3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas
yahoo.comIf you have the ability to pump concrete, and a gantry across the whole site, why wouldn't you pick and place concrete blocks or other materials rather than concrete the whole thing on site?
Also, aren't these walls significantly more CO2 unfriendly than lumber, and more difficult to renovate? What if I need to get a builder in to do repairs, is there a concrete wall guy who knows how to repair them?
Can it print multi family housing?
It takes four weeks to print, which seems long to frame a single story three bedroom house. If the home buyer isn't feeling savings, what's the draw here.
It’s mechanically less complex than using existing materials and allows for a new range of possible shapes. Moving a printer head around a gantry vs highly precise manipulation of objects.
3D printing homes is currently a terrible option, but the result is visually distinct which should help sell the homes. It doesn’t need to be good to make someone money.
For me it would not be about being cheaper but about being super customizable. I'd make mine look like a huge dragon.
The benefit of 3D printing is making unique things. If you make the same thing over and over there's way better options.
Is it purely that this robot never takes vacation and never asks for a raise? Feels a lot like this permits building a home largely without human labor, which I'm sure the VC class would be very excited about.
This only helps with the framing and cladding. You still need all the labor for interior finishings, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, foundation, and site prep. That’s 80%+ of the cost. Assuming the 3D printed walls are even cheaper than wood frame, which is doubtful.
Not only that but also quality is consistent, more so than with human builders.
The quality of timber framed houses can vary considerably depending on who built them.
If you happen to live in a flood plain, concrete is much less susceptible to water damage than a traditional timber frame building.
I would also imagine that a home with a concrete exterior (with appropriate roofing) would be more likely to survive a wildfire, in areas susceptible to those.
It’s a gimmick. There is no point other than marketing.
"It’s a gimmick"
Early attempts always look gimmicki.
Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls.
This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change.
Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.
3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.
3d printers have changed significantly. They used to be very finicky and hard to get a decent print. Lots of tweaking and it was different for every printer.
They have evolved into true click and forget machines.
I tear apart medical and other machines to recycle parts. I do often see 3d printed parts inside commercial machines, probably because they are making so few of them and it's more economical to just print a couple specialized parts.
How can you tell that they're 3d printed? Because they don't have a part number or the manufacturer's name and logo on them?
I don't have a 3d printer myself so maybe it'd be obvious if I printed some.
Most 3D printed parts have a telltale texture resulting from the layer-by-layer deposit of material. The same goes for many milled/CNCed parts bearing evidence of tool marks. Once you've seen and held enough, it's relatively easy to identify whether a given part was printed, cast, milled, lathed, etc.
I say most because there are finishing methods which can largely obscure these details and make it less obvious as to which method produced a given part.
They had the layer lines you see on FDM prints.
Maybe it was 20? I just remember they took expense fluids, hard to keep, fragile. Then month ago I was in a Micro Center, and there were dozens of very fancy printers that could take dozens of types of line feeds.
Feels like 3D printers have changed. A slicer from 10 years ago is not going to generate as good a print as one from today. And it feels like the variety of filaments from 10 years ago has greatly changed.
Survivor bias helps a lot here. For every thing that sticks you have thousands of absolute flops that we all forget very quickly
That is true.
When I look at 3d printing advancements, I have hard time not thinking that with scaled up to houses, they wont have similar advancements, with time and resources.
Kind of like Steam Engines. After the Steam Engine was invented, it took many decades to dial it in to the large 'more' efficient models we are familiar with. It seems like large 3d printing will take a similar time period to grow to industrial levels.
Even the Iphone, wasn't that great at the beginning.
Maybe my overall point. They have made an entire neighborhood with a 3d printer. That seems to be now over the hump of proof of concept, and now there can be steady improvements.
You coulx print a thermite mound like passive cooking system into the house?
Because you can just run the electrical wiring and plumbing and cover it all in concrete (?)
That seems like a huge drawback? Running new electrical and plumbing and doing repairs becomes much more difficult.
Yes, plan in advance ...
Every home builder is planing in advance, the problem is that down the line you'll realize mistakes you didn't think about, 100% of the time. You also can't plan failures in advance that good, and if you do care about that you certainly won't encase all your utilities in concrete
Well, I guess the idea is that if anything fails you just print yourself a new home ;)
Blessed be the developer who has never had to refactor anything.
Things change. Sometimes a lot and radically. I happen to live in the house I renovated 30 years ago. I had to change a lot of things during these years since then.
Welcome to Germany.
"...range in price from around $450,000 to close to $600,000."
In other words, there is little economic incentive to recommend this construction method. Not much in the way of aesthetics either --- unless you want a ranch box.
3D printing doesn't relieve any important construction constraints and probably raises costs because unfamiliarity increases risks and increased risk increases price.
Superstructure is about the easiest and fastest part of residential construction. Sitework, finishes, and MEP systems are harder, tend to take longer, and cost more.
Anyway, market rate housing sells at market rates no matter how it is built.
>Superstructure is about the easiest and fastest part of residential construction.
I'm perpetually confused on that front - interior, especially drywall, is stupid labor and time intensive (have to wait for taped joints to dry). There should be huge econmomies of scale for prefab walls with electric and ducting built in, yet all we see is this sort of 3d printing stuff.
How do you finish the joints between sections of prefabricated walls?
Where do you store hundreds of running feet of prefabricated wall during construction delays?
How do you move sections of prefabricated wall into and within a dryed-in building?
How do you trim a section to fit and extend another when construction is not ideal?
Who is responsible when something is not right?
And of course there’s getting UL listings for any proprietary electrical connections and issues of inspection for code compliance.
Prefabricated walls are common and are suitable for cubical farms. They tend to cost more psf than regular construction but can be depreciated as furniture and reconfigured more easily than site built walls and fixtures.
I feel like you’re telling ford how the Model T production line can’t work because someone wants a different color.
Yet, it’s ironic that we still end up with cookie cutter houses, but they are all built as if they are bespoke.
You cannot build an airplane out of bricks.
I don't understand the metaphor and how it would apply to this.
(But also, this feels like a Mythbusters episode challenge, and they managed to get a lead balloon flying).
Yet successful balloon building businesses don’t build balloons from lead because of the fundamental nature of the balloon building problem.
Again, I really don't understand how this metaphor fits with housing getting more or less customisation with more or less 3D printing vs. prefab vs. whatever the other option(s) is/are called at higher or lower costs.
The article describes nearly 100 houses printed at 2-3 weeks per house and 25 sold. That is very poor economics for single family development. Working capital tied up, carrying costs for the land, interest on construction loans, etc. are all coming out of the developer’s pocket. [1]
There’s also the capital cost of the printer, the inherent complexity of pumping concrete, and the material cost of concreter per unit volume.
My opinion is based on my bullshit detector. I worked in a precast plant with its own concrete plant, for a very large home builder, and for and with residential developers as an architect. Sure I might be wrong, but my opinion is formed from directly related experience with the materials and with the industries.
But even on the face the article is talking about moonbases as future projects not suburban Atlanta.
[1] Most likely this project is subsidized with non-commercial resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huf_Haus Construction of a Huf Haus in the UK featured in the 2004 series of Grand Designs.
Those are awesome, does anyone export this to the states? We just got a prefab studio from Schildr that's manufactured in Turkey and disassembles into a sea container. I imagine something similar would work for Huff houses?
Standardized wall sections, JIT inventory management, dedicated install teams?
We have standardized components delivered just in time by ordinary vendors and installed by subcontractors specializing in that work.
It is all commoditized and builders and trades people have choices about who they work with and long standing business relationships.
The inherent complexity of construction is a job shop scheduling problem which is not just in NP it is NP hard.
With a whole additional dimension of human social relationships and woven in. Everyone is trying to solve their own NP hard problem across a different set of projects and under a different set of constraints.
My parents’ home, built in the 1950s was built from pre-fabricated components. From what my dad says (his mother was the original owner of the home), the fit of walls was very poor and they had to do a lot of patching to fill in gaps between the walls and the ceilings. There have been numerous attempts at prefabricated building but all have failed to gain any traction.
A lot of homes in New Zealand were sent over 150 years ago from Australia and Europe as prefabricated kits. Apart from the abysmal lack of insulation, they are still going strong.
Right now most new houses have the wood framing CNC manufactured based on plans, shipped to the building site and assembled, then modified as needed by the builder.
Our roofs are almost exclusively steel, which are also CNC cut and shipped to the site and installed by roofers.
Some Quadrant homes in Washington are built this way. The framing is done in a factory on a gantry and the walls are trucked out and assembled on site. There are subdivisions of thousands of houses built this way.
You’re not wrong. That is confusing.
I think of it like the satellite industry. Crazy high launch costs and weight penalties make satellites expensive to build. Maybe there’s some rule that the cost of the satellite has to equal to the launch cost?
I think the same things happens to building prices when the land cost and available land is super limited. Construction kind of rises to take a piece of that?
I’m not sure if I’m explaining the idea well.
I think you would end up with a lot of onsite finish work with prefabbed walls that won't end up saving much time. And it makes transportation a lot more difficult.
That said, searching for prefab walls brings up a lot of things, from whole wall panels, to just prefabed wall framing, and of course, prefabed whole houses. So, it's out there, it's probably a matter of what a builder is familiar with and what's cost efficient for a particular job.
SIP walls are basically this. It's a foam-core panel board with chases built in for electrical.
Houses are mostly prefad - everthing is a standard dimension before it arrives on site.
You can, a random example of someone doing this is https://prefabhome.eu/en
Anyway, market rate housing sells at market rates no matter how it is built.
This is a demonstration project.
If there were any economic advantage, I would expect them to be eager to demonstrate it.
But such does not appear to be the case. $450-600K for a simple, single story ranch 30 miles outside of Austin is not exactly awe inspiring.
Many of these printed homes just leave the concrete exposed inside the home. They can just be painted directly, and they are also well insulated already so you don’t need to fill the wall with insulation.
So not only are you framing differently but you can skip the drywall and insulation steps of construction as well. This is the type of finish work you are talking about I think.
You still have to mobilize a drywall crew for ceilings. And your painter needs to use another primer and paint system for the concrete. Hanging interior doors and trimming them out is no longer a job for nails. Same for crown and base moldings and kitchen cabinets.
And you still have to insulate. Four feet of concrete wall thickness is needed for a nominal R10.
> market rate housing sells at market rates no matter how it is built.
This is true. Do you see any opportunity for efficiencies in rebuilds?
> This is true. Do you see any opportunity for efficiencies in rebuilds?
When this technology has become much more established, the "risk premium" can be decreased by a lot. Then one can start to find methods to make the process more economic. And I see quite some potential there, because 3D printing can potentially be done in a much more "automatic" way than other existing house building processes.
What do you mean by “efficiencies?”
Like you mentioned the market for housing is more about where people want to live, and the actual building on it is less important (up to first order quality and space), so that optimizing construction costs doesn’t really save money on housing.
But suppose we have a country of aging housing. Could prefabrication techniques result in lower costs when replacing existing buildings without a land transfer?
1. In successful businesses, lower costs usually correlate to greater profits not lower prices. This is particularly the case with the narrow section of the real-estate market that is single family housing (single family housing is about the lowest and worst use of real-estate (i.e. the opposite of highest and best use)).
2. Single family home construction in the US is highly prefabricated. You can go into any Home Depot and get lumber, fasteners, fixtures, appliances, and anything else you need to build a house. All of it movable and installable without much mechanization beyond a truck (and Home Depot will rent you one of those).
3. Tearing down existing houses for replacement only makes economic sense in two cases. The first is when the value of the land justifies more expensive construction (e.g. MacMansions). The second is when redevelopment is not for the market (e.g. Habitat for Humanity).
4. It is a mistake to look at construction as inefficient. Construction is just one component of real-estate markets.
5. We have very efficient prefabricated housing. It tends to look like mobile homes.
6. Wealth preservation is the primary function of the real-estate industry. Buying and selling for profit is the low end. The real money in real-estate resides in income producing property not single family houses.
> 3. Tearing down existing houses for replacement only makes economic sense in two cases. The first is when the value of the land justifies more expensive construction (e.g. MacMansions). The second is when redevelopment is not for the market (e.g. Habitat for Humanity).
Interesting you chose “MacMansions” as the example instead of increased density. In my (very) urban area they tear down single family homes and replace them with 6-9 town homes.
I chose MacMansions because it was clear and ordinary and uncomplicated.
Building a six pack is driven by the same basic economic condition, the existing building is economically obsolescent.
It's ~21% the cost of a home, it's actually the single most costly and labor intense category. That being said it does only take 14-21 days to frame a home.
At scale it takes significantly less time because the designs are familiar and there are not mobilizations and demobilizations. The next framing job is on the next lot.
So if a technology could cut that cost in half it would be desirable even if it took twice as long because in real terms your final cost drops 10% and only takes 2 more weeks.
It would depend on what else was in the spreadsheet.
That's the selling price. It doesn't say anything at all about construction costs, but more about the housing market in general.
I disagree. I checked Georgetown, TX for comparable homes in the area (3b/2ba, ~1500 sqft) and it seems many houses are going for under $400k. But “Dyce” sells for $470k.
https://www.lennar.com/new-homes/texas/austin-central-texas/...
Just as a random example, this is a comparable house (bigger in fact) and selling for $365k.
https://www.redfin.com/TX/Georgetown/346-White-River-Dr-7862...
I think this is a really cool technology but it’s not competitive yet.
You misunderstood. If I can build a house for half the cost, that goes to my profit margin, not a discount for the buyer.
As Jeff Bezos says, your margin is my opportunity. So yes, it would drive costs down. But we aren’t even there yet because the houses aren’t being sold because they’re too expensive.
Another way to pad your profit margins would be to raise the asking price of the $360k home by $100k. There is a reason people aren’t doing that.
That’s not how real estate works.
Amazon deals in commodity goods that are easily substituteable.
Housing is different because every single one is unique (by virtue of location) and also incredibly scarce (again, location).
Housing markets tend to strongly fight any tendency towards underpricing. When a house is underpriced, buyers will get into a bidding war and push the price back into the fair market price.
I disagree, they are priced the same as a new timber framed house but concrete is way better insulated and more efficient, which is great for the Texas heat. Also they are much more resistant to storm damage.
Look at the results in Florida where the only houses left standing after hurricanes are the ones which are built with ICF (insulated concrete forms)
So for the same money I would argue you are getting a better product. That’s also saying nothing about a more consistent build quality. Timber framed houses vary a lot in quality depending on the crew who built them and the quality of the materials used. Framing with a robot means that there is far less variation in quality, vs framing with crews of humans who are often paid a little as possible and told to work as quickly as possible.
I never understood how 3D printing buildings even come about. Desktop 3D printers work by melting thermoplastics that solidify when cooled down and is ready for the next layer.
With concrete, you have to wait for it to set before you can print on top of it. D
I think it happened because a nerd like us wanted to make a castle for their kid to play in, and that became an effective concrete printer, and that got in the news and inspired… mostly buildings that would have been easier with prefabricated concrete slabs, and which almost completely fail to take advantage of the opportunities that 3D printing can offer.
This page from Cemex might answer some of your questions
Tt’s worth noting that this article makes it sound like ICON invented everything from scratch, but the technology is much older than the company.
That is what I was thinking. I mean what is nice about those prefab housings like the ones you see on Amazon and Walmart is that they are really cheap!
Seems pointless and expensive, and it's concrete that doesn't lend itself to modification or repair. 3D printing in this case appears to be used as a tech gimmick rather than an actually-scalable process, or it would already be in-use everywhere.
The most inherently sensible home would be protected from wind (derecho, hurricane, and the uncommon tornado), fire, flooding, and severe heat and cold (and associated climate control costs) by building mostly underground on flat, stable, high ground.
I have toured the Icon houses at Wolf Ranch. I went through their show house, but I also went to some of the houses under construction and examined them and talked to the workers a bit. You couldn't approach them them while the printer was running -- note also, they have a next-gen printer that looks more like a cement pumper crane arm, these were the previous ones.
Anyway the modification of them is addressed in some of the videos in the show house. Essentially you use a circular saw with masonry teeth to cut new holes, they provide shade-matching grout to fill in an old hole. It's less flexible than sheetrock but about what modifying a cinder block wall would be. Unlike most cinder block commercial buildings, the wiring is inside the wall and not in an exposed conduit, there might have been one exception in a bathroom or something.
Over all, to my non-professional opinion, it seemed more expensive than traditional "stick built" but also higher quality, probably worth it if you wanted a high quality structure.
I have also visited their site in South Austin on St. Elmo, and the small "tiny houses" they built in the Community First village for the ex-homeless, but I wasn't able to go inside those.
My overall impression is that it's a great technology that will be used for more and more structures. Thus far I think they have been too traditional in their floor plans, they have been focusing on showing that they can build real up-to-code houses that banks will accept as collateral. Hopefully with their new cheaper printer, maybe in some area outside of HOAs and zoning, they can starting making some more interesting houses -- like round towers Victorian style, for example.
I grew-up in a stucco-clad (like concrete, about 3/4" or 20 mm thick) tract home in California. Replacing a termite-damaged sill joist was insanely laborious just cutting through a little bit of stucco. Now imagine a building that's completely made from concrete. Yikes!
OTOH, imagine a home that's not prone to termite damage. That would be awesome. Makes me want to build any sort of house, underground or not, with any material that's not wood.
PS: I left ATX last year for the rest of the triangle by hill country and right around the 100th meridian west that's much less expensive and less prone to storms.
> The most inherently sensible home would be protected from wind (derecho, hurricane, and the uncommon tornado), fire, flooding, and severe heat and cold (and associated climate control costs) by building mostly underground on flat, stable, high ground.
If I had the luxury of time and money that's the kind of home I'd build out, probably with a few Maginot line type turrets peeking out from the "roof".
For light, I'd have one or more glass or glass block domes on top.
I kind of like the idea of the conjoined egg-shaped rooms, but not the practicality of cylindrically- or compound-rounded walls.
When I was working at USC-ISI back in 2009–10, there was a project about doing 3D printing for construction taking place there back then. I was a bit surprised to learn that not only was this company not derived from those efforts, but according to their website, “In 2018, we told people we were going to 3D print a house and unveil it during SXSW in Austin, TX before we knew how to do it.” I wonder what ever happened with that ISI research work.
Glad to see new building techniques being attempted in real world scenarios. 3d printed structures will be most compelling when they do more things that are difficult or impractical with traditional techniques: curved walls, built inside, ornamentation, patterns, etc.
There is nothing you can’t do with classical drywall. Curved walls, ornamentation, patterns, integrated furniture… you name it. 3d printing has a huge limitation here - you need support to print over empty area. I am sure it’s not fun removing concrete support pieces from huge concrete structure without cracks.
> There is nothing you can’t do with classical drywall. Curved walls, ornamentation, patterns, integrated furniture… you name it
Okay, I name compound curves. Can I do that with drywall?
Yes you can. It’s the frame behind drywall then. Probably CNC cut plywood construction. And it’s more art than anything you might get from standard construction company. And crazy decorative art can be made from gypsum and integrated into drywall.
It’s a trick question sorta.
You can’t make a compound curve out of sheet material. Drywall can bend in a single axis only. If you add a second axis (compound curves) it won’t really work. Think about trying to drywall a sphere. The best you can do is a high poly sphere.
It’s not a single sheet. It’s multiple sheets covered in gypsum shell. More sculpture than drywall. Relative worked for riches, egg and bells were his projects 25 years ago. It’s just many many hours designing it and even more sanding to get perfect shape. There are now 3D printers for such projects: https://www.voxeljet.com/3d-printing-solution/sand-casting/ Since it’s cheap and fast today riches lost interest.
That's what the mudder is for ;)
How would plumbing and wiring work? The article states that the wall is a semi-hollow, corduroy pattern, so do the printers leave openings in the walls so pipes/wiring get shoved into them after?
Yes. I visited that site and examined some of the partially constructed buildings, and talked to a couple of the workers.
They have videos discussing how you would add a light switch or remove one -- basically a mansonry hole saw, and matching grout to fill in.
It seemed slightly more trouble to do modifications than a cinder block wall, but the quality and strength was much higher. I went with low expectations but I was impressed.
I didn't see any walls at the stage of construction where I could see what the insulation was, whether is was expanding foam or fiberglass.
> It seemed slightly more trouble to do modifications than a cinder block wall, but the quality and strength was much higher. I went with low expectations but I was impressed.
So the electricians and plumbers would all come in after the wall was printed, and saw through it all? Sawing, adding and then filling it back in sounds like lots of work to me. With stick-frame, wiring and plumbing are still a significant cost, but the actual hole-making part would be a small proportion of it.
I think everyone is missing the real reason for this. From TFA:
> requires fewer workers
what TFA didn't say, and which I'm sure is also true, is that the workers can also be less skilled.
I found it fascinating that interior walls are also concrete, and wifi signals are blocked. I betcha cellular doesn't fare too well either, and not easily fixed with multiple access points.
I don’t care how many workers it takes if the result still costs $600k.
Unless the houses can sell for half of traditional housing costs their main market will be building houses on the moon.
The builder cares. The buyer doesn't care too much either way what the construction technique is. They will be sold on the high insulation value, tornado resistance and so on. Not the fact that it costs less to build which is opaque anyway.
Lots of cynical takes here. Its cool. Time will tell if this method makes sense. One concern I have is in Texas the extreme weather and clay soil causes foundations to move. Lots of houses have foundation problems. Foundation shifts will likely translate into cracks.
Tornado-proofing, if actually so, is enough reason to prefer it, although I'm quite skeptical that it is protective as such.
for more detailed info watch https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=video...
Why not a direct link? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTps7e9SqY
Why would someone want one of these ugly homes for $400k when for that price you can buy something much nicer?
Texas is McMansion country, and these seem to be a notable upgrade over those at least. Kind of a throw back to ranch or shotgun houses.
I'm usually neutral on suburban hellscape buyers, but it's getting ridiculous. It made more sense to me I guess when 1/4 acre lots were standard. But these...man. The houses appear to be just a few feet from each other, and the yards are utterly pointless.
I can't believe I find myself saying this, but it would have been much nicer to just build nice condos in the middle, and use the rest as shared greenspace.
Shared space sounds like communism. /s
3D printed concrete, to be exact; and the cost benefits over traditional cast concrete seem unclear to me.
There is a huge amount of time and materials-- for the forms-- that go into building a cast concrete structure. Those are the bulk of the cost. Additionally, shapes with voids or curves are even more expensive to form via traditional means while the printing technique can do them naturally.
I wonder if 3d-printer lines will someday become a desirable aesthetic - like film grain.
Getting a strong cybertruck vibe from this neighborhood.
Good thing is it provides better insulation than wood.
Maybe if you compared it to the cheapest 2x4 construction that would cost 1/4 the amount. If you spent even just half of the structural cost on a better wood design you can have offset 2x6s 12 inch spaced stud walls for an 8 inch thick wall space. I don't see how any masonry work no matter how low density could have better insulation values.
A lot more CO2 though, and less repairable.
Can we please 3D print a city block next time?
Oh look, a suburb printer. Thirty minutes from Austin? I wonder if there's any grocery stores or places to gather any closer. So what if it's printed? Still looks like a miserable place designed more for cars to live in than humans.
Lol, Georgetown isn't really a suburb of Austin. It's a separate city that is almost as old as Austin, home to the oldest college in Texas, and is the seat of an entirely different county. So yeah, there are a few places to gather and get groceries. ;)
you don't have to wonder. 8 minutes by bike:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Lennar+at+Wolf+Ranch/wolf+ra...
Transportation from point A to point B isn't the only function of most cars on the road these days.
Relevant to central Texas in the summmer: 115° bike rides do not sound fun.
Seems a little defeatist and missing the forest for the trees.
No one is going to make you live there. Other people have preferences that are different from yours and are not less valid.