
New Story's first 3D-printed houses are now complete - prostoalex
https://www.fastcompany.com/90440406/the-worlds-first-3d-printed-neighborhood-now-has-its-first-houses
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injidup
How is this cheaper than shipping in prefab blocks and bolting them together?
There are lots of claims about it being low cost and affordable but little
data to explain why.

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lnsru
This here is low cost and affordable:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau)
Almost 100 years ago Germans discovered the way of cheap building. The first
houses are still used according recent documentary. This 3D printing might be
novel, but basically they move their factory each time for a new house while
Plattenbau factory must be installed once. Plus Plattenbau has canals for
cables and already installed windows and doors. Plus Plattenbau can be a high
building. I live in one from 1965, it’s really shitty. Insulation between
concrete layers is gone, you can hear TV of the neighbors and it’s cold in
winter.

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rapnie
Prefab cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a modern equivalent. It is suitable for
highrise buildings (no concrete, all wood including elevator shafts, etc) and
it is a carbon sink for as long as the housing stands.

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altacc
Really interesting idea and potentially a great benefit. I do find it funny
that they decorated the house in a very American/European style. That works
great for press photos aimed at US investors, but I wonder how all that will
fare given the high traffic & use that occur in small dwellings.

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walrus01
I'm curious how they are bridging the gaps for windows and doors. I imagine
toothpaste consistency concrete doesn't hang in the air very well. Or at least
not nearly as well as thin, hot, stringy PLA, ABS or TPU filament coming out
of the nozzle of a common 3d printer.

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KukicAdnan
3D Printers usually have support columns that are easily taken down once the
print is complete. Maybe something similar?

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walrus01
Right, I've done this with auto generated supports in Cura for PLA and ABS
fused deposition printing. Removed with needle nose pliers. But if done with
semi liquid concrete wouldn't it cure together and become very difficult to
break apart ?

[https://m.all3dp.com/2/cura-support-settings-optimize-
your-s...](https://m.all3dp.com/2/cura-support-settings-optimize-your-
supports/)

Looking at the photos of the houses, I wonder if they pause the printer at the
point just before where it needs to draw the first layer above the top of the
window frame. At that point a couple of workers manually lift the prefab
window unit into place. Then the printer can resume and print that next layer
on top of the top of the window frame.

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wahern
They manually add headers for spanning openings and leave them in place. You
can see here:
[https://youtu.be/is2UVodNphY?t=37](https://youtu.be/is2UVodNphY?t=37)

That said, wooden and, more recently, foam forms have been used since forever.
(At least a hundred years?) Breaking the forms away from cured concrete
doesn't seem to be problematic.

EDIT: Also, in another video there's a brief shot where the machine is
printing the internal zig-zag pattern over a steel mesh manually placed on the
wall, presumably for reinforcement. I fast-forwarded through 4 or 5 videos and
it's almost suspicious the way they avoid capturing these details. I guess
such details don't fit the narrative they're selling.

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parineum
I think that answers my question of how it's seismically sound.

There's got to be something in there that supports horizontal forces.

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wahern
FWIW, they show the mesh in the first few seconds of this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I)

Personally I think they should _emphasize_ the manual labor requirements. One
of the strongest criticisms of 3D-printed and prefab housing technology is
that it reduces demand for low-skilled labor. For the past 80 years home
construction has been a major pillar of the American labor economy; likewise
for China and many other countries. Free or reduced cost housing is great, but
to the extent it comes at the expense of a sustainable labor economy, then
it's problematic.

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drsim
Cool. But completely not a solution to affordable housing construction in
rural areas.

What is the barrier to affordable housing construction in rural areas? Where I
traveled in Uganda it was availability and affordability of materials and
equipment. Cement was expensive as was corrugated roofing. Renting heavy
equipment was expensive.

We had plentiful cheap unskilled labour, free bricks made from clay soil baked
in the sun, lots of hand tools and a foreman with basic construction skills.
Transportation was slow but not prohibitively expensive.

I hope this 3D printing technique is simply a way of waving a flag to draw
attention to the need for better housing in these communities. There are many
much better MVPs than an expensive machine using expensive materials operated
by an expensive team.

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logfromblammo
In Uganda, it is legal to use cheap construction methods, like wattle-and-daub
using cow dung, and thatch roofing.

Appropriate technology there is a hand-press for making TIB-style mortarless
interlocking bricks from local dirt. (I have heard that Ugandan brick masons
use way too much mortar anyway.)

The test site was likely in Mexico because building codes in the US have no
provision for establishment and testing of new technology that is too far
removed from existing construction techniques, such as inflation forms lined
with rebar and sprayed with shotcrete, or 3D-printed corrugated-interior
concrete walls. If the machine built 50 houses in the US, none of them could
get certificates of occupancy from the inspectors.

The end goal is likely not to house the poor around the world, but to
establish building codes that advantage the first-movers in printed-concrete
home construction, so the patent-holders can build houses in the US that can
be finish-ready for $5000, install windows, doors, electrical, and plumbing
with assembly-line labor, and then sell for $75000.

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bluGill
In most states you need a professional engineer to certify that your odd
construction is safe. This pulls in legal liability for failure so the
engineer will charge a lot of money (and run a lot of calculations) before
granting certification. It isn't a big deal to do that if you can figure out
how to pay the cost.

By contrast though: I can design you a house that follows traditional design
rules. So long as I use standard materials under the standard rules someone
else has long ago done all the work to ensure the standard is right and so it
doesn't need additional certification. It is quite likely I can violate
something in the standard and still be safe - but then it is up to me to prove
it is safe (I'm not qualified to do this)

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adwi
Wouldn’t there be economies of scale here though? Presumably the first print
would be very expensive from certification standpoint, but wouldn’t the
marginal cost going forward be negligible?

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bluGill
Maybe, it depends. If you build exactly the same house on exactly the same
soil type. However every change needs to be re-certified - you can get around
this of course, the engineer can decide what changes you are allowed to make.

Houses get around this because engineers figured out the limits - a 2x12 can
up to (note up to not exactly!) span x distance under these assumptions. The
inspector just verifies you met all the conditions and you are good. You can
do this with any form of building, but it is much cheaper for one building to
just certify that exact design. If you only have a half dozen designs it is
probably cheaper to certify each separately, but eventually you have enough
different designs that you just figure out the limits and rules and never have
to worry about it again.

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abdullahkhalids
Any information on how soundproof these houses are? What is the expected
lifetime? Maintenance costs compared to traditional houses? How difficult is
it to repair the walls with traditional materials?

Edit: Waterproof? Earthquake proof?

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walrus01
The closest traditional construction low-cost design I can think of, which is
somewhat common in Mexico, is built from concrete blocks like this:

[https://s3-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/contentlab.studiod/getty/...](https://s3-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/contentlab.studiod/getty/34565dbc533a4fbda21a58898585fc06.jpg)

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miskin
My house is also built from concrete blocks, because they have quite good
parameters when combined with good thermal insulation. Concrete walls were
something like 3% of price of the house and they were done in a week, that is
again something like 5% of (my) house construction time.

Concrete blocks can be produced locally with rather simple tools. It also has
benefit that it may provide work to local people. In poor regions, labor is
cheap and creating workplaces is always benefit to local commnunity, so I
wonder if automating this out is positive thing at all. I'd like to see
comparison of costs/benefits for houses built like this vs more traditional
construction. Don't get me wrong, I love tech toys, but this looks very much
as a solution looking for a problem.

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chaostheory
I don’t feel that this machine is ultimately meant for poorer regions with
cheap labor. This is just mainly R&D.

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miskin
I agree, this would make much more sense in areas with high labor costs,
something like sea side resorts where you can produce many similar buildings
with high building density.

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bluGill
I looked into this a few years ago. I discovered that even if I can build the
3d printer myself for free (including time), wood structures are still cheaper
than the concrete. The only reason you would choose this over something else
is if you want a unique shape that is impossible to do in wood. I wanted to
build a cheap shed, but this was one of the more expensive options, and it
didn't really save any labor either.

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iamthepieman
They seem like such simple structures. I could build one of those out of
rammed earth or cob in the time it takes to put up the rain shield. Cheap
housing (especially in rural areas) is a solved problem. Cheap, legal,
socially acceptable, housing is not.

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TulliusCicero
Neat, though I'm a bit skeptical about its utility outside of rural areas.
Particularly in the US, the problem with housing affordability is mostly in
booming metros where people want to live in already developed areas, the most
expensive part is often the land, instead of the house, so you really need
density/verticality to make a dent in affordability.

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trianglem
Does it leave room for electrical and plumbing? Sounds like they still have to
pour the slab manually.

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aaron695
This clearly makes no sense.... but I'd like to see it go on.

I think since donors have to feel good about themselves they won't just donate
concrete and bricks.

And since NGO's can't build houses that are not up to code they can't just use
local labour.

So this might work.

Earthship houses have shown after decades of having a cheap house design with
cheap materials, that's not enough to solve the problem. Watch the docos read
between the lines.

The actual benefit here might even be the fact the NGO makes the government
give land titles for under the houses.

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squarefoot
"The printer works by squirting a concrete mixture in layers to build floors
and walls."

Is that one a special type of concrete? In places where earthquakes occur I
would expect some kind of reinforcement to that concrete mixture, or it would
crumble very easily at the first hit, but from the article it doesn't seem
they're adding iron bars or any similar reinforcement.

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thefounder
I don't want to downplay the good work they do but I can't stop thinking that
these people are guinea pigs for the technology. Now, considering their
initial housing they can't really complain.

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lobo_tuerto
They never mention WHERE in Mexico is that rural town exactly, not even the
state name. They only say it's in the south. Weird.

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sadness2
A lot questions about cost, but nobody is talking about speed. They said the
frame was both fabricated and erected in 24 hours. That's a big one-up on
prefab.

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swiley
We need Uber but for brick layers.

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ape4
I guess the attractive new plants out front are 3D printed too

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ptah
any plans to use traditional adobe?

