for a total of 1,400 square feet. All for about $299,000, which is half the price of
a similar sized house in the same area. The real estate agent for the property, Stephen
King, said he will be...haunted...by potential buyers. Okay ... not that Stephen King. But
speaking of haunted houses, what if I told you 3D printing could give birth to a living
house? Not sure how I feel about that.
But before getting to that, how did 3D printing start? We need to go back to the early 1980s
to find a Japanese lawyer, Hideo Kodama, who laid the very first...layer...of 3D printing
technology. Kodama developed the rapid-prototyping technique, which is the ancestor of 3D printing.
A few years later Charles Hull put his...print name...on stereolithography (SLA), which was
the first 3D printing technique.
But how does SLA work? Basically, a UV light hits a liquid acrylic-based photosensitive
material (photopolymer) which then turns solid. The process is also called light curing or
photopolymerization. I'm kind of surprised I can pronounce that.
In general, 3D printing, a.k.a. additive manufacturing, creates a three-dimensional object layer by
layer starting from a digital sketch. This concept applies to all 3D printing processes,
but based on which technique you go for, the raw material and the layering process might
change.
During the 1990s, the development of two further technologies, selective laser sintering (SLS)
and fused deposition modeling (FDM), ...heated up the 3D printer nozzles race... These are
currently the two most widely used 3D printing techniques. Also, the printer company Solidscape
improved precision in additive manufacturing by introducing the ‘dot-on-dot’ process,
which was based on polymer jetting.
By the end of the following decade we see 3D printing becoming more accessible to designers.
In 2008, people could use an online 3D printing market called Shapeways. You would send through
your design and they would print it out and send it to a specific address. A sort of 3D
printing ecommerce. Just a year later, MakerBot invented DIY 3D printing. They provided an
open-source kit for creating 3D printers and products.
But when did 3D printing hit the housing business? In 2013, DUS Architects started a research
project inspired by Amsterdam canal houses. Using mostly bioplastic as a raw material,
the architecture studio printed out some kind of LEGO blocks and stuck them on top of each
other. They used the FDM technique to build their eight-square-metre micro-house. Although
this seems to be the first house ever 3D printed in the world, it’s still under construction.
In 2014, the Chinese company, Winsun, churned out 10 houses in 24 hours by feeding recycled
materials to a 3D printer. Each of the small homes was priced at $5,000 because of the
low labor needed to build it. Which sounds crazy, but that's not the craziest part. What
if you could print out a house that fixes itself? Believe it or not, that’s a real
project from the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
...You've gotta love government agency acronyms... With their Engineered Living Materials (ELM)
program, researchers are exploring the potential of living biomaterials that could quickly
grow, self-repair or adapt to the surrounding environment. Bone, skin, coral, mushrooms.
You name it, they print it. The project’s aim is two-fold. First, in the short-term,
the design of scaffoldings as a growing support for living cells. Secondly, in the long run,
incorporating structural features into the genome of biological systems so that they
can be self-supportive. Recently, the researchers developed a method to create a living brick
that breathes in CO2 and spit out calcium carbonate, a compound used to produce cement.
But has anybody ever lived in a 3D printed house? Yep. A French family was the first
in the world to make the move in 2017. A four-bedroom property was built with curved walls to minimize
humidity and included digital controls for disabled people. Short of windows, doors and
roof, builders...or should I saw printers...got the framework out in 54 hours. Its construction
cost, £176,000, which was 20% cheaper than a standard house of a similar footprint.
Faster delivery, more flexible design, lower cost, more sustainable. From an environmental
standpoint, 3D printing minimizes waste since components are printed on-demand and with
high accuracy. To add to that, it may be a more eco-friendly solution than traditional
construction when using natural materials that can be recycled, like mud or bamboo.
In that case, the printed structure would be near-zero waste. Just like the world's
first 3D-printed net zero energy community that the company Mighty Buildings is creating
in Palm Springs, California. Using their 3D-printed panels, made of a non-silicate light stone
material and steel, they print only the essential components. This saves up to 5 lbs of waste
per sq. ft. compared to traditional home construction. They've said each of the 15 homes will save
2000 kg of CO2 emissions. The low-carbon houses will get their energy from solar panels and
homeowners can opt for Tesla Powerwall batteries and EV charging points. The cheapest house
sold for $595,000 and covers a surface of 1,450-square-feet. Did I mention that they
also come with a swimming pool?
Altogether, building and construction sectors emit nearly 40% of all energy-related CO2
emissions. Concrete production plays a big part in this. Making conventional Portland
cement accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions.
When assessing the impact of 3D printing vs building with concrete, the data is a little
controversial. Based on one study, using a contour crafting technique saves 7 tons of
raw material waste and about 80% of CO2 emissions compared to a conventional concrete process
(CCP). On the other hand, a recent life cycle assessment (LCA) shows that when using recycled
concrete for 3D printing you end up with a higher environmental impact compared to traditional
methods. It's because 3D printed concrete buildings are more cement-thirsty.
But what about the process itself? It’s great that you can get a 3D printed house
pretty fast, right? But you need additives to speed up the layers hardening process.
Apparently these could pollute indoor air. Also, when feeding plastic to a 3D printer,
the melting process releases Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).
When looking at the price tags, the economic impact appears to be positive. UK research
found 3D printing can save up to 35% off of a standard house's price. The big reason is
from the lower amount of material and labor needed. That’s why 3D printed houses could
help meet the demand for social housing. And this is already starting to happen.
Two companies, ICON and New Story, joined forces to provide affordable homes to 500
low-income families in the Mexican town of Tabasco. ICON also partnered with Mobile Loaves
& Fishes to print a Community First! Village in less than 27 hours for homeless people.
Although being a good potential solution for cheap shelters in developing areas, 3D printing
could be a problem for countries that have a lot construction workers or a low labor
cost. Remember SQ4D and their quick and cheap 3D printed house? Well, it took only 3 people
to complete the project. If you compare that to a residential home built the usual way,
it would take up to 32 workers. But the labor reduction could go even further than that.
An Austrian architect combined robotics with Building Information Modeling (BIM) to design
the Museum of Contemporary Art and Planning Exhibition (MOCAPE) in Shenzhen, China. With
this advanced 3D printing technology, he said the number of workers needed on site went
down from 160 to only 8. Which is ... again ... crazy.
It seems 3D printing has already passed proof of concept. Even though there are still several
challenges to overcome, 3D printed homes hold a lot of promise for readily available and
cheap housing in the future. So, how fast will private 3D homes spread on the market?
Remember the first one for sale in the US? Well, ICON has got the second one...in press...already.
Actually more than one. They’re building a housing complex in Texas and pricing each
of the homes at $450,000, which is just about the average house price in the same area.
Even though they constructed the second floor the old fashioned way, the company 3D printed
the first floor using their Lavacrete material, a special concrete they claim is more resistant
to weathering. Thanks to the thermal properties of Lavacrete, the first level has got better
insulation value, which is why ICON claims the 3D printed floor is more energy efficient
and disaster-proof than standard construction.
But Dubai is ahead of the...printing queue... In 2019, its municipality hired Apis Cor,
one of the 3D printing construction leaders, to design the world’s largest 3D printed
building ever, with a height of nearly 10 meters and a footprint of 640 square meters.
The Russian company completed the office space in two weeks and used a robotic-arm construction
3D printer. The Emirate State has also...printed a clear roadmap...to drive 3D printing adoption.
They committed to use the technology for creating 25% of their buildings by 2025.
The market agency Business Wire predicted the global market for 3D printing construction
to grow at a CAGR of 247.1% from 2021 to 2023, reaching a value of $114.4 million.
But there’s another reason why we could build our hopes on 3D printed homes. One of
the main limitations for projects so far has been complying with local building regulations.
But in 2019 two companies, Sunconomy LLC and Forge New, joined forces to develop the first
fully approved 3D home technology in the US. A year later, the German company Peri designed
a residential building that got the all clear from the local government. They built their
two-story house with a COBOD 3D printer that takes just 5 minutes to raise 1 m² of a double-skin
wall.
## A new chapter yet to be printed So, will 3D printing change the way we live?
Clearly, the technology seems to be appealing for a low-carbon construction in the future.
And the lower labor requirements makes it a more affordable option compared to standard
housing. It’s true that not many projects have achieved full compliance with building
codes yet, but 3D printed homes are springing up like mushrooms ... perhaps they will be
made of mushrooms?
If you're fascinated by 3D printing and structures, and want to dig a little deeper into the physics
for how things like this work, I'd strongly recommend checking out the Physics of the
Everyday course and Brilliant. It's one of my favorites from Brilliant and helped me
wrap my head around beam and truss systems used in bridges to why and how skyscrapers
are designed to sway. It's really cool stuff.
But even if physics doesn't matter to you, they have over 60 courses including topics
in computer science, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. They've got something for everybody.
All of the concepts are taught through fun and interactive challenges to help you understand
the "why" of something ... not just the "how." It helps to develop your intuition, which
is my favorite part about Brilliant and taps into the way I learn.
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So would you want to live in a 3D printed home? Jump into the comments and let me know.
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