Housing Transformed : Is 3D printing the future for building homes?

Washington

3D printing could be likened to icing a cake. The printer, held by a robotic arm, prints the material layer by layer, and leaves spaces where doors or windows are supposed to be attached. This printing in layers allows architects a lot of flexibility in design as well as their choice of materials for building a structure.

“The special thing is that we, as planners, have a lot more freedom with the concrete printer,” Waldemar Korte, the architect whose company designed the structure, told German public broadcaster WDR. “We can really play around with the form.” Also made with 3D printers, the Italian architects’ sustainable houses TECLA are made of clay. Built in Massa Lombarda, near Bologna in Italy, these habitats were designed by the Italian company WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project) and Mario Cucinella Architects (MCA). TECLA — an acronym for technology and clay — structures are built entirely from local raw earth, according to WASP.

The project is inspired by author Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, which is a series of conversations between Marco Polo and the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. TECLA refers to the word “Thekla” that Calvino uses in his novel to describe a city that is always under construction. These houses, according to the company, are a response to the climate emergency we are facing today in the form of migration and natural disasters.

The circular structures, which cover an area of 60 square meters, have been created after researching local building practices, bio-climatic principles and the use of natural and local material. It is a nearly zero-waste project and even its furnishings are designed to be recycled or reused.

A TECLA structure can be built in 200 hours, its designers have said. German architect Waldemar Korte, predicts that — based on the current rapid development of the technology — building 3D houses may become cheaper than traditional methods of construction within the next five years. “We are much faster at building,” said the architect, whose house in Beckum only took four days to build. “We need fewer people and that helps when you have a dearth of skilled people in the building industry.” Indeed, innovative concrete mixes and the sinking prices of concrete printers are driving down costs for printing houses all over the world, according to All3DP, a website that specialises in news about 3D printing. Boston-based Russian company Apis Cor, for example, built a house in Russia in 2017 that cost around $10,000. The 38-square-meter home went up in a day. Texas-based building company ICON, which works on developing low-cost housing, aims to reduce the price of a house to $4,000.

The Chinese company Winsun has also broken records by print-constructing 10 houses in one day back in 2014. Each house cost around $4,800 to build. In an article published early this year, All3DP listed a number of printed constructions that were produced at very low cost and said that large concrete printers and innovative concrete mixes were driving the change. Concrete mixes are, as the name suggests, a mix of cement and sand, but many builders add geopolymers and fibers for reinforcement. Lavacrete, which was developed by US architect Paul Schwam, is a mix of pulverised red volcanic rock, cement and water. It can withstand extreme weather conditions. Many 3D-printed structures today offer an optimal combination of creative design and eco-friendly materials that can be built fast and at a substantially low cost.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle