It will still be science fiction to some, but 3D printing is quickly breaking down typical engineering and design barriers and streamlining how the development business works. Last month, the city showed off Europe’s first 3D-printed house that was designed almost entirely by a robot.
In recent years, the race to create the world’s first 3D-printed house has grown from a niche sci-fi show to one of the hottest tech contests in the construction industry. The main building, with five floors and 1,100 square meters, was intended to be the first 3D printed apartment block in the world.
Next came the world’s first 3D printed workplace in a metropolis in 2016, once again designed by WinSun during a collaboration with architect Tomasetti of Gensler UK and inaugurated by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. The single storey, 250m² structure was built in just seventeen days and required a team of just seven fitters and ten specialist electricians to fit.
The first micro-housing in Europe was built in the capital of the Netherlands in 2016, a gabled cabin of 8m² and 25m³ designed by the Dutch studio DUS Architects. In 2017, Europe’s first 3D-printed house was produced, a 37m² one-bedroom structure in the country’s capital that was created using a mobile printing crane in exactly 24 hours. Designed by Russian and San Francisco 3D printing specialists ApisCor, it cost just over £8,000 to build.
For Guglielmo Carra, Arup’s head of materials consulting in Europe, the benefits of 3D printing technology are obvious. “The industry is one of the largest users of resources and emitters of CO2 in the world. We would like to cause a paradigm shift in the way the construction business operates. It creates less waste throughout the construction and the materials are usually reused at the end of its useful life.
3D Housing 05 was designed by a 3D printed mechanism, which was equipped by the Dutch 3D printed concrete specialist CyBe. The robot squeezes the concrete through a nozzle and it forms the main structure of the house wall. This wall structure contains thirty-five concrete modules, each of which takes just one hour to build. The construction crew puts in the windows, doors and roof as soon as the concrete dries. The concrete mix itself is unconventional and is made in the factory using a mix of cement and admixtures particularly suited to its distinctive application methodology.
For Luca Stabile, head of construction monitoring at Arup Italy, the 3D printing technology harnessed by 3D Housing 05 could be a sign of things to come: “3D printing can contribute to breaking down the traditional barriers of engineering and architecture. Using recent technologies on board a digital approach to replacing the engineering environment will be instrumental in making even a lot of complicated multi-storey buildings written in 3D,” he says.
However, Stabile is referring to a partnership that some see as elemental to the success or alternative to 3D printing technology: digitization. And this reveals in turn the last major development that sets 3D Housing 05 apart from similar examples within the increasingly stalled 3D printed housing market: it was created entirely by mechanism rather than humans.
Most of the 3D printed buildings and every single 3D printed house that preceded 3D Housing 05 was designed by a static 3D printer. Although this is invariably capable of rotating or rotating functionality, it could normally remain mounted at an equivalent point along the construction and would therefore be limited by supply constraints. However, the CyBe machine used by the city project is understood as a mechanical manipulator. It can be a robot attached to a mobile base, thus offering considerably more flexibility in construction method and more variation in the shape of the finished building.
Digital style specialist Nick Grace is a former Arup CAD specialist and also the former director of Rapidform, the Royal School of Arts’ 3D printing unit. He has now created his own digital style studio, and for him, 3D printing technology, for all the art movement clamor that surrounds it, becomes almost redundant unless it goes hand in hand with the compromised use of AI.
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