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A startup is 3D printing houses in under a day at a cost of about $10,000 each, and hopes to get it down to $4,000 each:
ICON has developed a method for printing a single-story 650-square-foot house out of cement in only 12 to 24 hours, a fraction of the time it takes for new construction. If all goes according to plan, a community made up of about 100 homes will be constructed for residents in El Salvador next year. The company has partnered with New Story, a nonprofit that is vested in international housing solutions. "We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia," Alexandria Lafci, co-founder of New Story, tells The Verge.
[...] Using the Vulcan printer, ICON can print an entire home for $10,000 and plans to bring costs down to $4,000 per house. "It's much cheaper than the typical American home," Ballard says. It's capable of printing a home that's 800 square feet, a significantly bigger structure than properties pushed by the tiny home movement, which top out at about 400 square feet. In contrast, the average New York apartment is about 866 square feet.
The model has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a curved porch. "There are a few other companies that have printed homes and structures," Ballard says. "But they are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts. For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses." The use of cement as a common material will help normalize the process for potential tenants that question the sturdiness of the structure. "I think if we were printing in plastic we would encounter some issues."
Also at Fortune, Wired, and BGR.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 16 2018, @09:58PM (1 child)
There's a building tech called SIPS (structural insulated panel systems) that puts up the exterior cladding, insulation, and interior cladding as a single panel, typically 3' wide - so the whole building goes up incredibly fast, and small structures can get all their SIPS panels for $22 to 45 per square foot, depending... but, even though that includes roof and walls, it doesn't include the slab, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, windows, doors, etc. (one [innovaecobuildingsystem.com] of many SIPS companies.)
We watched a big apartment building go up in the 1990s near work, the shell and even windows and doors were up incredibly fast, but it took nearly twice as long before the inside finish work was done. Cost of the structure is mostly captured in the labor (including labor of making the construction materials off-site), so all that time spent doing the finishing work equates to cost of the finished product.
When your 3D printing process can also set pipe, run wires, install glazing, etc. then we can talk about real cost savings.
In the meantime - I like this 3D printing process not for the cost, but for the strength and style of the walls.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:39PM
I was on a cruise ship approx twenty years ago and the bathrooms were cassette design where they were whomped into place, a room inside a room, which is interesting as a concept.
If you're hand sawing and hand nailing a completely custom hand made house on site using relatively expensive experienced carpenter labor, exotic routing of stuff in wall makes sense, but I wonder if the future is completely separating structural walls from residential services. So given a bare concrete windowless wall you'd slap a wall sized tele-screen up, or imagine a cassette-kitchen where a kitchen makeover amounts to disconnecting a handful of pipes and cables, then slide out the old kitchen and slide in the new.
Perhaps the future of modular houses isn't the exterior at all, its the interior.
I converted a dining room in my house into an office by moving things around and changing light fixtures and things; in a modular cassette era, might simply pull out the dining room cassette containing table and china cabinet and everything, sell it used, and slide in a home office cassette complete with desks and filing cabinets.
Another novel idea, some regions take the family fridge and stove with them to new homes, others not. If your living spaces were cassettes and house walls did nothing but structural support, you could move from one house to another simply by moving all the cassettes to another house...