3D Printed Houses

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

A Chinese company just completed a successful test using 3D printing technology to construct ten small homes in 24 hours. The modules are prototypes, so for now they use a simple design, but in the future almost any shape should be possible.

Think of what this could mean for Puna:
* Inexpensive homes
* Fireproof (so you could get by with the most basic insurance coverage)
* Hurricane Resistant - could be engineered with rounded corners
* Termite Proof
* Can use lava and recycled cement as a building material
* Roof and walls would provide insulation (similar to adobe)
* Organic architecture as espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright: an attempt to integrate the spaces into a coherent whole: a marriage between the site and the structure and a union between the context and the structure. In other words, it would be possible to build a home that looked like an extension of the lava flow on which it was built.

What do you think? If this technology became available locally would you build and live in a 3D lava home?

http://qz.com/230032/how-3d-printing-10-...-of-waste/

[kalakoa]

If this technology became available locally would you build and live in a 3D lava home?

Probably needs an amendment to the building code, unless this technology is fully UBC-compliant.

It would also be somewhat more useful if the 3D printing occured on-site.

[pahoated]

There is a US professor that has been working on this for well over a decade and is still at a fraction of the size the Chinese have achieved.

http://www.contourcrafting.org/

He wants to try a 1/4 scale demonstration later this year. The gantry is designed to be taken down, and reused over and over. In collapsed form, it could probably fit in a shipping container.

The OP is kind of dated (in this area, one day is dated). The Chinese are rapidly advancing. It will be just another case where the US may have been first but are dead last to get it out of the laboratory, or never, eventually losing any potential market that may have been there.

"This island Hawaii on this island Earth"

[terracore]

The future of affordable housing is GMO.

Now that you're done laughing, it's not actually that far fetched using existing technology. Modify or create a dense wood producing organism to grow instead of a traditional "tree shape" into the framing for a house, plus use same technology to cause growth at accelerated pace (look at how fast albezias grow). Here's a quick and easy example of what can be done without GMO, now imagine it on Frankenstein steroids http://www.odditycentral.com/art/arborsc...f-art.html

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

terracore -
Is this what you had in mind?

"We propose a method to grow homes from native trees. A living structure is grafted into shape with prefabricated Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) reusable scaffolds."
http://www.archinode.com/fab-tree-hab.html