Affordable-housing hopes are building around 3D-printed homes

26 Sep 23 187 0 0

Affordable-housing hopes are building around 3D-printed homes

Cool Story - Affordable-housing hopes are building around 3D-printed homes

We require more homes in the United States to lower housing costs. Most estimates place the additional units at millions.

There are many complicated reasons for the housing shortage, but it is unquestionably not helped by the high cost of building, which increased as a result of labor and supply shortages brought on by the epidemic.

A technological innovation called 3D printing has the potential to streamline the construction process. There is a movement to get the technology more widely used after startups tested it in the large-scale building.

Meghan McCarty Carino of Marketplace spoke with author Rachel Monroe, who delves further into the subject in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

The conversation between them is summarised here.

Rebecca Monroe, We are primarily discussing the printers that produce a building's exterior. So the wall system prints the house from the ground up, layer by layer, using something like a concrete mixture that comes out of a nozzle.

I'm Meghan McCarty Carino. Does the website genuinely allow printing? How does the printer itself appear? It's a nozzle, as you claimed.

Monroe: A gantry crane is holding a nozzle. Therefore, you sort of has three pieces to what you do. First, you have a software system that feeds the plan into the printer, which then follows the plan that the software has laid out. And in essence, it's like a fancy concrete mixture that is blended and fed into the printer, which just follows the outline of the building you want to create.

Carino McCarty Correct, and the printing materials themselves are a bit of a jumble of various things?

Monroe: That's a good way to phrase it, yes. It must have this incredibly intricate balance and be liquid enough to get through the machinery, am I right? But it also needs to start up rapidly after that. So by the time the printer head, or nozzle, turns around, it has sufficiently hardened to allow for the acceptance of the subsequent layer, correct? As a result, it's frequently employed as, say, a cement or concrete blend. It appears to be concrete to the untrained eye, but there are other chemicals in it that sort of makes it precise in the manner that they need it to be.

Carino McCarty, You wrote a profile of Icon, an Austin, Texas-based construction startup that is utilizing this technology. What do they offer?

Monroe: I believe the benefits became quite apparent during the epidemic when we had severe supply chain problems as well as a labor shortage. That has kind of been a persistent problem in the building sector. With 3D printing, houses can be constructed more quickly, with less waste and labor, and they are also, in theory, more durable, energy-efficient, and less expensive. However, what's remarkable right now is that Icon is printing a full neighborhood, which consists of roughly 100 houses. It seems as though we are now genuinely determining whether this is possible to mainstream.

Carino McCarty, They undoubtedly couched their aim in a very tech-utopian manner, am I correct?

Monroe: I agree. This business is venture-funded. Thus, you hear all of that talk about how it will change the world. We're going to print millions of houses, you know. This will completely transform the built environment. a lot of extremely intelligent conversation.

Carino McCarty And you got to spend a night in one of those test homes made from 3D printing. How did that feel? What did it resemble? What sensation did you get?

Monroe: I agree. Therefore, it wasn't one of the residences in this development that is being printed. To demonstrate that luxurious homes can be created using 3D printing technology, Icon created this somewhat finer residence. And I have to admit, it was pleasant. It was a somewhat odd experience. The architecture of the house itself is distinctive. They desired a dwelling that was only printable, am I correct? This was a very sinuous building because printers find it easier to create curves than they do straight lines. And as a result of the layers that I was adding, the walls of a 3D-printed house got this, like, ribbed texture.

Carino McCarty And how much does it cost to paint a house? Does it still save money, I mean, at this point?

Monroe: Forgive the pun, but this is tricky and difficult to quantify, but the best impression I could get is that the houses they're printing—ranging from pretty basic structures for nonprofits that house the homeless to these luxury homes to these kinds of typical suburban homes—tend to be about 10% less expensive at this point. You understand that is a saving. It is not a ground-breaking saving. The theory is that as technology advances, such savings will increase.

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