Work begins on the world’s first 3D-printed house

Zero waste, lower transport costs and recyclable materials – is 3D-printing the future of housebuilding? Dutch architects are putting the process to the test for the first time in Amsterdam.

3D-printed house … The future of volume house-building, or a novelty technology for temporary pavilions? Photograph: Peter Dejong/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Treacle-black plastic oozes from a nozzle at the bottom of a small tower in Amsterdam, depositing layer upon layer of glistening black worms in an orderly grid. With a knot of pipes and wires rising up to a big hopper, it looks like a high-tech liquorice production line. But this could be the future of house-building, if Dus Architects have their way.

On this small canal-side plot in the north of the city, dotted with twisting plastic columns and strange zig-zag building blocks, the architects have begun making what they say will be the world’s first 3D-printed house.

“The building industry is one of the most polluting and inefficient industries out there,” says Hedwig Heinsman of Dus. “With 3D-printing, there is zero waste, reduced transportation costs, and everything can be melted down and recycled. This could revolutionise how we make our cities.”

Working on site for three weeks, the architects have so far produced a 3m-high sample corner of their future house, printed as a single piece weighing 180kg. It is one of the building blocks that will be stacked up like Lego bricks over the next three years to form a 13-room complex, modelled on a traditional Dutch gabled canal house, but with hand-laid bricks replaced by a faceted plastic facade, scripted by computer software.

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/90333642″>3D Print Canal House – Element 002</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user9732280″>3D Print Canal House</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

At the centre of the process is the KamerMaker, or Room Builder, a scaled-up version of an open-source home 3D-printer, developed with Dutch firm Ultimaker. It uses the same principle of extruding layers of molten plastic, only enlarged about 10 times, from printing desktop trinkets to chunks of buildings up to 2x2x3.5m high.

For a machine-made material, the samples have an intriguingly hand-made finish. In places, it looks like bunches of black spaghetti. There are lumps and bumps, knots and wiggles, seams where the print head appears to have paused or slipped, spurting out more black goo than expected.

“We’re still perfecting the technology,” says Heinsman. The current material is a bio-plastic mix, usually used as an industrial adhesive, containing 75% plant oil and reinforced with microfibres. They have also produced tests with a translucent plastic and a wood fibre mix, like a liquid form of MDF that can later be sawn and sanded. “We will continue to test over the next three years, as the technology evolves,” she says. “With a second nozzle, you could print multiple materials simultaneously, with structure and insulation side by side.”

For now, these plastic blocks, which are printed with a honeycomb lattice within for reinforcement, are back-filled with lightweight concrete, for structural strength and insulation – which would make recycling the parts somewhat difficult.

“It’s an experiment,” says Heinsman. “We called it the room maker, but it’s also a conversation maker.” Over 2,000 people have already visited the site, from building contractors to coach-loads of architecture students, while even Barack Obama was shown the prototypes when he was in Amsterdam last week.

“This is only the beginning, but there could be endless possibilities, from printing functional solutions locally in slums and disaster areas, to high-end hotel rooms that are individually customised and printed in marble dust.”

While Dus may be the first architects to start printing a full-scale house, they join a number of others who have been experimenting with printing at an architectural scale over the last few years. Since 2008, researchers at the University of Southern California have been developing a technology, known as contour crafting, that uses acomputer-controlled gantry to print structures in quick-setting concrete, which they say is potentially capable of printing high-rise buildings, with the printer climbing the structure as it grows. Another Dutch architect, Janjaap Ruijssenaars, is working on a project to print a house shaped like a looping Mobius strip with the Italian-made D-Shape printer, which uses sand mixed with a binding agent to create a form of synthetic sandstone. So far, only a small pavilion-sized structure has been printed. This looks to be where the technology will remain for the time being: temporary novelty structures for exhibitions and events.

“One of my fantasies is printing in biodegradable materials for festivals,” says Heinsman. “You could print an outrageous tent structure, then after a couple of years and few rain showers it disappears.”

Taken from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/mar/28/work-begins-on-the-worlds-first-3d-printed-house

Will 3D-printed houses stand up as architecture?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars’ design can be printed from sand ‘just by pressing enter’. But is this high-speed construction a welcome change?

 

‘Enter a new architecture’ … 3D-printed house by Janjaap Ruijssenaars. Photograph: Universe Architecture

3D-printing may have been used for a long time in the world of architecture, allowing visionaries to conjure ever more elaborate and unbuildable forms from the ether. But the technology has never been used to build anything bigger than a prototype model.

This could all be set to change, now that Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars has unveiled designs for the world’s first 3D-printed house. The Landscape House takes the form of a continuous looping Möbius strip, rising out of the ground before folding back on itself in a seamless undulating band. Its complex geometries are not made of reinforced cast concrete, however, but layers of printed sand.

Working with mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs, Ruijssenaars plans to create the building in sections of up to 6x9m, printed using theD-Shape printer. Developed by Italian engineer Enrico Dini, the printer uses the same stereolithography principles as smaller printers, only scaled up, using sand fused together with a chemical binding agent. The sections will be printed as hollow shells, which will then be filled with fibre-reinforced concrete for extra strength. The entire house will take around 18 months to construct, at an estimated cost of €4-5m (£3.3-£4.2m).

“By simply pressing the ‘enter’ key on the keypad we intend to give the architect the possibility to make buildings directly,” says Dini, “without intermediaries who can add interpretation and make mistakes in the realisation.”

His vision is to cut out the expensive, cumbersome manual processes of conventional construction and give the designer absolute freedom.

“To build a complex concave-convex surface, for example, would require the prefabrication of expensive formworks and cages, the mounting of complicated scaffolding and then the manual casting,” says Dini. He claims the D-Shape allows a level of precision unheard of in the past. “The human limitations of master builders and bricklayers will no longer hamper architects’ visions.”

The Landscape House follows an earlier project by Italian architect Andrea Morgante of Shiro Studio, who used the same printer to construct a 3m-high pavilion in 2009 – the largest ever 3D-printed object at the time.

But the question remains: is speeding up the process from concept design to built reality an entirely welcome change? In a world where scaleless computer-generated forms can be summoned so quickly from the inky black depths of the screen, free from context, what might “simply pressing ‘enter'” lead to?

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/jan/22/first-3d-printed-house-janjaap-ruijssenaars