$4000 3D-Printed House Could Provide Shelter To The World's Homeless
This week, during an event at SXSW in Austin, a startup called ICON unveiled an amazing project, a house that could be 3-D printed for just $4,000. With the new method that the company has developed, they are able to print a 650-square-foot house out of cement in less than 24 hours.
In contrast, it could take a human roughly 20 days to complete the same project.ICON's first project is to build 100 homes for a community in El Salvador next year. To complete this goal, ICON is teaming up with New Story, a nonprofit that focuses on finding homes for people across the world who have inadequate shelter.“We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia,” Alexandria Lafci, co-founder of New Story, told The Verge.
Newstory CEO Brett Hagler said that their main goal is to help provide housing for the poorest billion people on the earth.
“We thought, okay, what if the bottom billion weren’t the last ones to get this, but the first ones to get this? It made sense for us to try to leapfrog what’s happening domestically, because our homes are so simple,” Hagler said.“Ideally we can move from thousands of people to millions of people around the world by allowing other nonprofits and governments to use this technology. That’s the big goal, because our goal is impacting the most families possible,” he added.
ICON will be producing the materials with a Vulcan 3D printer and the team said that they could make houses as large as 800 square feet, which is about the size of the average apartment in New York City.
“The big difference, between a developed world and developing world context is you have a much more limited set of materials to work with. Number one, just because of access, you want to restrict your material mix to things that you could find very ubiquitously around the globe. And you also want to avoid expensive materials,” Jason Ballard of ICON said.
“There are fundamental problems with conventional stick-building that 3D printing solves, besides affordability. You get a high thermal mass, thermal envelope, which makes it far more energy-efficient.
It’s far more resilient. There are a few other companies that have printed homes and structures, but they are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts. For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses,” he added.
Ballard said that eventually these technologies can even be used to build housing in space.
“One of the big challenges is how are we going to create habitats in space. You’re not going to open a two by four and open screws. It’s one of the more promising potential habitat technologies," Ballard said.
In 2015, a Chinese construction company named WinSun 3D printed a huge five story apartment building and a 11,840 square foot mansion. Both of the new projects are located side by side in Suzhou Industrial Park. Each project was constructed with a unique type of pre-mixed concrete which is made from from “construction waste” according to cnet.
I wrote this on my blog @ https://themindunleashed.com/2018/03/4000-3d-printed-house-could-provide-shelter-to-the-worlds-homeless.html
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans
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This is really cool, and is likely to help a lot of people who have places they can put a house.
Almost all of the billion people that live in inadequate housing don't. This won't solve that problem. The biggest impediment to the homeless is where to live, not what to live in. All those who think the problem is the structure itself haven't been homeless.
This is why Seattle is at war with people living in RVs. The RVs are perfectly fine housing, if a bit cramped. The people living in them have no place to park them. RV parks are limited in how many they can take, and cost upwards of $500/mth. The poorest people in the world cannot afford that. Many of them have income less than $500/year.
Location, location, location. People with even very inadequate housing, such as tents, or cardboard boxes, can make do, and gradually improve their homes over time, if they but have a place to put them. Just laying out a grid of sites in some godforsaken desert somewhere, as refugee camps are wont to do, won't serve.
Folks need services, stores, septic/sewer, water, and communications and transport access.
That's why homeless people live in cities, rather than out in the country. Cities are where the liquor stores and drug dealers are, after all. Having been homeless, I am intimately familiar with this problem.
It's possible to lay out refugee style camps, with adequate services, where these structures, RVs, cars and trucks, or whatever homeless people wanna live in can be placed, and many will not live there, even if the rent is free, because services you don't think they need are of primary importance to them, such as the aforementioned liquor stores and drug dealers.
Cities are where the customers are also, for them as have services they offer, too. Booze and drugs cost money.
Homelessness won't be solved by structures built by robots, unless those structures are able to be sited where people can use them permanently to lead the lives they choose to.
Thanks!
excellent points!
a very good plan, how about later if if made in the house in space, wow very good this
This is such a cool concept! And it's a nice looking house to boot. Nice to see 3D printing being used for humanitarian goals.
Why not just use places that are empty? There are many of them. Its a great idea this but its just annoying that the governments allow homlessness in the first place 😢
how much does the printer cost?
it seems like they are teaming up with a charity who will cover that costs
I would think the most efficient way to build a bunch of concrete houses would be to build a mold, that's the great thing about concrete. The advantage of 3D printing is the ability to make one- off things.
I just came across this too! Awesome project
this is amazing!! The implications would be world-changing! All people deserve a clean, sustainable, safe home to rest their heads and raise their families :)
How cool is this? Technology really is doing some amazing things. The world won't look even a little like the one we remember from childhood fifty years from now.
That's amazing! Are there any pics of the inside, or of the actual printing of it. I have this idea of a giant spaceship looking-like printer just popping these things out... which i know, is probably nothing like the actual process.
this video here has a little bit of a time lapse that you can kinda see, but thats all i have been able to find sofar
This video has a bit better footage of a different but similar proejct
what kind of capitalization is required to attain this machine? Nothing in the housing industry seems as promising for replacing the brain-dead, illiterate IDIOTS who occupy the construction industry these days... Oh, what I experienced in the late '90s attempting to put together a small start up construction company in Nevada... and then in early '00s in west Texas. sheeesh.
I realised just this week that all construction jobs apart from concreters and electricians will be gone because soon you can just 3d print any office block and bolt it together. started with stick on plastic bricks, and soon yeh, huge 3d printed buildings.
800,000 million jobs not existing by the year 2030!
best learn how to be self susficient soon!
You are not correct about construction jobs. I may be the last man alive to be replaced by robots. A huge number of construction jobs are maintaining extant structures, many of which are stick built. While it is possible that robots could do this, it isn't likely they'll do it soon.
Spraying concrete isn't difficult, compared to figuring out where the termites or carpenter ants are getting in, and why the wood is wet enough for them to eat. Then repairing the problem area is somewhat demanding of cognizance of often serial bouts of original construction tacked onto one another, and a vast suite of skills ranging from the demolition work, to framing, various surfaces, and how to patch them, and on and on.
Such highly variable and diverse tasks aren't suited to automation.
Concrete may be the very first construction job robots take over, as it involves little more than building and stripping forms, and smoothing the surface after the pour over the rebar. Far less to it.