I've worked closely with a leading concrete 3D printing company for several years now, so I hope my insight into the actual construction process provides some perspective. First, one clarification: There is no gravel aggregate in 3D printing concrete. It is only sand. You're right that the vertical integration is very strong in this industry, but there is already internal pressure to break that up. I expect in 10 years or so, you'll see more open-access tools available to architects and construction companies alike. I can't be too specific and honor my non-disclosure agreements, but there is recognition that the ability for architects to play with shape is very limited for now, which also limits the primary advantage of concrete 3D printing over other methods: complex shapes cost the same as simple ones. The primary reasons IMO for the vertical integration is 1) that there has been a high learning curve for the industry and 2) the business case relies on minimizing labor costs and the strategies for dealing with that are still being prototyped. Normally trivial things like laying foundations, running plumbing, tying roof timbers into the frame, and lintels as you mentioned, are difficult for concrete 3D printed construction. It's only in the last year or so that acceptable, repeatable solutions have been identified for most of these and are finding their way into standard design practices. But even then, there are still maybe 5 or 10 years more of on-the-ground construction needed to establish best practice. It's not too different from the way building materials and building science radically changed in the 1980's, leading to a decade of extremely poorly built houses prone to water damage and short lifespans. It wasn't until maybe 20 years after that best practices for high-quality construction had been standardized. I would push back on the lack of repairability, though. This has always been an issue with concrete construction, and it's likely to become increasingly common for plaster or stucco finishes to be applied to internal walls, allowing for intrusive renovations to be reintegrated. Structural stability is not likely to be an issue since all walls have reinforcement every half meter anyway and often exceed building strength standards by an order of magnitude. Further, virtually all concrete 3D printing for now is slab-on-grade construction, which already has the same repairability issues you mention but is already widely adopted and has best practices for dealing with things like electrical and plumbing repair. I would also point out that the timber frame construction that we love so much is largely an anomaly unique to the U.S. where wood is abundant and cheap. Concrete 3D printed homes have the (so far unrealized) potential of being many decades or centuries more durable than frame buildings, which will change the design requirements that often contribute to design choices that later need renovations and repairs. I would also push back on the criticism of how windows and doors are seated in the concrete homes. I don't doubt that many early concrete 3D printed homes were sealed with silicone only, but 1) the gap between windows and walls is already standard in frame construction and addressed with shims, spray foam, and trim and 2) the 3D printing companies have already started to adopt the same building techniques used by frame construction. Echoing much of what you said, IMO concrete 3D printing has a high potential for unique design that won't be unlocked until architects are given freer access to the tools and pre-fab construction is a necessary companion to this industry, but there is still a lot of building science that is being worked out. There are already some serious advantges, such as all walls having a native R40 insulation rating, but these will be tempered by the inherent limitations. I don't expect to see a rapid adoption of 3D printed construction for another 5 or 10 years and for the U.S. market share to cap around 20% and primarily remain in the residential and light commercial construction spaces. I also think that the current bare-wall aesthetic will fall out of favor out in that timeframe since it will prove difficult to clean. I also expect that environmental costs will remain high as long as cement production relies on fossil fuels and concrete aggregate relies on mined sand. I also expect that a future use case for heavy construction is using 3D printing to create forms for much thicker concrete constructions, particularly for foundations, buttresses, and pillars, such as you see in airport construction. Anyway, thanks for the video, and all the best!
Yup. Those internal 3D printed surfaces look like they're begging for some of that aerogel lime plaster or plain old dot and dab drylining. I've seen people build shotcrete boat hulls upside down and then roll them over. They use a stainless mesh, like rebar in regular concrete, then seal it with paint. I've also seen robots tying rebar together on job sites. Will we see these two robots working in tandem to, first, tie a steel frame together then, second, fill it with concrete? A third robot to do the lime plaster?
You know what a bad idea is? A bad idea is pouring concrete without any reinforcing. Now that's a bad idea! Even some chicken wire in the mix makes concrete so much stronger. Take it from a guy that's jackhammered up more than his fair share of concrete. You want steel reinforcing in your concrete. That fibermesh is horse crap. Know what I'm not seeing in these printed houses? Reinforcing.
Lol, I am a seismologist and was thinking the same thing. Honestly, some kind of resin/plastic 3D printed material would probably work since it's flexible, though I don't know about the longevity. Or maybe figure out how to 3D print what are essentially cinder.blocks (with open spaces), and then maybe you can add rebar down the center and pour in a slurry at the end to reinforce it? There are also metal 3D printers... Could have multiple printer heads laying interleaving layers of concrete and metal (I assume actually making such a system would be practically complex). Honestly, mass produced prefab "modules" probably makes more sense. Attach modules together as the "skeleton" of the house, and then the facade can be whatever you want to customize its appearance. I assume there are construction professionals (not me) that are thinking about these sorts of things.
Tell the Romans that , there stuff is still around . No steel in centuries old structures . Steel guarantees a limited structural life span. Reenforced concrete 100 years max.
Current concrete and ancient concrete, completely different things. Besides, the walls of the structures from the Roman era are feet thick, not a few inches.
@@ytSuns26 the Romans were working on a different timetable than we do today. Change is more rapid now. It is pointless to build something that'll outlast its usefulness. There's very little from 100 years ago that we want now. 100 years from now they won't want what we have today either. That's because they'll be doing different things different ways.
There is much more nuance to the cost structure, and the company I work with consistently costs much less per square foot than frame construction. The companies in this space are well aware of the costs, and while the marketing focuses on the walls, the actual business case lies in the interfaces between the walls and everything else and automating as much of that as possible. That said, though, cheap labor eliminates the market advantage, limiting most concrete 3D printing to high-cost-of-living areas for now.
People are trying to solve the housing crisis. What housing crisis i hear you say? Give it 5 short years and you will see, baring an exponential uptick in home building. Given the current purchusing power of a dollar, the hopes of buying homes for future inhabitents of the world, who are not rich aka the 99 percent, is dismal. A massive increase in production ability would then drive down cost. This is how it works tech drives down cost, without that were boned
@@legionjames1822 I know what the housing crisis is. I'm an architect. The housing crisis is caused by economic and social forces, and it won't be solved by building concrete walls slightly faster.
@@henryglennon3864 you aint seen nothing yet. Besides 3d printing a home requires a top down systemic approach of the ENTIRE home building process ahead of time. Its not a practice in wall building, thats a nice pigeon hole tho if thats what anyone is looking for. The dollar is devaluing by 7 percent year over year. All asset values are through the roof. Homes are the primary asset in anyones portfolio of assets. Therefore the values will continue to baloon, pricing LOTS of people out of home buying. The future needs future soltutions.
The only part that is being automated with 3d printing is essentially the framing, which is already the quickest and easiest part of construction. You still have to do all of the finishing (plumbing, electrical, cabinets, windows, doors, painting, flooring, roofing, etc), which is the slower and more expensive part.
Also, all those other trades become much more expensive in this type of building, as running electrical and plumbing through hollow walls is obviously much simpler.
Plumbing and wiring a concrete wall seems vastly more difficult. Think of all the removal of material you would need to do for junction and switch boxes. Times that by 2 for pipes. The only time I see saved is not having to sheetrock, or slap on vinyl siding. I shudder at the idea of cutting baseboard for these things too. Nothing is straight and square. You would need half a truckload of caulk.
While I find 3d printed houses fascinating, it's kind of annoying to see it billed as a way to fight the affordability crisis as if the cause is the cost of construction, rather than an economic issue. The price of housing is artificially inflated by external economic pressures, such as houses not being listed to drive up the price of other houses due to a perceived lack of availability
Worse than that. Houses are priced by proxy, we have real estate companies arbitrarily posting houses 115% higher than their curb value simply because the one down the street is charging 115% the curb value and they do it with a smile knowing they will get the sale eventually as housing prices increase.
Zoning laws is the main issue. Not enough dense housing in places people want to live. Supply and demand basically. NIMBY don't want it and companies don't want it because it will bring values down. Until the majority agrees that housing is a right and not focused on it as a wealth building tool housing will stay expensive
Housing keeps going up in price, because local governments keep increasing the assessment values in order to collect more property tax money. When people sell their houses, they expect to get at least their houses' assessment values. New construction is priced in accordance with the market value of existing houses, if not more. Everyone is trying to get the most money they can. Greed.
I think it would be, with enough of parts/components it would be like Lego, instead of building brick by brick it would be wall by wall. I think pre-fab have bad reputation because it is cheap
i mean ngl if you want looks you can just slap stucco or plaster right over the exterior/interior of this i don't see anything stopping you from doing so its obviously just cheaper, which is probably their whole selling point in not doing so as its not required to have a functional home
I have always had a problem with the hype around 3d printed structures, especially residential structures, especially in the US. For a 3d printed house you still need a poured foundation, you still need interior finishing, you still need a roof, you still need MEP, the list goes on and on. You still need to do the rest of the house. What does 3d printing automate away? the framing and sheathing - because to be clear - the vast majority of houses are wood framed, and will continue to be. Now, what is the absolute fastest part of building a wood framed house? the framing and sheathing. 3d printing replaces the fast, easy, low skill part of home construction with something marginally faster if at all, extremely complicated, unforgiving, and requiring highly skilled workers if not engineers on site. For home construction, 3d printing is *silly*
It replaces high skilled and low skilled jobs. It depends on the design. Automation at any degree becomes useful when applied right. What does AI replace currently? Customer service on websites sometimes considered a low skill low pay job. Great well that can be allocated to other areas now, and that employee can focus on other tasks instead. Recently completed a 3D printed home in California. A duplex. We could print the roof but we didn't in this particular job. Doing the MEP was easy, foundation can be printed and interior finishing can be done in a day. Now at scale it really starts to work as the printer can finish a couple houses a week, then the contractors can come and do the MEPs all in a row. There are definitely some kinks to work out in the process and approval but the US is one of the few places who still do wood frame. Its largely about material cost and understanding. Go to AUS and see everything still being done in Brick.. Also 3D printing isn't only concrete. More and more materials pop up all the time. From clay, adobe, hemp to stone. It is also about customization, freedom of form and design.
Incorrect. 3D printing has capabilities that stickbuilts dont. Especially in areas particularly prone to hurricane & tornados. If you doubt the market potential or usecase applicability just take a gander at what's still standing after a hurricane sweeps through. Or heck, in any given centenial flood plain construction put to the test. Stickbuilts can't just be dried off and refurnished. Concrete structures can be, as long as the aggregate substrate wasn't washed from underneath it With climate shift exaggerating those risks AND vastly expanding their potentially area of impact I think you'll quickly note that concrete printing a house makes more sense than rebuilding a stickframe.
@@brianhirt5027 Don't underestimate the role of rebar in those things that stand up to hurricanes. Reinforced concrete is impressively strong. A few ton of splooged grout will not compare favorably.
@@brianhirt5027 The structures you speak of are not printed, they are reinforced and poured in place. Cartesian motion systems used by these house scale 3d printers, and even corexy for that matter, cant cope with the rebar that did all the work. remember that concrete has virtually no strength in tension or torsion, which is what earthquake and hurricane resistant structures are designed to withstand. its the rebar doing all the work, and the motion systems simply do not allow for those to be in place. It is also telling that the precautions in traditional wood construction against earthquake and high winds are to add steel reinforcing, and not to fill the walls with concrete.
The biggest problem with 3d printing homes is that its a gimmick thats being served as a solution to a problem. Problem being lack of affordable housing, solution being 3d printing making houses cheaper to produce.... but the problem with housing is not really cost of brick and mortar itswlf but the land. So what that you can get cheap house, you aint gonna be building it in a local lidl parking lot.
Problem is bigger and more nefarious than that even…if their tech reduces the cost to build a house by $100K, the construction company is going to pocket $100K. Total consumer savings? Zero dollars. Technology doesn’t save US anything anymore. It’s just profit. Nuclear fusion will be a windfall for energy companies, with us paying the same prices we do burning coal.
I live in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. I'm a 77 year old electrician. I was an electrical contractor for most of the years since I finished my apprenticeship. Most buildings here are double brick with a concrete slab, timber roof with generally concrete tiles on top of the roof timbers. These are installed when needed. The Electricians put the TPS sheath wires into the walls & ceilings. The plumbers put the water pipes in & Gas pipes in. Then the gutters & downpipes are installed. First the cement is troweled on and the plaster is troweled on when needed to the inside brick walls. Gyprock ceiling panels on the bottom of the roof timbers are installed. Internal cupboards, bath, Shower recess and toilets are installed. then it has the floor & wall tiles installed and at the correct times the painters do their painting. Then there is a hand over process. After six months or so an inspection is done & items that the owners who have been living in the house find problems are fixed. This works very well but it can take a long time. The building costs are kept low because the builder has contractors doing their work in reputation so it's completely different to employing wage people. The labour cost are very low. The house may take quite a while to build but you all would be amazed what you get for your money. Let's say somebody wants a house designed by an architect and they then use the architect to build the house. The costs don't compare with the standard builders houses from display plans. Maybe they have to change the way 3D printing works when wanting to include it in house construction to compete with the price here. In 1968 the houses were double brick with timber floors. In that year an Italian builder built a double brick home with a concrete floor. All of a sudden within say a month or two all houses (Except for the government, Homes West houses) seem to all change to building houses with concrete floors. Houses were built then without using any electricity. Not even a generator. One day it will obviously change to a 3D built house here in Perth, Western Australia I suppose.
I worked for a masonry contractor that was pretty quick and reliable. They'd lay a guy off every day just to keep the rest of the crew on their toes. That's how they kept up the pace. If you wanted to work then you'd better work fast.
In Japan you buy a house from a book , truck come at 8 am in the morning at 5 PM you move-in it's totally finished , with spectacular finish and details
You missed a bigger issue, building codes and inspectors. Being one of the earlier 3D concrete printer developers our biggest issue was the building inspectors here in the US. Good video.
@@Kaz-qz2oq There is a ton of upfront costs, and most 'printers' are one-ofs custom jobs. There's no commercial manufacturer of the 'printers' yet i'm aware of.
The most expensive part of a house is not the material cost of a house but the land that it sits on. A burnt out abandoned house in California was sold for $1 million.
On how many acres and where? Land is cheap if you don't need a lot or don;t need to be close to a city. It's $200k for a 160 acre plot 1 hour from Sacramento, right now.
@@filonin2 if you calculate the cost of throwing utilities, and the increased freight of one extra hour drive... you will quickly understand that "cheap" land means "hidden costs".
The cost of the land depends on where it is. In places with high demand, the cost of the lot could be the most expensive part. For example, a $1 million dollar house in southern California could really be just a $200,000 house on an $800,000 lot. Build that same house out in the middle of nowhere and the lot may only be $20,000, but then you may need to drive an hour to get to a job or decent store. Also, you will probably have to drill a well and put in a septic system.
2:33 My man, I invite you to come to this wonderful place called Europe, where we've been building 50m+ high structures with small blocks of stone and no lintels for more than two thousand years.
Yes but we didn't simply stack them up that high. The point is not that arches don't exist, but that you cannot build an arch without a support structure. Small scale plastic 3D printing just prints those supports alongside the model and the user has to break them off at the end. But that's not really a great solution for printing slowly drying concrete.
@@alfonshasel1995 We have many brick houses and a few stone bridges here but they are not commonly built today. I bet most americans have seen a brick arch in a window or door of an older house. This guy is just an idiot.
As a residential contractor and past commercial construction worker... this is a horrible idea. Imagine doing repairs or getting a hold of the builder to fix an issue
I don't know about the who country, but put here the permiting, zoning, and land costs are what's making housing unafordable. Once you got the land and permission to build, the rest is relitivly cheap and straightforward.
2:42 You can, it's called flat arch. A somewhat forgotten technique that was very common in 19th and early 20th century. It works for spans that are 4 feet or less but it's still the majority of windows and doorways. Or you can, you know, span everything with a segmental arch like we had been doing for the past 2000 years.
I wouldn't be sure you can print a flat arch out of concrete. This process creates a homogeneous structural member. The premise of the masonry arch is that load is directed in compression from masonry unit to masonry unit. I'm not sure the internal load would be distributed the same way in a printed concrete wall.
@@kacperwoch4368 fair enough. That said, in America, code might prevent it. Which is stupid, but American building codes really do not like unreinforced masonry. For example, I'm not too sure how the printed walls would be reviewed, unless they have a special variance.
It's internally reinforced, I think. If it's a biggie sized version of my home 3D printer there's ways to 'reinforce' your builds by choosing certain internal geometries depending on the intended usecase application.
@@jackhydrazine1376 Yup. There's one inflil type called gynoid in particular would make the final superstructure several times more solid than a brick & mortar. It's akin to solid body chassis in car construction. Since it's all cast together there's no 'joints' for groundshock to vertically sheer. The whole houseframe jiggles as one contiguous solid.
My sister and brother-in-law recently moved into a 3D printed home. I envy them. The walls are thick, not just the exterior walls. It’s very resistant to exterior noise. It’s similar to living in the basement, always nice and cool and quiet. Very energy efficient too. They love it. And it looks aesthetically like any other house.
Isn't that the same as for any stone-like building. I.e. the vast majority of buildings in Belgium are brick ones. In regions with more rock, stone walls are more popular, and today pre-fabricated concrete walls are also used to make houses. These prefab walls are what comes closest to the mass production of other industries. There are a number of standard wall shapes, often including cavities for pipes or multi-layered with insulation. These walls are then brought to the buildsite and bolted together.
@@Srt3D01-db-01 I lived in a cement block house and the 3D printed house is definitely different. First of all cement block houses normally have drywall. Not a 3D printed house, all the walls are cement. Thick cement. There is no doubt when you walk into the house that it is different from any other house.
The problem I have with 3D printing a house is that it 3D prints literally the cheapest part of the house - walls. So I doubt there's much in savings done. Plumbing, electricity, roof, heating/cooling, windows/doors, interior finish are all way more expensive that the walls so I don't see how they are claiming any benefit.
I used to work as an engineer for a major 3D printing construction company and this analysis is quite accurate. 3D printed construction is a nail looking for a hammer and will never be able to reduce cost or build time of single family homes. The printed structural elements of a home only equate to ~20% of the total cost of house so in order to reduce the cost of a house by 10% printing will need to be able to halve the cost of stick framing which is impossible. And not to mention the gigantic CO2 footprint that is associated with the production of cement.
Used to be that gypsum drywall was a hammer looking for a nail, too. It too was spendy, initially. It took a while for folks to shift from plaster walls to gypsum drywall. Other than in restoration projects I challenge you to find plastering it in any sort of modern construction project use today, though. Perhaps you should be a bit more cautious about waiving around that 'never' flag so hard.
Stick framing is just about the worst way to build a house we have invented. Timber framing is orders of magnitude superior, if building in wood. Both in strength and longevity. Secondly, nobody cares about how long it takes, within reason. What matters is price/performance. And in hot climates, this method will work well, given the thermal mass of the walls.
@@timothyblazer1749 I think concrete printers do have a significant edge in certain climates, most especially in areas prone to natural disasters. If a printer laid superstructure & a manufactured home builder supplied veneers & facades to hang on that superstructure substrate the resultingbuilt-to-last power combo could literally rebuild entire towns wrecked in natural disasters with months. As it stands it can ebe upwards of five to seven YEARS for local recovery.That's only likely to get worse with hardly any youngsters entering the trades anymore.
Metal studs could be screwed directly to the interior and exterior walls, and finished conventionally with drywall board, siding, and wood in much the way concrete or block buildings are finished now
Regulatory capture is the bane of the American economy. It’s the reason why healthcare is so expensive. Why government spends so much money for so little output. Why so many industries are monopolized WTH inferior versions..
The current age of the United States is older than the median lifespan of human empires by some estimates. This country is on borrowed time, and it shows.
The shipping costs of the built parts are what kills this idea & have you SEEN how modular homes are built ?? I have worked on many and they are not built well just built fast.
This is what's described as ivory tower thinking. Most college graduates and engineers have no hand-on field experience. Talk to me when you build your own house.
I love when the 3d printing homes topic comes up on my feed. The batshit comments are always entertaining😂 HGTV has turned every moron in the country into a professional builder😂
So, in colder countries like Canada, where I live, the one huge thing you want to avoid is having a construction material bridge the space between the exterior and the interior. This results in dramatic heat loss through a phenomenon called thermal bridging. By creating continuous webs, you are encouraging heat to escape. Insulation in the remaining cells doesn't overcome this difficulty. There needs to be an impermeable membrane - and preferably, an air space between the exterior and interior construction. So, like many innovations, this is an idea that will work great in warmer countries, but not that great when it gets down to -30C on a regular basis for 4 or 5 months of the year.
It does not take a couple of days to 3d print a home. It takes several weeks for most companies. I believe icon recently got down to a week but all other companies are much longer. Maybe print time, but there is a lot of downtime. They have to let the layers dry. A couple of days is just a marketing thing at the moment.
Depends on the mix you are using and the experience. We can do it in a few days. Just depends on the model and drying time of the materials. 750 sq ft home in 2-3 days is easy once you have the experience.
@user-nu1wp4pw9o sure cures - seems you knew what i meant, I doubt clarification was necessary. In any case, it needs to get to a certain amount of strength before they can add addional layers.
it happens with traditional concrete forms too if things are not braced correctly. its called a blow out I worked a job building the floor forms for a 15 story building and we had 2 major blow outs. having the forms shift and then 20+ truckloads of concrete start pouring through a hole makes a huge mess into a place that is typically very tight with shoring for the pour. it was always all hands on deck shoveling the wet concrete into buckets and passing them down a man line till it can get to a forklift.
The other factor to consider is that the layers of concrete naturally form a series of bulges and indents up the wall. Those indents would collect dust on the inside and be very hard to clean compared to smooth drywall or mostly smooth vinyl siding. The ongoing maintenance would suck
I had briefly a 20% stake in a 3D house printing company before I decided it was not viable. The construction times are not any faster than brick when everything is taken into account. The onsite risks of vandalism are higher (the equipment is very expensive, not to mention the building very fragile before it sets properly). The transportation, storage, manpower are all equivalent or far more to 3D print. The niche market is not project housing, but rather upper end architecture, public buildings (libraries, schools, etc). The real breakthrough will be when it is easily integrated with traditional methods. Its biggest advantage is the ability to create complex curves which would be near impossible with traditional methods. If someone can create a far smaller setup, without the risks of vandalism and theft, or otherwise have it on secured sites, where the creativity advantages can be integrated, then it will have found its niche.
“Forever haunted by a memorial of this imperfection”. Couldnt have said it better. And thats what makes 3d concrete printing so frustrating. Its dynamic, you cant be always monitoring the quality of the print. Especially when youre printing in an outdoor or open space, every little change in the environment affects the print quality. And whatever goes into the tube may seem okay initially, but watch it get extruded in absolute mess. Theres so many variables that it makes this type of construction causes more unique problems than traditional building methods. Im not sure if 3d concrete printing is the future, but i feel like automation of what humans are doing on site, would be the future.
From fairly limited experience (being involved in building five concrete brick houses/ cottages), one thing that has never made sense to me about 3D printed buildings is that in terms of cost and construction time, the walls and roof aren't such a big deal. What costs the money (and time) is the finishes and fittings, which don't seem to feature in the design software. Maybe this is just so for some places, and in others, the cost of the walls is the limiting factor. (Else, if you build your cheap walls big, you just have to spend more on expensive fittings that the walls are made to protect.) Also, the little crevices inside are not going to make for nice walls. You still need to plaster those (or cover them with drywall). On the outside, all they're going to do is provide a nice substrate for mosses and lichens - which could be great if they weren't quite likely structural hazards, long term).
I think it's just the first step to fully automated custom houses. First create a system for the foundation and walls. then for the roof. Then use boston dynamic robots for the finish work. One day you will go to a website, or probably just talk to your AI, and design your house. Maybe a week later you would walk in and the robots already moved all of your stuff in and stocked the fridge.
There are so many issues with that, it just makes no sense. Just the equipment. And transportation. Who will be fixing it? What if concrete is not perfect... And you need to build foundation not only for the house, but for the machine too. Can't correct any mistakes... Btw, Nobody is building the brick houses. And 4 guys can build a house faster. All you need is a foundation, frame, & drywall. And it will be like 100 times cheaper. * We have been building houses for thousands of years. There is no reason to make something more complicated that it needs to.
When my family’s house was being built, 2 things took the majority of the time. 1: the foundation 2: interior The frame took a month with a crew of 3 guys working 3 days a week.
A big issue is that current methods don't allow dense housing. You couldn't easily (to my knowledge) print a row of terrace houses unless you used a gigantic gantry a whole street long to print all of them at once. The concurrency of modular construction means you can lay bricks for a second house while the first is being fitted and decorated. Currently, most 3D printed housing aims to just be slightly cheaper versions of the same expensive suburban single-family developments, which will not fix a housing crisis. I am therefore surprised that construction 3D printing isn't aimed more towards prefab. People often complain about not wanting to live in cookie-cutter homes lacking character and uniqueness. 3D printing sounds good for that. You could talk to an architect about a custom design for one part of the house or some finishing touches that are printed on/off-site, cured, and then assembled.
1) dense housing is definitely an issue, but most gantries also are easily retrofitted to build an entire row. This construction method would allow the printer to make maybe 4 houses at once, put a gap, and then start on the next cluster as the first cluster is being finished. 2) I disagree that construction 3D printing is good for prefab. A concrete 3D printer will never have the same economies of scale as a well designed set of molds. It's far too slow and sloppy by comparison. Rather, I expect pre-fab to be a symbiotic industry to concrete 3D printing.
Building vertically becomes challenging and expensive with traditional methods, but not for a printer. Home and apartments could be printed with 4 floors/homes allowing for dense affordable housing.
@@hellothere6627 This is a good point, but there's currently a height limit on 3D printed buildings, because they don't use rebar or reinforcing frames. That's probably a fixable issue, but currently the tallest 3D printed apartment building has 5 floors (by WinSun in Suzhou), was considered complex and expensive to pull off, and has some longevity concerns. And even then, they prefabricated the parts offsite and shipped them for construction. That's why nearly all the 3d-print-in-place buildings in this video are single-storey or single+loft.
Why can't the printing head apparatus be fitted with something like a pari of vertical trowels, one on either side of the wall, to smooth the layered appearance a little? It seems like it would lead to a more pleasing appearance and also make it easier to do whatever decorative touches you might want later, which would be better suited to non-lumpy walls.
to be honest not only that, but also portaying it as a major issue while completely ignoring the fact plaster (not only drywall) is routinely used in the standard construction shows the negative bias. There's no one stopping the architect from covering the facade with "something" to make it look less alien.
3d printing a building only sounds like a good idea for people who don't have any experience building, repairing, renovating, remodeling, or otherwise working on a building
On a one off, maybe - but how many people does it take to do that? So to do.. i don't know, 50 houses it takes that many people x50, but with this you only need 1 person at most to monitor each print and you can do them all at the same time.
@@andrewhooper7603 I'm not advocating or even think 3d printed houses can replace every aspect of a construction workers job. I'm just pointing out that they can have a use and it's not as far-fetched as you might think.
This is 3D concrete pouring which is referred to as "printing" for ADVERTISING purposes. Precast concrete is old news and arguably a much better system which is why it's in wide use. The printer is basically a CNC concrete extruder.
One of my jobs as a welder was to inspect and correct the product of our robot welder, and I can say it was not a great welder. It had limited use as most of our weldments were not repetitive enough to justify using a robot. I only got about 5 to 8 hours of work a week from the robot. That included inspecting the welds and correcting about 10% of the finished parts. A lot of the errors were for parts that were out of tolerance, and the tolerance was pretty high on these things, ± 1/4" when most of the hand welded stuff was between ± 1/8" and ± 1/16"
Affordability is an issue because of the way our economy works, not because we can't do things on the cheap. In other words, it comes down to who owns the home--investor or occupant. 3d printed homes will be bought up, en masse, just as other affordable homes have been bought up, en masse, which constricts the market for owner occupied home and therefor drives those prices. Also, the home as an isolated object is not the objective of most people, who want to live in neighborhoods and send their kids to good schools. Again, walkable neighborhoods are desperately difficult to find and the market, therefore, makes them stupidly expensive. 3D printed homes will do nothing to solve this. In fact, if we were able to build a few million homes very quickly, the glut in housing would crash the prices and the economy. It's econ 101. The solution isn't a manufacturing gimmick, it's changing the way markets work. Since we invented markets and money, we can reinvent markets and money.
Housing isn't bought up "en masse" by investment companies. Housing is scarce for consumers because major metropolitan areas don't build anything new anymore. For example, San Francisco permitted exactly 1,136 homes. That isn't enough to keep pace with the demand for living in San Francisco. Compare this to Austin TX, who has built 11,600 units in the same timeframe with much less demand, and they've seen a decline in both home and rent prices. It's all supply.
Or really any construction. Watching this video I'm watching the deposition of what amounts to a special sandstone or limestone, without reinforcement, in a slow process that doesn't allow for much in the way of variation, and with an unfinished look that will still require a significant amount of labor to cover up. Plus the land required lots of prep and likewise setting up the machine, larger than the final structure, also required lots of prep. The actual deposition of material might not have required much in the way of a crew, but it still required technicians monitoring for proper deposition, the delivery and loading of a continuous supply of cement, and the back office business functions to run all of this. If one builds with concrete at-scale, either a large building or else a bunch of smaller buildings on a jobsite like a housing development, then one can leverage economy of scale. If the same building is being built several times, or variations on a set of buildings are being built at the same time, then a comparatively small crew can come in to place rebar, or can come in to build wooden forms for the pour, or can come in and perform the pour, going from building to building with large trucks rather than small print heads.
02:45 That is not true. You don't need any steel to bridge the cap, you use the bricks by forming a bridge over that opening. And it is stronger than steel, because it acts as a wedge and harder you push from above, more it wedges itself in the sides, that will hold the weight by pushing upwards. That is how basically most bridges and such are made, weight load balancing and shifting it to different directions from the stress point. The cement can withstand extremely high pressures, but it is very brittle to sheer force or pulling force. Why you can't use cement to hold something up by hanging it from cement, or put it on place where it is sheered off.
In Greece most construction starts with a conventional concrete structure for the columns, beams, and decks. After the concrete cures the masons come in and lay in the brick to fill in the open areas, this is followed by the contractor who will come in and cover the walls with stucco and smoothed out. Now window and door openings are measured one at a time and a custom order is placed with the manufacturer of these items. So if you have a difference of 1/2 inch or so there is no major issue when windows and doors are set in. A bed of silicone is laid in where the window unit sets in. Masonary screws such as the American Tapcon screws are used to secure the window unit to the walls. Side and top gaps are filled with an expanding foam (window and door frames come with a protective plastic that is peeled off after construction is complete) and when it has cured excess foam is trimmed away. Areas around the window are then caulked with a silicone based paintable mix. The downside to this process is that every window must be custom built to fit each opening. What has me a bit perplexed is why is no one on the outside of the home smoothing out the lines in the concrete with the same mix? Just like the "print head" there is equipment that will allow one to fill in the gaps, followed by someone smoothing out the surface. I would leave the corners rounded since thick layers of stucco could fall off of the corners over time. The fill mix should be the exact same formula that the concrete is made of. This prevents issues of dissimilar materials with different coefficients of expansion from tearing the fill mix from the concrete base material.
I'm 0:56 in and already, taking the 3D printed home from a unique structure with personality into something more like an ugly 21th centrury American home is such a stupid idea to me that it must be good idea to appeal to the masses.
It seems to me that 3-D printing houses has two main applications that circumvent some of the other problems: The first is creating architectural shapes that would be impossible to make any other way, like the example that was shown where the outside concrete was wavy and circular in the video. The second is building inexpensive housing quickly in areas that don’t already have the inventory infrastructure for traditional western housing. There are plenty of places in the world, most notably countries in Africa, where Woodstock housebuilding is not the standard, and there are even still people living in dirt huts. In places like that, being able to quickly build a step up level and housing would go along way to improving standard living. If one or two bring a 3-D concrete printing system there, you could build hundreds or possibly thousands of houses to a higher standard than his typical, more quickly and less expensive. Otherwise, 3-D housing printing designs would need to change in order to accommodate some of these other issues, but I think the other main opportunity for such systems would be for foundations and basements. Granted, the current system is pretty inexpensive and relatively official, however, if you were building a housing development with several hundred or even several thousand houses, having a system like this go from location to location to build all of the foundations might be cost-efficient and would certainly be fairly. The only issue would be how long does it take to move the machine from one location to the next.
the first problem, is that 3d printing houses, is not 3d printing houses. What is ambitiously called 3d printing houses is automated, formless and marginally reinforced concrete pouring.
A yearing the issues of 3d printed homes reminds my all of the reasons why I favor the brick laying robot arms as they make house that ate much more similar to people are used to with 90° angles & being as smooth as any brick wall
Just wanna say that the Henson razor is legitimately amazing. It’s the platonic razor. It literally cannot get better than this until they develop handheld electronic shavers that use lasers to burn the facial hair off your face. Those Henson razors are insanely sharp, and the way that the mechanism holds the blade is perfect and it really does give you an insanely clean shave. I will definitely say there is a slight learning curve. Unless you are used to using a single bladed razor like that, it can be a little awkward at first. But it is almost exactly the same technique that you would use for any kind of disposable razors, but you just have to hold it at a slightly different angle. So What I mean is that you will have to readjust your muscle memory on this one if you already have a really dialed in strategy. But once you use it a few times, then it becomes second nature. Also, the blades are stupidly cheap. I got like 100 blades for like, 10 bucks or something. Each side of blade usually gives me two shaves. I know it sounds stupid but yeh I can get four clean shaves that don’t hurt or fuck me up badly, out of each blade
The problem I see with concrete is cracking. I recently watched a show on PBS that tested the flexibility of an ancient Chinese wood building under various earthquake conditions. It was amazing to see how the thing flexed and danced around as it was shaken. Even under non earthquake conditions there is settling, wind pressures and temperature/humidity changes over time that will cause cracks and seepage in concrete. And patching concrete never seems to work well. I also think the exposed concrete looks unsightly since I don't like the African mud hut aesthetic. Cheaper is not always better.
Shockingly, the same was found in octagon blocks, when they were studied. They could dance in the earthquake, but returned to the same position. A square or rectangle block, does not do that. It's worse if you mortar it in place.
@@normbograham That is interesting. It seems we have for some reason become very wed to the square/rectangle for building structures. Maybe it is time to think outside of the box.
Nothing cheap about concrete construction, especially when you form both sides of a wall. It's labor intensive and OPC concrete is expensive, and then you have to frame a wall inside your structural concrete wall to have something to insulate anyway. If Blue Crete (above) works out, it will save a lot of labor and materials.
7:27 The solution for precision fit windows will be a milling robot that goes in after the print to use a diamond grinder to leave window openings far more stable and precise than possible by any other method.
I wonder if the print head couldn't also have a separate nozzle for expanding foam to use as a matrix structure for headers (to be knocked out later) and also to fill voids as insulation as it goes...
@@ryanjohnson3615 Pouring modern concrete is time sensitive, as it is reacting from the moment it's mixed. You stop the flow, and random parts of the apparatus will jam with concrete hardening inside the machine. Meanwhile, the already poured concrete will bind less with the eventual next layer the more time there's between them.
@@diametheuslambda Right. It has to start and stop fairly often anyway though. I'd think a 2 part foam nozzle could be routed right next to the concrete nozzle so it just switches to foam for two seconds as it passes a window or door.
Separate robot machine that comes in after rough window opening is printed and cured. It has different tools/nozzles/grinders etc. and it quickly forms a precise and specific window opening, perhaps even with custom ridges or flanges to accept a quick fit window designed as part of the whole system. Yes it's a second step, but it seems unlikely that any primary wall printer would ever be able to make anything but a rough window opening.
I worked maintenance for a 95 year old adobe brick style building. The bricks made the walls anywhere from 14-24 inches thick in places. Adding any new plumbing or electrical to the existing building requires tearing into the wall, or hanging conduit everywhere.
I really appreciate how the sponsor ad is at the end if your video and not in the middle... I actually watched it unlike most ads.. and you get a like 👍
Yeah. I imagine a broken pipe requiring an access hole be cut into the wall. It strikes me as an easy process to use cinder block or brick or even stucco to patch the hole.
The biggest problem in building housing or any construction is not really the contractors or the materials. It can be, but a well organized construction company can bypass most of those problems, especially if they build homes at scale. The biggest problem is inspections and bureaucracy. Here in Los Angeles, that problem is especially, because the city does not have enough inspectors to do the inspections in an efficient way, and processing plans etc. can be very slow as well. A new construction next to the office I work at Looked like it was completed about six months ago, but then nothing happened for six months. I don’t know for a fact, but with experience with other construction, I guarantee that the reason was that they were waiting for an approval for something, and the inspector had not been able to come by for at least a month, and then the paperwork wasn’t processed for several months as well. For 3-D printed houses, or for any housing, if cities are serious about dealing with a housing crisis, they need to put in the money to ensure that inspections can be done quickly and efficiently. This means hiring more people to both do the inspections,and be knowledgeable about the requirements to help builders avoid problems along the way.
I had a friend who worked as a computer geek for many years. But employers were looking for some kid who knew the latest programming languages. So my friend studied to become a concrete inspector. About the time he was qualified, 2008 happened. No building going on, so no inspection needed. He never worked as a concrete inspector, but did find a job as a baker with Vons supermarket. Since then we've had the pandemic, and related stuff happened. Partly explains the lack of inspectors.
@@EXROBOWIDOW I'm sure it does, but here in Los Angeles, we've had a problem with not having enough inspectors for several decades. It is not been a budgetary priority, and it really should be.
This is a really good rundown of the problems of 3D printed buildings. I don't believe we want or need a one-size-fits-all, vertically integrated architecture. There's already plenty of complaining that our built environment is soulless and while 3D printing can create some dynamic shapes, it's true mission is fast, cheap replication. I wish there was more focus on going back to arts and craft in our architecture. The human touch in our mass-produced world.
I suspect that this sort of thing is going to play a ever greater role in new construction simply due to pressures created by climate shift alone. With tornado Allley now reaching from Spokane to Nashville, with hurricane impact zones now occuring well beyond the gulf states jamming up New England, with wildfires now wiping entire towns off the map in an afternoon I think we'll see a vastly increasing demand for concrete construction & anything that can deliver it quickly & uniformly. If you wish to 'humanize' it' i'd suggest focusing on technical means of facing these concrete structures. There's almost nobody in that space currently and there will be an increasing market demand for it as time moves forward.
@@OregonOutdoorsChris Nothing in prototype testing ever is. It takes time and manufacturing capacity coming online to bring that price per unit down. Far as i'm aware every single one of these printers is basically a custom built stepped up version of a homebrew.
@@brianhirt5027 Being just vaguely related to the current 'cool' thing (consumer level plastic 3d printers) isn't solving a problem, and it has to actually solve a real problem, otherwise it has no hope of ever becoming cheaper, faster, or better.
@@brianhirt5027 and P.S. ICF construction ALREADY does all the same things as 3D printed construction, except better, faster, and cheaper... and it's still more expensive than lumber construction
Great video. One issue with 3D printing concrete which I’ve never heard addressed is reinforcement. When you look at a traditional concrete structure being poured, you’ll see lots of steel rebar. Concrete is great under compression, but not so great with tension. Very similar to brick, and why many buildings you see with brick today are a thin brick veneer over a more durable structure.
I like the idea of 3D printing, but I find prefabricated homes to be more interesting as a concept. I love how boxabl tried to package homes in a modular fashion. Of course, this replaces the role of the traditional architect, so it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I like the idea of being to just choose options and place things like you would in a videogame's housing system and being able to get it installed in a short time upon delivery.
I have built a bunch of RC/FC homes. There is a lot more very important complexity that these 3D printed buildings totally lack making them aweful. 1) no tensor material - steel 2) electrical conduits 3) waterline conduit 4) design shape limitations 5) finish 6) lack of thermal mass 7) lack of insulation 8) lack of a proper foundation 9) roof 10 ceilings 11) too specialized equipment
Yeah concrete with no reinforcing in it is garbage. Even that fibermesh stuff doesn't impress me. It stays together a little better. But nothing beats real steel.
unless you aren't following building code, my understanding is that municipalities would never approve a building without steel or reinforcement. Watch the multitude of videos out there to see how wrong or simply misinformed you are. I just did a building in California and not a single thing on your list was an issue. R value over 30, PSI 7200 on the cement, sheer wall and steel built to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. Maybe you just have more homework. 3D printing doesn't do the entire process but you still have to follow code as with any technology.
Your analysis of the sluggish and dull construction industry is spot on, when talking about the U.S. construction industry. Construction in the rest of the advanced nations is moving forward with agility.
One of my favorite building technologies, ICF (Insulating Concrete Forms) is basically lego that you can arrange however you want then fill with concrete, getting the structure and insulation in one go. As with other concrete structures changes (other than additions) to it are not as easy as with stick built, but in return you get an air impervious highly insulated and extremely durable structure that will run circles around stick in terms of energy efficiency. Plus how often do people modify the outer shape of their houses, anyway? I'm not sure what 3D printed buildings offer over ICF - perhaps not as much labor, and circular shapes are easier with less finishing?
ICF construction is typically done with crews of the same size but ICF does not really offer much more over traditional forming it cost more takes, longer to set up, more complex to brace. I have done both ill take symons forms over ICF any day
@@imchris5000 But then there's additional labor to remove the forms, adding insulation to the finished concrete on the outside, furring on the inside for drywall and mechanicals, etc. I can't imagine all that combined is still somehow cheaper to do than just doing ICF in one go.
@@imchris5000 There's no need to fur out ICF, drywall can be applied to it directly and mechanicals can be routed inside of it. The "studs" or in this case fastening points are also built in. And there's of course no need to add insulation since the forms are insulating. All of those would need to be added to a bare concrete wall
@@rafflesmaos it sounds good on paper but having installed it things dont go that simple. its cake work to frame walls compared to trying to dig in the foam also with regular concrete on the outside the concrete can be your finished surface
I think the biggest issue is what makes developers more money, whatever does that best is what developers would go for. If you go back 45 years to 190 years+ all construction was quicker and in most cases a lot quicker, so just because something is quicker doesn't mean it will take off. Look at pre fab, cheap, quick and much less profitable. We will get it if developers make more money, it's that simple. Even if it's a much worse product. Developers will claim it's regulations but putting on a harness takes a minute, a safety talk takes 20 mins. Yet the difference is not a day or week at most, it years even decades difference in length and amazingly the only thing that has gone up in that time is the amount of money they take in.
From an economic perspective, wouldn't most of these hurdles be solved by integrating 3D printing with prefabrication? With prefab, 3d printing could become much more modular and have more outside conditions controlled for to create a more consistent product. Even if there are other construction materials required, at least in a factory, it would be easier to integrate those materials with the 3d printing process. Also as a side note, I feel the biggest problem with housing affordability isn't the cost to produce the home itself, but rather, the inability for cities to up-zone areas that require denser housing. As always, cheers! Love your videos!
There's no magic bullet. My city has and continues to upzone but there's not much uptake. More missing middle and high density helps. For downtowns, no height limit seems intuitive but that can drive land speculation, effectively slowing down and increasing the cost of development, so there's a balance. Even if municipalities and developers work together to fire on all cylinders, there are still shortages of staff and building materials. There are other issues too. There are so many issues that have snowballed together.
Great video! I'm working with 3D concrete printing for about 4 years. Your research is on the spot! Really well-pointed problems. I can say that concrete doesn't relay only on rebar but also on dispersed reinforcement such as polypropylene fibers. Cartesian printers have some limitations but nonplanar printing is a thing ;)
In Minneapolis there were a number of mid century modern drive in banks built by Twin City Federal S&L. They experimented with rounded interior and exterior walls /corner in a variety of floor plans. The branch banks used different finish materials such as brick, tile, vertical wood panels to create rounded forms -which were very 1960s space age modern. The banks were quite striking. The slogan for TCF Bank was "Tuck a buck, a day away!" Originally the branch banks were round to mimic the bank's tree logo. As a young architect I worked on several of these. After going thru a number of "experiments"in different parts of the Twin Cities what we found the most flexible construction option was to do the curvy walls on the inside of the bank and then put a more rectilinear form on the outside to fit into limited lots. Perhaps some of the difficulties described in your video might be resolved by using a Le Corbusier approach from the 1960s and 1970s. This approach was quite fashionable.
Hey Stewart, we actually do put drywall on the outside of buildings. In that case it's fiberglass faced, usually on commercial and large residential buildings like apartments.
I've been involved with construction design for over 30 years now. New ideas pop up.. usually targeted at one aspect of the construction process- either being cheap to buy or way faster on site - while adding lots of other issues that add to the total cost. About half the cost of building a new house is labor. I like the idea of "3d printing" a house.. but this doesn't actually solve ANY problems, while creating MORE problems (added expenses). While you could design a home to the limitations of 3d printed concrete walls.. you could also design a new home to the limitations of prefabricated walls, prefabricated trusses, and/or Structural Insulated Panels. Those all allow for quickly getting a new house under roof with proper planning. The BIGGEST issue I see with the 3d printed walls shown in the video is they have no steel. They can't put rebar in place before the 3d print because they would be in the way of the print nozzle head. No steel in concrete (and layered to boot) = it's not very structural. You can't build a two story building with these walls only. It's basically glorified Brick Veneer. No idea why people are pushing it like some innovation. We already have efficient uses of material to make prefab systems for a new structure. That being said- in places where they already pour the walls with concrete due to moisture/termite issues, I could see this having SOME benefits but it's still iffy. But they need to figure out the steel aspect.. I would love to see a structure built with these walls on a seismic test platform. Looks like the layers would just crumble.
The prefab mass timber fad is plagued with issues. It is not equivalent to ancient methods of building with old growth timber. Your buildings are being held together with glue and loose fibers. Check out WASP.
@catface101 I'm not hating on people who want to live in that kind of housing, it's just not for me, city living just isn't my style, and I'm saying people should have a choice. One thing I do agree with urbanists on is that American zoning laws are stupid and need to change and I do appreciate walkability and bike-ability, I simply don't like when people try to overcorrect in the direction that assumes that people ought to be pressured into a condition they don't want, that's tyranny.
I would really question the strength of these things in major storms or earthquakes. Concrete is strong in compression, but far less in extension and I am not seeing rebar or fiberglass aggregate to try and re-enforce it. Those layers are going to be weaknesses too and there are hundreds of them. Also it containing flyaash seems bad because that stuff is full of things that arent good for you.
its not a 3d printed home, its a 3d printed wall. still need floors, roofs, electrical, plumbing, windows, doors, paint etc and a million other things. walls are usually the quickest and easiest part of building
This was what I was wondering when he was talking about bricks. Seems like using high volume pre-fabricated parts (i.e. bricks) is going to be a better alignment with robots rather than concrete printing.
Isn't rebar used to ensure structural integrity when using concrete? How is that achieved in 3D printed structures? How is this better than just creating forms/molds and just dumping concrete into it?
Small steel "staples" are a different kind of aggregate in concrete that provides more tensile strength than rock aggregate. There are also plastic fibres but they are more used to minimize surface cracking as the concrete cures.
I can't comment on the total structural integrity of the wall, but rebar rods are placed orthogonally to the interior and exterior walls every 50cm or so every few layers. The space between the walls is often filled with a zig-zag of concrete too, similar to cardboard construction. The roofs are also attached with tie rods that span through the wall to screws formed into the foundation, providing some vertical compression. It is reinforced, but I am not certain what structural effect these have, especially compared to traditional reinforcement.
I think we keep forgetting how much carbon is emitted in the process of making and curing concrete, whereas wooden houses essentially sequester carbon.
"...fly ash admixture, or ash produced by the burning for pulverized coal..." in other words the byproduct of coal power plants. Which are all being shut down due to environmental rules. They are already looking at opening up old coal ash pits to reclaim what was buried as a waste byproduct of coal 50+ years ago as the concrete industry is doing a pretty good job of consuming the current output of plants. And like you say, the cement powder with is mostly kiln-dried lime and silica. There's a time and place for concrete IMHO, mostly along the outside where water and insect intrusion are a real risk. I'm all for a hard shell and a woody interior.
I mean, 3d printing isnt for prototypes, 10 years ago maybe, but its 100% used for finished products now. and its a finished thing. building need improvments but pouring concrete which kills the planet, or finding a way to do it on site. no brainer
The planet is an inanimate object so it cannot be killed. It may enter a state that doesn't suit you. But that's not going to adversely impact it. This planet has already been hit by another planet sized object and that didn't kill it. Busted it up some. That's where the Moon came from. It's the leftovers of that collision.
1:49 Sorry, *what* forays has musk made into construction? Did you use one of those musk fanboy channels as a source? Those guys just make shit up to get clicks.
I think he made some modern sci fi trailer houses for 10k ir something, not sure if they ever went into production like most of his tabloid title projects
How about the entire town called Utopia he is building in Texas? Would that count? Found that in about 3 seconds with a search engine. Probably took less time than your comment.😂
We should also clarify. This is not the first 3D printed house. The first one was built in 1939 by William Urschel and they even got a patent in 1941 for the concept. They just didn't call it 3D printing.
To me, it seems to be a technology in search of a use. It's not that quick, it's not that flexible, the equipment is expensive and the results are questionable in terms of quality. Why wouldn't you just use prefabrication?
i see your art and videos used links, but you need to cite your sources. dont "im a professor" that does not grant you special privilege's in my eyes. your profession would incentivize you to speak ill of 3d printed houses because 3d printed houses would change your job drastically. we see what is going on here.
I've worked mainly on large Reinforced concrete structures. The 3d printing of buildings are.Focusing on the easy problems the shell of the building . What makes a building expensive is everything else, foundations, drainage, ground floor slab, heating, wiring, plumbing, painting, fixtures and fittings, insulation, tiling, etc etc. Bathrooms toilets etc are expensive. 3d printing can only do so much without thinking about the home in totality. In the commercial space it's common to have toilets prefabed and droped onto the slab at each level, this saves a significant amount on cost and time.
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I've worked closely with a leading concrete 3D printing company for several years now, so I hope my insight into the actual construction process provides some perspective.
First, one clarification: There is no gravel aggregate in 3D printing concrete. It is only sand.
You're right that the vertical integration is very strong in this industry, but there is already internal pressure to break that up. I expect in 10 years or so, you'll see more open-access tools available to architects and construction companies alike. I can't be too specific and honor my non-disclosure agreements, but there is recognition that the ability for architects to play with shape is very limited for now, which also limits the primary advantage of concrete 3D printing over other methods: complex shapes cost the same as simple ones. The primary reasons IMO for the vertical integration is 1) that there has been a high learning curve for the industry and 2) the business case relies on minimizing labor costs and the strategies for dealing with that are still being prototyped. Normally trivial things like laying foundations, running plumbing, tying roof timbers into the frame, and lintels as you mentioned, are difficult for concrete 3D printed construction. It's only in the last year or so that acceptable, repeatable solutions have been identified for most of these and are finding their way into standard design practices. But even then, there are still maybe 5 or 10 years more of on-the-ground construction needed to establish best practice. It's not too different from the way building materials and building science radically changed in the 1980's, leading to a decade of extremely poorly built houses prone to water damage and short lifespans. It wasn't until maybe 20 years after that best practices for high-quality construction had been standardized.
I would push back on the lack of repairability, though. This has always been an issue with concrete construction, and it's likely to become increasingly common for plaster or stucco finishes to be applied to internal walls, allowing for intrusive renovations to be reintegrated. Structural stability is not likely to be an issue since all walls have reinforcement every half meter anyway and often exceed building strength standards by an order of magnitude. Further, virtually all concrete 3D printing for now is slab-on-grade construction, which already has the same repairability issues you mention but is already widely adopted and has best practices for dealing with things like electrical and plumbing repair. I would also point out that the timber frame construction that we love so much is largely an anomaly unique to the U.S. where wood is abundant and cheap. Concrete 3D printed homes have the (so far unrealized) potential of being many decades or centuries more durable than frame buildings, which will change the design requirements that often contribute to design choices that later need renovations and repairs.
I would also push back on the criticism of how windows and doors are seated in the concrete homes. I don't doubt that many early concrete 3D printed homes were sealed with silicone only, but 1) the gap between windows and walls is already standard in frame construction and addressed with shims, spray foam, and trim and 2) the 3D printing companies have already started to adopt the same building techniques used by frame construction.
Echoing much of what you said, IMO concrete 3D printing has a high potential for unique design that won't be unlocked until architects are given freer access to the tools and pre-fab construction is a necessary companion to this industry, but there is still a lot of building science that is being worked out. There are already some serious advantges, such as all walls having a native R40 insulation rating, but these will be tempered by the inherent limitations. I don't expect to see a rapid adoption of 3D printed construction for another 5 or 10 years and for the U.S. market share to cap around 20% and primarily remain in the residential and light commercial construction spaces. I also think that the current bare-wall aesthetic will fall out of favor out in that timeframe since it will prove difficult to clean. I also expect that environmental costs will remain high as long as cement production relies on fossil fuels and concrete aggregate relies on mined sand. I also expect that a future use case for heavy construction is using 3D printing to create forms for much thicker concrete constructions, particularly for foundations, buttresses, and pillars, such as you see in airport construction.
Anyway, thanks for the video, and all the best!
This was a great comment, addressing a lot of the things I also thought about. Thanks for the insight!
Excellent information, thanks for taking the time to comment.
Thanks!
Yup. Those internal 3D printed surfaces look like they're begging for some of that aerogel lime plaster or plain old dot and dab drylining. I've seen people build shotcrete boat hulls upside down and then roll them over. They use a stainless mesh, like rebar in regular concrete, then seal it with paint. I've also seen robots tying rebar together on job sites. Will we see these two robots working in tandem to, first, tie a steel frame together then, second, fill it with concrete? A third robot to do the lime plaster?
Yes - To all of this. Thanks for taking the time to offer this info.
You know what a bad idea is? A bad idea is pouring concrete without any reinforcing. Now that's a bad idea! Even some chicken wire in the mix makes concrete so much stronger. Take it from a guy that's jackhammered up more than his fair share of concrete. You want steel reinforcing in your concrete. That fibermesh is horse crap. Know what I'm not seeing in these printed houses? Reinforcing.
So true!
Lol, I am a seismologist and was thinking the same thing.
Honestly, some kind of resin/plastic 3D printed material would probably work since it's flexible, though I don't know about the longevity. Or maybe figure out how to 3D print what are essentially cinder.blocks (with open spaces), and then maybe you can add rebar down the center and pour in a slurry at the end to reinforce it?
There are also metal 3D printers... Could have multiple printer heads laying interleaving layers of concrete and metal (I assume actually making such a system would be practically complex).
Honestly, mass produced prefab "modules" probably makes more sense. Attach modules together as the "skeleton" of the house, and then the facade can be whatever you want to customize its appearance.
I assume there are construction professionals (not me) that are thinking about these sorts of things.
Tell the Romans that , there stuff is still around . No steel in centuries old structures . Steel guarantees a limited structural life span. Reenforced concrete 100 years max.
Current concrete and ancient concrete, completely different things. Besides, the walls of the structures from the Roman era are feet thick, not a few inches.
@@ytSuns26 the Romans were working on a different timetable than we do today. Change is more rapid now. It is pointless to build something that'll outlast its usefulness. There's very little from 100 years ago that we want now. 100 years from now they won't want what we have today either. That's because they'll be doing different things different ways.
Hooray for automating the least complicated, least expensive, most reliable part of the construction process! You did it, Tech Bros!
@@rok1475 twas ever thus. Supply chain issues cause WAY more problems in the cost and speed of construction than masons and framers.
There is much more nuance to the cost structure, and the company I work with consistently costs much less per square foot than frame construction. The companies in this space are well aware of the costs, and while the marketing focuses on the walls, the actual business case lies in the interfaces between the walls and everything else and automating as much of that as possible. That said, though, cheap labor eliminates the market advantage, limiting most concrete 3D printing to high-cost-of-living areas for now.
People are trying to solve the housing crisis. What housing crisis i hear you say? Give it 5 short years and you will see, baring an exponential uptick in home building. Given the current purchusing power of a dollar, the hopes of buying homes for future inhabitents of the world, who are not rich aka the 99 percent, is dismal. A massive increase in production ability would then drive down cost. This is how it works tech drives down cost, without that were boned
@@legionjames1822 I know what the housing crisis is. I'm an architect. The housing crisis is caused by economic and social forces, and it won't be solved by building concrete walls slightly faster.
@@henryglennon3864 you aint seen nothing yet. Besides 3d printing a home requires a top down systemic approach of the ENTIRE home building process ahead of time. Its not a practice in wall building, thats a nice pigeon hole tho if thats what anyone is looking for. The dollar is devaluing by 7 percent year over year. All asset values are through the roof. Homes are the primary asset in anyones portfolio of assets. Therefore the values will continue to baloon, pricing LOTS of people out of home buying. The future needs future soltutions.
The only part that is being automated with 3d printing is essentially the framing, which is already the quickest and easiest part of construction. You still have to do all of the finishing (plumbing, electrical, cabinets, windows, doors, painting, flooring, roofing, etc), which is the slower and more expensive part.
There is also a lot of risk regarding resale value.
Also, all those other trades become much more expensive in this type of building, as running electrical and plumbing through hollow walls is obviously much simpler.
@@NoTroubleMikeG it’s no different than Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF)in that regard.
@@unlisted5152yes it is. ICF are just a form for a conventional foundation that stays in place. A conventional frame is placed upon them
Plumbing and wiring a concrete wall seems vastly more difficult. Think of all the removal of material you would need to do for junction and switch boxes. Times that by 2 for pipes. The only time I see saved is not having to sheetrock, or slap on vinyl siding. I shudder at the idea of cutting baseboard for these things too. Nothing is straight and square. You would need half a truckload of caulk.
While I find 3d printed houses fascinating, it's kind of annoying to see it billed as a way to fight the affordability crisis as if the cause is the cost of construction, rather than an economic issue. The price of housing is artificially inflated by external economic pressures, such as houses not being listed to drive up the price of other houses due to a perceived lack of availability
I don't know of anyone who wants to sell their house, refusing to list it so as to improve prices in the neighborhood.
Worse than that. Houses are priced by proxy, we have real estate companies arbitrarily posting houses 115% higher than their curb value simply because the one down the street is charging 115% the curb value and they do it with a smile knowing they will get the sale eventually as housing prices increase.
Zoning laws is the main issue. Not enough dense housing in places people want to live. Supply and demand basically. NIMBY don't want it and companies don't want it because it will bring values down. Until the majority agrees that housing is a right and not focused on it as a wealth building tool housing will stay expensive
Housing keeps going up in price, because local governments keep increasing the assessment values in order to collect more property tax money. When people sell their houses, they expect to get at least their houses' assessment values. New construction is priced in accordance with the market value of existing houses, if not more. Everyone is trying to get the most money they can. Greed.
100%
I do not understand 3D printing houses. Wouldn’t pre-fab construction be better looking, more efficient and environmental?
I think it would be, with enough of parts/components it would be like Lego, instead of building brick by brick it would be wall by wall.
I think pre-fab have bad reputation because it is cheap
This is technically technology for other places like space. Not really for the local people on earth.
Prefabs have a connotation of being cheaply built. I recall you can't even get the same kind of financing.
@woopeeallan gonna ship all that water and cement to Mars huh?
i mean ngl if you want looks you can just slap stucco or plaster right over the exterior/interior of this i don't see anything stopping you from doing so its obviously just cheaper, which is probably their whole selling point in not doing so as its not required to have a functional home
I have always had a problem with the hype around 3d printed structures, especially residential structures, especially in the US. For a 3d printed house you still need a poured foundation, you still need interior finishing, you still need a roof, you still need MEP, the list goes on and on. You still need to do the rest of the house. What does 3d printing automate away? the framing and sheathing - because to be clear - the vast majority of houses are wood framed, and will continue to be. Now, what is the absolute fastest part of building a wood framed house? the framing and sheathing. 3d printing replaces the fast, easy, low skill part of home construction with something marginally faster if at all, extremely complicated, unforgiving, and requiring highly skilled workers if not engineers on site. For home construction, 3d printing is *silly*
It replaces high skilled and low skilled jobs. It depends on the design. Automation at any degree becomes useful when applied right. What does AI replace currently? Customer service on websites sometimes considered a low skill low pay job. Great well that can be allocated to other areas now, and that employee can focus on other tasks instead. Recently completed a 3D printed home in California. A duplex. We could print the roof but we didn't in this particular job. Doing the MEP was easy, foundation can be printed and interior finishing can be done in a day. Now at scale it really starts to work as the printer can finish a couple houses a week, then the contractors can come and do the MEPs all in a row. There are definitely some kinks to work out in the process and approval but the US is one of the few places who still do wood frame. Its largely about material cost and understanding. Go to AUS and see everything still being done in Brick.. Also 3D printing isn't only concrete. More and more materials pop up all the time. From clay, adobe, hemp to stone. It is also about customization, freedom of form and design.
That's probably because the technology is not meant for consumers but to lure investor money.
Incorrect. 3D printing has capabilities that stickbuilts dont. Especially in areas particularly prone to hurricane & tornados. If you doubt the market potential or usecase applicability just take a gander at what's still standing after a hurricane sweeps through. Or heck, in any given centenial flood plain construction put to the test. Stickbuilts can't just be dried off and refurnished. Concrete structures can be, as long as the aggregate substrate wasn't washed from underneath it With climate shift exaggerating those risks AND vastly expanding their potentially area of impact I think you'll quickly note that concrete printing a house makes more sense than rebuilding a stickframe.
@@brianhirt5027 Don't underestimate the role of rebar in those things that stand up to hurricanes. Reinforced concrete is impressively strong. A few ton of splooged grout will not compare favorably.
@@brianhirt5027 The structures you speak of are not printed, they are reinforced and poured in place. Cartesian motion systems used by these house scale 3d printers, and even corexy for that matter, cant cope with the rebar that did all the work. remember that concrete has virtually no strength in tension or torsion, which is what earthquake and hurricane resistant structures are designed to withstand. its the rebar doing all the work, and the motion systems simply do not allow for those to be in place. It is also telling that the precautions in traditional wood construction against earthquake and high winds are to add steel reinforcing, and not to fill the walls with concrete.
The biggest problem with 3d printing homes is that its a gimmick thats being served as a solution to a problem. Problem being lack of affordable housing, solution being 3d printing making houses cheaper to produce.... but the problem with housing is not really cost of brick and mortar itswlf but the land. So what that you can get cheap house, you aint gonna be building it in a local lidl parking lot.
Problem is bigger and more nefarious than that even…if their tech reduces the cost to build a house by $100K, the construction company is going to pocket $100K. Total consumer savings? Zero dollars.
Technology doesn’t save US anything anymore. It’s just profit. Nuclear fusion will be a windfall for energy companies, with us paying the same prices we do burning coal.
I live in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. I'm a 77 year old electrician. I was an electrical contractor for most of the years since I finished my apprenticeship. Most buildings here are double brick with a concrete slab, timber roof with generally concrete tiles on top of the roof timbers. These are installed when needed. The Electricians put the TPS sheath wires into the walls & ceilings. The plumbers put the water pipes in & Gas pipes in. Then the gutters & downpipes are installed. First the cement is troweled on and the plaster is troweled on when needed to the inside brick walls. Gyprock ceiling panels on the bottom of the roof timbers are installed. Internal cupboards, bath, Shower recess and toilets are installed. then it has the floor & wall tiles installed and at the correct times the painters do their painting. Then there is a hand over process. After six months or so an inspection is done & items that the owners who have been living in the house find problems are fixed. This works very well but it can take a long time. The building costs are kept low because the builder has contractors doing their work in reputation so it's completely different to employing wage people. The labour cost are very low. The house may take quite a while to build but you all would be amazed what you get for your money. Let's say somebody wants a house designed by an architect and they then use the architect to build the house. The costs don't compare with the standard builders houses from display plans. Maybe they have to change the way 3D printing works when wanting to include it in house construction to compete with the price here.
In 1968 the houses were double brick with timber floors. In that year an Italian builder built a double brick home with a concrete floor. All of a sudden within say a month or two all houses (Except for the government, Homes West houses) seem to all change to building houses with concrete floors. Houses were built then without using any electricity. Not even a generator. One day it will obviously change to a 3D built house here in Perth, Western Australia I suppose.
We already have quick and reliable building process, it is called "prefabricated elements"
I worked for a masonry contractor that was pretty quick and reliable. They'd lay a guy off every day just to keep the rest of the crew on their toes. That's how they kept up the pace. If you wanted to work then you'd better work fast.
@@1pcfred thats fucked up, but money is what matters right?☺️
@@exchangAscribe construction is a money racket. Nothing gets done for nothing.
How are you going to prefabricate a brick wall that interleaves with every other wall? Or transport a prefabricated section made of brick?
@@1pcfred That sounds like a company culture issue instead of a manufacturing process issue.
In Japan you buy a house from a book , truck come at 8 am in the morning at 5 PM you move-in it's totally finished , with spectacular finish and details
You missed a bigger issue, building codes and inspectors. Being one of the earlier 3D concrete printer developers our biggest issue was the building inspectors here in the US. Good video.
Resistance to change.
It works for China not for everyone
How does one get into the business of industrial 3d printing like this?
@@Kaz-qz2oq There is a ton of upfront costs, and most 'printers' are one-ofs custom jobs. There's no commercial manufacturer of the 'printers' yet i'm aware of.
Protection racket
The most expensive part of a house is not the material cost of a house but the land that it sits on. A burnt out abandoned house in California was sold for $1 million.
This is Australia.
Japan is similar. The house has no value
On how many acres and where? Land is cheap if you don't need a lot or don;t need to be close to a city. It's $200k for a 160 acre plot 1 hour from Sacramento, right now.
@@filonin2 if you calculate the cost of throwing utilities, and the increased freight of one extra hour drive... you will quickly understand that "cheap" land means "hidden costs".
The cost of the land depends on where it is. In places with high demand, the cost of the lot could be the most expensive part. For example, a $1 million dollar house in southern California could really be just a $200,000 house on an $800,000 lot. Build that same house out in the middle of nowhere and the lot may only be $20,000, but then you may need to drive an hour to get to a job or decent store. Also, you will probably have to drill a well and put in a septic system.
2:33 My man, I invite you to come to this wonderful place called Europe, where we've been building 50m+ high structures with small blocks of stone and no lintels for more than two thousand years.
great point! I immediately thought about curved arches and keystones...doesn't need to be square
It's actually funny how they s Americans can be baffled by trivial stuff like concrete houses.
Stone isnt like concrete.
Yes but we didn't simply stack them up that high. The point is not that arches don't exist, but that you cannot build an arch without a support structure. Small scale plastic 3D printing just prints those supports alongside the model and the user has to break them off at the end. But that's not really a great solution for printing slowly drying concrete.
@@alfonshasel1995 We have many brick houses and a few stone bridges here but they are not commonly built today. I bet most americans have seen a brick arch in a window or door of an older house. This guy is just an idiot.
As a residential contractor and past commercial construction worker... this is a horrible idea. Imagine doing repairs or getting a hold of the builder to fix an issue
I hope people are ready to pay Electricians extra for running electrical through this new type of Rough In.
I don't know about the who country, but put here the permiting, zoning, and land costs are what's making housing unafordable. Once you got the land and permission to build, the rest is relitivly cheap and straightforward.
2:42 You can, it's called flat arch. A somewhat forgotten technique that was very common in 19th and early 20th century. It works for spans that are 4 feet or less but it's still the majority of windows and doorways. Or you can, you know, span everything with a segmental arch like we had been doing for the past 2000 years.
I wouldn't be sure you can print a flat arch out of concrete. This process creates a homogeneous structural member. The premise of the masonry arch is that load is directed in compression from masonry unit to masonry unit. I'm not sure the internal load would be distributed the same way in a printed concrete wall.
@@henryglennon3864 I was talking about bricks, he said you cannot span an opening with bricks without a lintel.
A quick search suggests we've been doing brick archways for at least 3400 years. But I always think of Moorish architecture for brick archways
@@kacperwoch4368 fair enough. That said, in America, code might prevent it. Which is stupid, but American building codes really do not like unreinforced masonry. For example, I'm not too sure how the printed walls would be reviewed, unless they have a special variance.
Yes, get ready for a massive reemergence of arches in architecture. I'm here for it.
Unreinforced concrete is hell for seismic. This would never be approved in places like california, where mass production of housing is most needed.
Also problematic on sites with expansive clay soils. Seasonal swelling and shrinkage of clay soils account for a lot of structural damage.
It's internally reinforced, I think. If it's a biggie sized version of my home 3D printer there's ways to 'reinforce' your builds by choosing certain internal geometries depending on the intended usecase application.
If rebar could be 3D printed into the concrete that might possibly work.
@@jackhydrazine1376 Yup. There's one inflil type called gynoid in particular would make the final superstructure several times more solid than a brick & mortar. It's akin to solid body chassis in car construction. Since it's all cast together there's no 'joints' for groundshock to vertically sheer. The whole houseframe jiggles as one contiguous solid.
No problem adding steel. Adds to the labor and material costs a bit.
My sister and brother-in-law recently moved into a 3D printed home. I envy them. The walls are thick, not just the exterior walls. It’s very resistant to exterior noise. It’s similar to living in the basement, always nice and cool and quiet. Very energy efficient too. They love it. And it looks aesthetically like any other house.
Isn't that the same as for any stone-like building. I.e. the vast majority of buildings in Belgium are brick ones. In regions with more rock, stone walls are more popular, and today pre-fabricated concrete walls are also used to make houses.
These prefab walls are what comes closest to the mass production of other industries. There are a number of standard wall shapes, often including cavities for pipes or multi-layered with insulation. These walls are then brought to the buildsite and bolted together.
Yeah just like any other cement bricks in many parts of the world
@@Srt3D01-db-01 I lived in a cement block house and the 3D printed house is definitely different. First of all cement block houses normally have drywall. Not a 3D printed house, all the walls are cement. Thick cement. There is no doubt when you walk into the house that it is different from any other house.
Lies
@@DurzoBlunts 😂
The problem I have with 3D printing a house is that it 3D prints literally the cheapest part of the house - walls. So I doubt there's much in savings done. Plumbing, electricity, roof, heating/cooling, windows/doors, interior finish are all way more expensive that the walls so I don't see how they are claiming any benefit.
I used to work as an engineer for a major 3D printing construction company and this analysis is quite accurate. 3D printed construction is a nail looking for a hammer and will never be able to reduce cost or build time of single family homes.
The printed structural elements of a home only equate to ~20% of the total cost of house so in order to reduce the cost of a house by 10% printing will need to be able to halve the cost of stick framing which is impossible.
And not to mention the gigantic CO2 footprint that is associated with the production of cement.
CarbonX
Wright's Law
Used to be that gypsum drywall was a hammer looking for a nail, too. It too was spendy, initially. It took a while for folks to shift from plaster walls to gypsum drywall. Other than in restoration projects I challenge you to find plastering it in any sort of modern construction project use today, though.
Perhaps you should be a bit more cautious about waiving around that 'never' flag so hard.
Stick framing is just about the worst way to build a house we have invented. Timber framing is orders of magnitude superior, if building in wood. Both in strength and longevity.
Secondly, nobody cares about how long it takes, within reason. What matters is price/performance. And in hot climates, this method will work well, given the thermal mass of the walls.
@@timothyblazer1749 I think concrete printers do have a significant edge in certain climates, most especially in areas prone to natural disasters. If a printer laid superstructure & a manufactured home builder supplied veneers & facades to hang on that superstructure substrate the resultingbuilt-to-last power combo could literally rebuild entire towns wrecked in natural disasters with months. As it stands it can ebe upwards of five to seven YEARS for local recovery.That's only likely to get worse with hardly any youngsters entering the trades anymore.
All those groves to collect dust on interior and since it’s a rough texture, cleaning would be a nightmare
That's what I was thinking about, plus spiders would love nesting.
Dust is bad, grease from cooking would be worse.
it would be simple to plaster it with structolite and veneer plaster to look like a traditional wall and stucco on the outside
Metal studs could be screwed directly to the interior and exterior walls, and finished conventionally with drywall board, siding, and wood in much the way concrete or block buildings are finished now
Doesn't stucco have the same problem?
We could make a bunch of these parts like walls in factories but we made it illegal to put modular homes in 90% of America
Regulatory capture is the bane of the American economy.
It’s the reason why healthcare is so expensive. Why government spends so much money for so little output. Why so many industries are monopolized WTH inferior versions..
@@astronemir oh I've never heard the word regulatory capture before
Modular homes are legal everywhere. Modular isn't manufactured.
The current age of the United States is older than the median lifespan of human empires by some estimates. This country is on borrowed time, and it shows.
The shipping costs of the built parts are what kills this idea & have you SEEN how modular homes are built ?? I have worked on many and they are not built well just built fast.
This is what's described as ivory tower thinking. Most college graduates and engineers have no hand-on field experience. Talk to me when you build your own house.
Right? bro is writing fanfiction about how buildings work
I love when the 3d printing homes topic comes up on my feed. The batshit comments are always entertaining😂
HGTV has turned every moron in the country into a professional builder😂
It’s like the “architect” in the comments above. Dude thinks clicking a mouse is in a way synonymous of running a build crew and doing the work.
So, in colder countries like Canada, where I live, the one huge thing you want to avoid is having a construction material bridge the space between the exterior and the interior. This results in dramatic heat loss through a phenomenon called thermal bridging. By creating continuous webs, you are encouraging heat to escape. Insulation in the remaining cells doesn't overcome this difficulty. There needs to be an impermeable membrane - and preferably, an air space between the exterior and interior construction. So, like many innovations, this is an idea that will work great in warmer countries, but not that great when it gets down to -30C on a regular basis for 4 or 5 months of the year.
It does not take a couple of days to 3d print a home. It takes several weeks for most companies. I believe icon recently got down to a week but all other companies are much longer. Maybe print time, but there is a lot of downtime. They have to let the layers dry.
A couple of days is just a marketing thing at the moment.
Meanwhile a regular forming crew takes a day and a half
Depends on the mix you are using and the experience. We can do it in a few days. Just depends on the model and drying time of the materials. 750 sq ft home in 2-3 days is easy once you have the experience.
Concrete doesn't dry; it cures. In warm climates you often need to spray concrete with water to keep it from drying while it cures.
@user-nu1wp4pw9o sure cures - seems you knew what i meant, I doubt clarification was necessary. In any case, it needs to get to a certain amount of strength before they can add addional layers.
Also, walls printing is only 20% of house building. And other elements created using classic technologies.
Imagine waiting and waiting for your dream house to be built, and you end up with a big rendering error intead
it happens with traditional concrete forms too if things are not braced correctly. its called a blow out I worked a job building the floor forms for a 15 story building and we had 2 major blow outs. having the forms shift and then 20+ truckloads of concrete start pouring through a hole makes a huge mess into a place that is typically very tight with shoring for the pour. it was always all hands on deck shoveling the wet concrete into buckets and passing them down a man line till it can get to a forklift.
or spaghetti house
Low ink warning !
3d print an entire atual red ERROR building like from source engine
If that happens then the construction company will just redo it. Otherwise legal fees await.
I love the concept and don't dislike the texture of the walls, my concerns would be settling causing cracking and moisture control.
We usually finish with stucco, and everything is sealed so no moisture issues.
@@LeeGaudi-vb9ev The buildings settling would be a bigger issue. Concrete isnt very flexible.
The other factor to consider is that the layers of concrete naturally form a series of bulges and indents up the wall. Those indents would collect dust on the inside and be very hard to clean compared to smooth drywall or mostly smooth vinyl siding.
The ongoing maintenance would suck
I had briefly a 20% stake in a 3D house printing company before I decided it was not viable. The construction times are not any faster than brick when everything is taken into account. The onsite risks of vandalism are higher (the equipment is very expensive, not to mention the building very fragile before it sets properly). The transportation, storage, manpower are all equivalent or far more to 3D print.
The niche market is not project housing, but rather upper end architecture, public buildings (libraries, schools, etc). The real breakthrough will be when it is easily integrated with traditional methods. Its biggest advantage is the ability to create complex curves which would be near impossible with traditional methods.
If someone can create a far smaller setup, without the risks of vandalism and theft, or otherwise have it on secured sites, where the creativity advantages can be integrated, then it will have found its niche.
“Forever haunted by a memorial of this imperfection”. Couldnt have said it better. And thats what makes 3d concrete printing so frustrating. Its dynamic, you cant be always monitoring the quality of the print. Especially when youre printing in an outdoor or open space, every little change in the environment affects the print quality. And whatever goes into the tube may seem okay initially, but watch it get extruded in absolute mess. Theres so many variables that it makes this type of construction causes more unique problems than traditional building methods. Im not sure if 3d concrete printing is the future, but i feel like automation of what humans are doing on site, would be the future.
You'd think putting something up to control more of the elements would be common to address that. Like a plastic greenhouse type thing
From fairly limited experience (being involved in building five concrete brick houses/ cottages), one thing that has never made sense to me about 3D printed buildings is that in terms of cost and construction time, the walls and roof aren't such a big deal. What costs the money (and time) is the finishes and fittings, which don't seem to feature in the design software. Maybe this is just so for some places, and in others, the cost of the walls is the limiting factor. (Else, if you build your cheap walls big, you just have to spend more on expensive fittings that the walls are made to protect.)
Also, the little crevices inside are not going to make for nice walls. You still need to plaster those (or cover them with drywall). On the outside, all they're going to do is provide a nice substrate for mosses and lichens - which could be great if they weren't quite likely structural hazards, long term).
Also they appear to be building single-family homes. R1 zoning is what keeps housing costs high.
I think it's just the first step to fully automated custom houses. First create a system for the foundation and walls. then for the roof. Then use boston dynamic robots for the finish work. One day you will go to a website, or probably just talk to your AI, and design your house. Maybe a week later you would walk in and the robots already moved all of your stuff in and stocked the fridge.
There are so many issues with that, it just makes no sense.
Just the equipment. And transportation.
Who will be fixing it?
What if concrete is not perfect...
And you need to build foundation not only for the house, but for the machine too.
Can't correct any mistakes...
Btw,
Nobody is building the brick houses.
And 4 guys can build a house faster. All you need is a foundation, frame, & drywall.
And it will be like 100 times cheaper.
*
We have been building houses for thousands of years.
There is no reason to make something more complicated that it needs to.
When my family’s house was being built, 2 things took the majority of the time. 1: the foundation 2: interior
The frame took a month with a crew of 3 guys working 3 days a week.
A big issue is that current methods don't allow dense housing. You couldn't easily (to my knowledge) print a row of terrace houses unless you used a gigantic gantry a whole street long to print all of them at once. The concurrency of modular construction means you can lay bricks for a second house while the first is being fitted and decorated. Currently, most 3D printed housing aims to just be slightly cheaper versions of the same expensive suburban single-family developments, which will not fix a housing crisis.
I am therefore surprised that construction 3D printing isn't aimed more towards prefab. People often complain about not wanting to live in cookie-cutter homes lacking character and uniqueness. 3D printing sounds good for that. You could talk to an architect about a custom design for one part of the house or some finishing touches that are printed on/off-site, cured, and then assembled.
1) dense housing is definitely an issue, but most gantries also are easily retrofitted to build an entire row. This construction method would allow the printer to make maybe 4 houses at once, put a gap, and then start on the next cluster as the first cluster is being finished.
2) I disagree that construction 3D printing is good for prefab. A concrete 3D printer will never have the same economies of scale as a well designed set of molds. It's far too slow and sloppy by comparison. Rather, I expect pre-fab to be a symbiotic industry to concrete 3D printing.
Building vertically becomes challenging and expensive with traditional methods, but not for a printer. Home and apartments could be printed with 4 floors/homes allowing for dense affordable housing.
@@hellothere6627 This is a good point, but there's currently a height limit on 3D printed buildings, because they don't use rebar or reinforcing frames.
That's probably a fixable issue, but currently the tallest 3D printed apartment building has 5 floors (by WinSun in Suzhou), was considered complex and expensive to pull off, and has some longevity concerns. And even then, they prefabricated the parts offsite and shipped them for construction.
That's why nearly all the 3d-print-in-place buildings in this video are single-storey or single+loft.
We could also live in pods, eat bugs and be hooked up to the metaverse 24/7. You ideas are inhumane.
Yeah, I rather just live far away with space than breathing my neighbors breath.
Why can't the printing head apparatus be fitted with something like a pari of vertical trowels, one on either side of the wall, to smooth the layered appearance a little? It seems like it would lead to a more pleasing appearance and also make it easier to do whatever decorative touches you might want later, which would be better suited to non-lumpy walls.
to be honest not only that, but also portaying it as a major issue while completely ignoring the fact plaster (not only drywall) is routinely used in the standard construction shows the negative bias. There's no one stopping the architect from covering the facade with "something" to make it look less alien.
3d printing a building only sounds like a good idea for people who don't have any experience building, repairing, renovating, remodeling, or otherwise working on a building
If you're going to build a concrete house, using the standard pour into forms method is probably cheaper.
On a one off, maybe - but how many people does it take to do that?
So to do.. i don't know, 50 houses it takes that many people x50, but with this you only need 1 person at most to monitor each print and you can do them all at the same time.
@@PhosPhryne It doesn't matter how many people it takes, the bottom line is the price.
@@marksandoval5361 .... And you do know LABOR is the highest cost of all?
@@PhosPhryne When everyone has been automated out of the means of production, who exactly is going to buy these products?
@@andrewhooper7603 I'm not advocating or even think 3d printed houses can replace every aspect of a construction workers job. I'm just pointing out that they can have a use and it's not as far-fetched as you might think.
This is 3D concrete pouring which is referred to as "printing" for ADVERTISING purposes. Precast concrete is old news and arguably a much better system which is why it's in wide use.
The printer is basically a CNC concrete extruder.
One of my jobs as a welder was to inspect and correct the product of our robot welder, and I can say it was not a great welder.
It had limited use as most of our weldments were not repetitive enough to justify using a robot.
I only got about 5 to 8 hours of work a week from the robot. That included inspecting the welds and correcting about 10% of the finished parts. A lot of the errors were for parts that were out of tolerance, and the tolerance was pretty high on these things, ± 1/4" when most of the hand welded stuff was between ± 1/8" and ± 1/16"
I graduated engineering school almost 20 years ago. This is an amazing application of the technology. Great explanation.
2:40 that is wrong. It’s not impossible to make an opening with just bricks without any lintels. All you need to do is to make an arch.
Affordability is an issue because of the way our economy works, not because we can't do things on the cheap. In other words, it comes down to who owns the home--investor or occupant. 3d printed homes will be bought up, en masse, just as other affordable homes have been bought up, en masse, which constricts the market for owner occupied home and therefor drives those prices. Also, the home as an isolated object is not the objective of most people, who want to live in neighborhoods and send their kids to good schools. Again, walkable neighborhoods are desperately difficult to find and the market, therefore, makes them stupidly expensive. 3D printed homes will do nothing to solve this. In fact, if we were able to build a few million homes very quickly, the glut in housing would crash the prices and the economy. It's econ 101. The solution isn't a manufacturing gimmick, it's changing the way markets work. Since we invented markets and money, we can reinvent markets and money.
This.
Exactly! Couldn't have described it better 👏👏
I think singapore and the Netherlands have the right idea where they own the land and rentals so you can't speculate
We must decommodify housing
Housing isn't bought up "en masse" by investment companies. Housing is scarce for consumers because major metropolitan areas don't build anything new anymore. For example, San Francisco permitted exactly 1,136 homes. That isn't enough to keep pace with the demand for living in San Francisco. Compare this to Austin TX, who has built 11,600 units in the same timeframe with much less demand, and they've seen a decline in both home and rent prices. It's all supply.
This sounds like a wonderful idea when you know nothing about residential construction.
My man said you can't lay bricks when there is no bricks underneath it he never heard of arch's domes and vaults
Exactly
Or really any construction.
Watching this video I'm watching the deposition of what amounts to a special sandstone or limestone, without reinforcement, in a slow process that doesn't allow for much in the way of variation, and with an unfinished look that will still require a significant amount of labor to cover up. Plus the land required lots of prep and likewise setting up the machine, larger than the final structure, also required lots of prep. The actual deposition of material might not have required much in the way of a crew, but it still required technicians monitoring for proper deposition, the delivery and loading of a continuous supply of cement, and the back office business functions to run all of this.
If one builds with concrete at-scale, either a large building or else a bunch of smaller buildings on a jobsite like a housing development, then one can leverage economy of scale. If the same building is being built several times, or variations on a set of buildings are being built at the same time, then a comparatively small crew can come in to place rebar, or can come in to build wooden forms for the pour, or can come in and perform the pour, going from building to building with large trucks rather than small print heads.
Correct. They think framing is what takes time.....
Or about 3d printing...
02:45 That is not true.
You don't need any steel to bridge the cap, you use the bricks by forming a bridge over that opening. And it is stronger than steel, because it acts as a wedge and harder you push from above, more it wedges itself in the sides, that will hold the weight by pushing upwards.
That is how basically most bridges and such are made, weight load balancing and shifting it to different directions from the stress point.
The cement can withstand extremely high pressures, but it is very brittle to sheer force or pulling force. Why you can't use cement to hold something up by hanging it from cement, or put it on place where it is sheered off.
In Greece most construction starts with a conventional concrete structure for the columns, beams, and decks. After the concrete cures the masons come in and lay in the brick to fill in the open areas, this is followed by the contractor who will come in and cover the walls with stucco and smoothed out. Now window and door openings are measured one at a time and a custom order is placed with the manufacturer of these items. So if you have a difference of 1/2 inch or so there is no major issue when windows and doors are set in. A bed of silicone is laid in where the window unit sets in. Masonary screws such as the American Tapcon screws are used to secure the window unit to the walls. Side and top gaps are filled with an expanding foam (window and door frames come with a protective plastic that is peeled off after construction is complete) and when it has cured excess foam is trimmed away. Areas around the window are then caulked with a silicone based paintable mix. The downside to this process is that every window must be custom built to fit each opening. What has me a bit perplexed is why is no one on the outside of the home smoothing out the lines in the concrete with the same mix? Just like the "print head" there is equipment that will allow one to fill in the gaps, followed by someone smoothing out the surface. I would leave the corners rounded since thick layers of stucco could fall off of the corners over time. The fill mix should be the exact same formula that the concrete is made of. This prevents issues of dissimilar materials with different coefficients of expansion from tearing the fill mix from the concrete base material.
I'm 0:56 in and already, taking the 3D printed home from a unique structure with personality into something more like an ugly 21th centrury American home is such a stupid idea to me that it must be good idea to appeal to the masses.
Good god that transition to the sponsor segment was smoother than butter on ice
Like ice cold butter getting spread on cold toast
It seems to me that 3-D printing houses has two main applications that circumvent some of the other problems:
The first is creating architectural shapes that would be impossible to make any other way, like the example that was shown where the outside concrete was wavy and circular in the video.
The second is building inexpensive housing quickly in areas that don’t already have the inventory infrastructure for traditional western housing.
There are plenty of places in the world, most notably countries in Africa, where Woodstock housebuilding is not the standard, and there are even still people living in dirt huts. In places like that, being able to quickly build a step up level and housing would go along way to improving standard living. If one or two bring a 3-D concrete printing system there, you could build hundreds or possibly thousands of houses to a higher standard than his typical, more quickly and less expensive.
Otherwise, 3-D housing printing designs would need to change in order to accommodate some of these other issues, but I think the other main opportunity for such systems would be for foundations and basements. Granted, the current system is pretty inexpensive and relatively official, however, if you were building a housing development with several hundred or even several thousand houses, having a system like this go from location to location to build all of the foundations might be cost-efficient and would certainly be fairly. The only issue would be how long does it take to move the machine from one location to the next.
the first problem, is that 3d printing houses, is not 3d printing houses. What is ambitiously called 3d printing houses is automated, formless and marginally reinforced concrete pouring.
Bingo. love it
A yearing the issues of 3d printed homes reminds my all of the reasons why I favor the brick laying robot arms as they make house that ate much more similar to people are used to with 90° angles & being as smooth as any brick wall
Just wanna say that the Henson razor is legitimately amazing. It’s the platonic razor. It literally cannot get better than this until they develop handheld electronic shavers that use lasers to burn the facial hair off your face. Those Henson razors are insanely sharp, and the way that the mechanism holds the blade is perfect and it really does give you an insanely clean shave. I will definitely say there is a slight learning curve. Unless you are used to using a single bladed razor like that, it can be a little awkward at first. But it is almost exactly the same technique that you would use for any kind of disposable razors, but you just have to hold it at a slightly different angle. So What I mean is that you will have to readjust your muscle memory on this one if you already have a really dialed in strategy. But once you use it a few times, then it becomes second nature. Also, the blades are stupidly cheap. I got like 100 blades for like, 10 bucks or something. Each side of blade usually gives me two shaves. I know it sounds stupid but yeh I can get four clean shaves that don’t hurt or fuck me up badly, out of each blade
Second. I was shaving with my henson while watching! I bought it two years ago and haven't put another penny towards shaving since
The problem I see with concrete is cracking. I recently watched a show on PBS that tested the flexibility of an ancient Chinese wood building under various earthquake conditions. It was amazing to see how the thing flexed and danced around as it was shaken. Even under non earthquake conditions there is settling, wind pressures and temperature/humidity changes over time that will cause cracks and seepage in concrete. And patching concrete never seems to work well. I also think the exposed concrete looks unsightly since I don't like the African mud hut aesthetic. Cheaper is not always better.
you can always attach some framing to get the exterior or interior visual you want. the 3d printed part can be structural if they wanted.
Shockingly, the same was found in octagon blocks, when they were studied. They could dance in the earthquake, but returned to the same position. A square or rectangle block, does not do that. It's worse if you mortar it in place.
@@normbograham That is interesting. It seems we have for some reason become very wed to the square/rectangle for building structures. Maybe it is time to think outside of the box.
Nothing cheap about concrete construction, especially when you form both sides of a wall. It's labor intensive and OPC concrete is expensive, and then you have to frame a wall inside your structural concrete wall to have something to insulate anyway. If Blue Crete (above) works out, it will save a lot of labor and materials.
7:27 The solution for precision fit windows will be a milling robot that goes in after the print to use a diamond grinder to leave window openings far more stable and precise than possible by any other method.
I wonder if the print head couldn't also have a separate nozzle for expanding foam to use as a matrix structure for headers (to be knocked out later) and also to fill voids as insulation as it goes...
@@ryanjohnson3615 Pouring modern concrete is time sensitive, as it is reacting from the moment it's mixed. You stop the flow, and random parts of the apparatus will jam with concrete hardening inside the machine. Meanwhile, the already poured concrete will bind less with the eventual next layer the more time there's between them.
@@diametheuslambda Right. It has to start and stop fairly often anyway though. I'd think a 2 part foam nozzle could be routed right next to the concrete nozzle so it just switches to foam for two seconds as it passes a window or door.
Separate robot machine that comes in after rough window opening is printed and cured. It has different tools/nozzles/grinders etc. and it quickly forms a precise and specific window opening, perhaps even with custom ridges or flanges to accept a quick fit window designed as part of the whole system. Yes it's a second step, but it seems unlikely that any primary wall printer would ever be able to make anything but a rough window opening.
Or just forms, lol
I worked maintenance for a 95 year old adobe brick style building. The bricks made the walls anywhere from 14-24 inches thick in places. Adding any new plumbing or electrical to the existing building requires tearing into the wall, or hanging conduit everywhere.
It will be another 5 years before the 3D House printing industry discovers the concept of:
Sanding.
I really appreciate how the sponsor ad is at the end if your video and not in the middle... I actually watched it unlike most ads.. and you get a like 👍
the "cant fix mentality" is a non issue. anything needs attention can still be fixed with traditional ways. It doesnt need to be "reprinted"...
Yeah. I imagine a broken pipe requiring an access hole be cut into the wall. It strikes me as an easy process to use cinder block or brick or even stucco to patch the hole.
The biggest problem in building housing or any construction is not really the contractors or the materials. It can be, but a well organized construction company can bypass most of those problems, especially if they build homes at scale.
The biggest problem is inspections and bureaucracy.
Here in Los Angeles, that problem is especially, because the city does not have enough inspectors to do the inspections in an efficient way, and processing plans etc. can be very slow as well.
A new construction next to the office I work at Looked like it was completed about six months ago, but then nothing happened for six months. I don’t know for a fact, but with experience with other construction, I guarantee that the reason was that they were waiting for an approval for something, and the inspector had not been able to come by for at least a month, and then the paperwork wasn’t processed for several months as well.
For 3-D printed houses, or for any housing, if cities are serious about dealing with a housing crisis, they need to put in the money to ensure that inspections can be done quickly and efficiently. This means hiring more people to both do the inspections,and be knowledgeable about the requirements to help builders avoid problems along the way.
I had a friend who worked as a computer geek for many years. But employers were looking for some kid who knew the latest programming languages. So my friend studied to become a concrete inspector. About the time he was qualified, 2008 happened. No building going on, so no inspection needed. He never worked as a concrete inspector, but did find a job as a baker with Vons supermarket. Since then we've had the pandemic, and related stuff happened. Partly explains the lack of inspectors.
@@EXROBOWIDOW I'm sure it does, but here in Los Angeles, we've had a problem with not having enough inspectors for several decades. It is not been a budgetary priority, and it really should be.
This is a really good rundown of the problems of 3D printed buildings. I don't believe we want or need a one-size-fits-all, vertically integrated architecture.
There's already plenty of complaining that our built environment is soulless and while 3D printing can create some dynamic shapes, it's true mission is fast, cheap replication.
I wish there was more focus on going back to arts and craft in our architecture. The human touch in our mass-produced world.
I suspect that this sort of thing is going to play a ever greater role in new construction simply due to pressures created by climate shift alone. With tornado Allley now reaching from Spokane to Nashville, with hurricane impact zones now occuring well beyond the gulf states jamming up New England, with wildfires now wiping entire towns off the map in an afternoon I think we'll see a vastly increasing demand for concrete construction & anything that can deliver it quickly & uniformly. If you wish to 'humanize' it' i'd suggest focusing on technical means of facing these concrete structures. There's almost nobody in that space currently and there will be an increasing market demand for it as time moves forward.
Except it's neither fast or cheap
@@OregonOutdoorsChris Nothing in prototype testing ever is. It takes time and manufacturing capacity coming online to bring that price per unit down. Far as i'm aware every single one of these printers is basically a custom built stepped up version of a homebrew.
@@brianhirt5027 Being just vaguely related to the current 'cool' thing (consumer level plastic 3d printers) isn't solving a problem, and it has to actually solve a real problem, otherwise it has no hope of ever becoming cheaper, faster, or better.
@@brianhirt5027 and P.S. ICF construction ALREADY does all the same things as 3D printed construction, except better, faster, and cheaper... and it's still more expensive than lumber construction
Great video. One issue with 3D printing concrete which I’ve never heard addressed is reinforcement. When you look at a traditional concrete structure being poured, you’ll see lots of steel rebar. Concrete is great under compression, but not so great with tension. Very similar to brick, and why many buildings you see with brick today are a thin brick veneer over a more durable structure.
I like the idea of 3D printing, but I find prefabricated homes to be more interesting as a concept. I love how boxabl tried to package homes in a modular fashion. Of course, this replaces the role of the traditional architect, so it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I like the idea of being to just choose options and place things like you would in a videogame's housing system and being able to get it installed in a short time upon delivery.
There's a reason we don't just pour concrete and call it a day already.
I have built a bunch of RC/FC homes. There is a lot more very important complexity that these 3D printed buildings totally lack making them aweful.
1) no tensor material - steel
2) electrical conduits
3) waterline conduit
4) design shape limitations
5) finish
6) lack of thermal mass
7) lack of insulation
8) lack of a proper foundation
9) roof
10 ceilings
11) too specialized equipment
Yeah concrete with no reinforcing in it is garbage. Even that fibermesh stuff doesn't impress me. It stays together a little better. But nothing beats real steel.
unless you aren't following building code, my understanding is that municipalities would never approve a building without steel or reinforcement. Watch the multitude of videos out there to see how wrong or simply misinformed you are. I just did a building in California and not a single thing on your list was an issue. R value over 30, PSI 7200 on the cement, sheer wall and steel built to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. Maybe you just have more homework. 3D printing doesn't do the entire process but you still have to follow code as with any technology.
@leegaudi-vbcev, If you are replying to me then you completely failed to understand what I wrote.
2:35 My man has never seen a vaulted ceiling. 😭 Bricklaying is lost media.
Or an arch?
@@calmeilles For real
I love the
voice; it’s so soothing.
Your analysis of the sluggish and dull construction industry is spot on, when talking about the U.S. construction industry. Construction in the rest of the advanced nations is moving forward with agility.
One of my favorite building technologies, ICF (Insulating Concrete Forms) is basically lego that you can arrange however you want then fill with concrete, getting the structure and insulation in one go. As with other concrete structures changes (other than additions) to it are not as easy as with stick built, but in return you get an air impervious highly insulated and extremely durable structure that will run circles around stick in terms of energy efficiency. Plus how often do people modify the outer shape of their houses, anyway?
I'm not sure what 3D printed buildings offer over ICF - perhaps not as much labor, and circular shapes are easier with less finishing?
ICF construction is typically done with crews of the same size but ICF does not really offer much more over traditional forming it cost more takes, longer to set up, more complex to brace. I have done both ill take symons forms over ICF any day
@@imchris5000 But then there's additional labor to remove the forms, adding insulation to the finished concrete on the outside, furring on the inside for drywall and mechanicals, etc. I can't imagine all that combined is still somehow cheaper to do than just doing ICF in one go.
@@rafflesmaos you have to do the same for ICF minus removing the forms which takes far less than than it does to assemble icf forms
@@imchris5000 There's no need to fur out ICF, drywall can be applied to it directly and mechanicals can be routed inside of it. The "studs" or in this case fastening points are also built in. And there's of course no need to add insulation since the forms are insulating. All of those would need to be added to a bare concrete wall
@@rafflesmaos it sounds good on paper but having installed it things dont go that simple. its cake work to frame walls compared to trying to dig in the foam also with regular concrete on the outside the concrete can be your finished surface
I think the biggest issue is what makes developers more money, whatever does that best is what developers would go for. If you go back 45 years to 190 years+ all construction was quicker and in most cases a lot quicker, so just because something is quicker doesn't mean it will take off. Look at pre fab, cheap, quick and much less profitable. We will get it if developers make more money, it's that simple. Even if it's a much worse product. Developers will claim it's regulations but putting on a harness takes a minute, a safety talk takes 20 mins. Yet the difference is not a day or week at most, it years even decades difference in length and amazingly the only thing that has gone up in that time is the amount of money they take in.
From an economic perspective, wouldn't most of these hurdles be solved by integrating 3D printing with prefabrication?
With prefab, 3d printing could become much more modular and have more outside conditions controlled for to create a more consistent product. Even if there are other construction materials required, at least in a factory, it would be easier to integrate those materials with the 3d printing process. Also as a side note, I feel the biggest problem with housing affordability isn't the cost to produce the home itself, but rather, the inability for cities to up-zone areas that require denser housing.
As always, cheers! Love your videos!
There's no magic bullet. My city has and continues to upzone but there's not much uptake. More missing middle and high density helps. For downtowns, no height limit seems intuitive but that can drive land speculation, effectively slowing down and increasing the cost of development, so there's a balance. Even if municipalities and developers work together to fire on all cylinders, there are still shortages of staff and building materials. There are other issues too. There are so many issues that have snowballed together.
Great video! I'm working with 3D concrete printing for about 4 years. Your research is on the spot! Really well-pointed problems.
I can say that concrete doesn't relay only on rebar but also on dispersed reinforcement such as polypropylene fibers.
Cartesian printers have some limitations but nonplanar printing is a thing ;)
A+ on the ad insertion. I didn't even roll my eyes when you started talking about it.
I just don't really see how this is really that much better than placing styrofoam molds and pouring the concrete
It's actually worse, not better.
A lot less labor, a lot less waste. I'd imagine it's 50% less product than a solid wall. Not to mention the thermal benefits
Great insights. Especially the problems with repairs & changes after the construction.
In Minneapolis there were a number of mid century modern drive in banks built by Twin City Federal S&L. They experimented with rounded interior and exterior walls /corner in a variety of floor plans. The branch banks used different finish materials such as brick, tile, vertical wood panels to create rounded forms -which were very 1960s space age modern. The banks were quite striking. The slogan for TCF Bank was "Tuck a buck, a day away!" Originally the branch banks were round to mimic the bank's tree logo. As a young architect I worked on several of these. After going thru a number of "experiments"in different parts of the Twin Cities what we found the most flexible construction option was to do the curvy walls on the inside of the bank and then put a more rectilinear form on the outside to fit into limited lots. Perhaps some of the difficulties described in your video might be resolved by using a Le Corbusier approach from the 1960s and 1970s. This approach was quite fashionable.
Hey Stewart, we actually do put drywall on the outside of buildings. In that case it's fiberglass faced, usually on commercial and large residential buildings like apartments.
I've been involved with construction design for over 30 years now. New ideas pop up.. usually targeted at one aspect of the construction process- either being cheap to buy or way faster on site - while adding lots of other issues that add to the total cost. About half the cost of building a new house is labor. I like the idea of "3d printing" a house.. but this doesn't actually solve ANY problems, while creating MORE problems (added expenses). While you could design a home to the limitations of 3d printed concrete walls.. you could also design a new home to the limitations of prefabricated walls, prefabricated trusses, and/or Structural Insulated Panels. Those all allow for quickly getting a new house under roof with proper planning. The BIGGEST issue I see with the 3d printed walls shown in the video is they have no steel. They can't put rebar in place before the 3d print because they would be in the way of the print nozzle head. No steel in concrete (and layered to boot) = it's not very structural. You can't build a two story building with these walls only. It's basically glorified Brick Veneer. No idea why people are pushing it like some innovation. We already have efficient uses of material to make prefab systems for a new structure. That being said- in places where they already pour the walls with concrete due to moisture/termite issues, I could see this having SOME benefits but it's still iffy. But they need to figure out the steel aspect.. I would love to see a structure built with these walls on a seismic test platform. Looks like the layers would just crumble.
What would be stupidly weird to say my house went spaghetti 😂
Houses are the most customizable thing that an average person may ever own.
Prefab, mass timber, high density, mixed use. This ain't it.
The prefab mass timber fad is plagued with issues. It is not equivalent to ancient methods of building with old growth timber. Your buildings are being held together with glue and loose fibers. Check out WASP.
High density may be fine for some, but not everyone wants to live in high density housing.
@@RandyXandar heal your heart
@catface101 I'm not hating on people who want to live in that kind of housing, it's just not for me, city living just isn't my style, and I'm saying people should have a choice. One thing I do agree with urbanists on is that American zoning laws are stupid and need to change and I do appreciate walkability and bike-ability, I simply don't like when people try to overcorrect in the direction that assumes that people ought to be pressured into a condition they don't want, that's tyranny.
Really enjoyed the calm and pragmatic approach to this subject. A refresher compared to the usual "click-bait" method.
I would really question the strength of these things in major storms or earthquakes. Concrete is strong in compression, but far less in extension and I am not seeing rebar or fiberglass aggregate to try and re-enforce it. Those layers are going to be weaknesses too and there are hundreds of them. Also it containing flyaash seems bad because that stuff is full of things that arent good for you.
its not a 3d printed home, its a 3d printed wall. still need floors, roofs, electrical, plumbing, windows, doors, paint etc and a million other things. walls are usually the quickest and easiest part of building
Those thousands of 3D printed houses being built are sure setting a huge trend.
Wait, how many? One? Oh, JFC.
I guess you're to lazy to use google huh.....th-cam.com/video/Y-4S7cdo3tY/w-d-xo.html
I actually like the streamline modern style that 3D printed houses look
Always nice to see a Henson sponsorship
Best razor I ever had
Have you looked at the startup bricklaying robot. I believe CAT was an investor in the robot bricklayer company.
This was what I was wondering when he was talking about bricks. Seems like using high volume pre-fabricated parts (i.e. bricks) is going to be a better alignment with robots rather than concrete printing.
@@thewiirocks There was a startup out of Perth Australia but they seem to have fallen off the map.
Techbros will be the end of humanity.
Isn't rebar used to ensure structural integrity when using concrete? How is that achieved in 3D printed structures? How is this better than just creating forms/molds and just dumping concrete into it?
Small steel "staples" are a different kind of aggregate in concrete that provides more tensile strength than rock aggregate.
There are also plastic fibres but they are more used to minimize surface cracking as the concrete cures.
Jokes on us, if we built structures that were under compressive loads, then we would not need as much concrete.
I can't comment on the total structural integrity of the wall, but rebar rods are placed orthogonally to the interior and exterior walls every 50cm or so every few layers. The space between the walls is often filled with a zig-zag of concrete too, similar to cardboard construction. The roofs are also attached with tie rods that span through the wall to screws formed into the foundation, providing some vertical compression. It is reinforced, but I am not certain what structural effect these have, especially compared to traditional reinforcement.
I'm for it.
I myself would probably never get behind it but if it becomes popular enough then the cost of lumber would gradually become cheaper.
damn, the ad bit at the end was actually quite convincing and good. That's rare
I think we keep forgetting how much carbon is emitted in the process of making and curing concrete, whereas wooden houses essentially sequester carbon.
"...fly ash admixture, or ash produced by the burning for pulverized coal..." in other words the byproduct of coal power plants. Which are all being shut down due to environmental rules. They are already looking at opening up old coal ash pits to reclaim what was buried as a waste byproduct of coal 50+ years ago as the concrete industry is doing a pretty good job of consuming the current output of plants.
And like you say, the cement powder with is mostly kiln-dried lime and silica. There's a time and place for concrete IMHO, mostly along the outside where water and insect intrusion are a real risk. I'm all for a hard shell and a woody interior.
I mean, 3d printing isnt for prototypes, 10 years ago maybe, but its 100% used for finished products now. and its a finished thing. building need improvments but pouring concrete which kills the planet, or finding a way to do it on site. no brainer
The planet is an inanimate object so it cannot be killed. It may enter a state that doesn't suit you. But that's not going to adversely impact it. This planet has already been hit by another planet sized object and that didn't kill it. Busted it up some. That's where the Moon came from. It's the leftovers of that collision.
1:49 Sorry, *what* forays has musk made into construction? Did you use one of those musk fanboy channels as a source? Those guys just make shit up to get clicks.
Damn how much sleep have you lost due to Elon Musk?
I think he made some modern sci fi trailer houses for 10k ir something, not sure if they ever went into production like most of his tabloid title projects
How about the entire town called Utopia he is building in Texas? Would that count? Found that in about 3 seconds with a search engine. Probably took less time than your comment.😂
This channel lost me on this statement alone. Am having it no longer recommended.
This is a deeper dive than I've ever seen on this subject, seriously fascinating, thanks.
We should also clarify. This is not the first 3D printed house. The first one was built in 1939 by William Urschel and they even got a patent in 1941 for the concept. They just didn't call it 3D printing.
To me, it seems to be a technology in search of a use. It's not that quick, it's not that flexible, the equipment is expensive and the results are questionable in terms of quality. Why wouldn't you just use prefabrication?
You know what is innovative? There is a country where every single citizen gets a house for free. Where housing is a basic right. That is innovative!
Live in ze ash concrete house! Eat ze bugs!
You need a home and not a house..commie blocks are the way to go
i see your art and videos used links, but you need to cite your sources. dont "im a professor" that does not grant you special privilege's in my eyes. your profession would incentivize you to speak ill of 3d printed houses because 3d printed houses would change your job drastically. we see what is going on here.
I've worked mainly on large Reinforced concrete structures.
The 3d printing of buildings are.Focusing on the easy problems the shell of the building .
What makes a building expensive is everything else, foundations, drainage, ground floor slab, heating, wiring, plumbing, painting, fixtures and fittings, insulation, tiling, etc etc.
Bathrooms toilets etc are expensive.
3d printing can only do so much without thinking about the home in totality.
In the commercial space it's common to have toilets prefabed and droped onto the slab at each level, this saves a significant amount on cost and time.
Framing a house is the cheapest part. The installation, doors, windows, water lines and electrical wire is way more expensive.
I bought a henson. it really does give you an excellent shave and the materials are high quality