Architect wants to print a house
Using a massive 3-D printer, a Dutch architect believes he can create a Mobius-style loop home strong enough to live in. The printer's inventor agrees.
Scientists are just beginning to delve into the possibilities created by the process of 3-D printing, which can produce a three-dimensional object made of multiple materials from one printer.
A Dutch architect believes he can print a house. Janjaap Ruijssenaars, of Universe Architecture in Amsterdam, has drawn up plans for a 12,000-square-foot endless-loop house called the Landscape House that he believes could be created with a 3-D printer.
"It's our ambition to have the first printed house,” he told Agence France-Presse, predicting that it could be completed by 2014. “This printer has made art or objects for sea defenses, but this is the first time to build something that can be lived in.”
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While no one has yet printed a building, the D-Shape printer’s creator, Enrico Dini, has set that as a goal.
The house would be printed in sections -- the D-Shape printer can print a section that’s about 20 by 30 feet -- and then assembled. Ruijssenaars expects the project would take 18 months to build, including about six months of printing, and cost $5.3 million to $6.6 million.
Parts that are normally made from concrete would be printed with broken-up rocks and an emulsion binding, then filled with fiber-reinforced concrete and covered with a steel and glass façade.
One reason the architect turned to the printer technology is that he wanted to build an endless Mobius-style loop. Traditional building methods required him to make a strip and then bend it.
"3-D printing is amazing," Ruijssenaars told the BBC. "For me as an architect, it's been a nice way to construct this specific design -- it has no beginning and no end, and with the 3-D printer we can make it look like that. In traditional construction you have to make a mold of wood and you fill it with concrete and then you take out the wood. It's a waste of time and energy."
| Tags: | new construction |
ok although what i know to be the brainchild of mit's printing in 3d has not been quite perfected to work on some things it could work i know once a hamnmer was printed out and then it disentegrated.
i simply cant wait for the human organs to be printed out thus eliminating the need for any kind of primitave transplant-
think of it you own blood your own dna printing out your own organ/
however over at harvard i have heard they take a more natural aproach and grow thier own,
keep in mind all this is only what i have heard and in noway should be considered fact.
About Teresa Mears
Teresa Mears is a veteran journalist who has been interested in houses since her father took her to tax auctions to carry the cash at age 10. A former editor of The Miami Herald's Home & Design section, she lives in South Florida where, in addition to writing about real estate, she publishes Miami on the Cheap to help her neighbors adjust to the loss of 60% of their property value.
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