An interesting article in Core 77: “Icon to 3D Print Houses for the Homeless” This is a practical application of an idea that’s been floating around for a while: use 3D printing’s additive technology with concrete (or a concrete-like material) to create buildings. Based on the renderings of what the completed houses are expected to look like, it seems that the idea here is to print the walls and then use stick-built or prefab wood trusses for the roofs, so the printing does not have to span horizontally.
There’s no obvious way to put rebar into the concrete, and the close-up photos of in-progress wall – in addition to looking very much like how I remember Play-Doh houses – seem to show unreinforced concrete. That issue would explain why the only horizontal framing needed for these one-story houses, the roofs, are not printed. It also helps that these houses are quite small in plan, so the walls are braced by many corners.
It’s an experiment, an attempt to do things a new way in the hope that it will be faster/easier/less-expensive/more-durable than small houses built more traditionally. Maybe it will. More likely, these early attempts won’t be, but they might be encouraging enough to spur more and better experiments.
An interesting precursor was Thomas Edison’s attempt, in the 1910s, to build concrete houses in one placement operation. The idea was to build a negative of the entire two-story building with a re-usable form kit, and then dump in concrete until you were done. A few were built but there was no obvious payback for all the effort required and the idea died.
More accurately, the idea went into a coma and has now awake in a new and stranger era.
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