I’m assuming that 6k is referring to the concrete/soil slurry they are using to form the walls.
I think the thing that they are hiding with this number is that Concrete block would come in at near the same cost, probably cheaper, and would require less specialized labor/set up and could be built in a similar amount of time. (my post downstream shows the napkin math)
In this case, I would have the conduits in the walls and floors as open-face channels, them put a removable cap on them. They might not be fun to get to after the fact, but hella easier than ripping open concrete.
The $300,000 is “about half of the average new home cost in the area…”
When a cost-conscious buyer wants to live in that area (and assuming a well-built home that meets building codes) then everything else becomes academic. 
It’s much more protective than my 2D printed house.
In went old school with 1D, so far it’s working out.
As I said… It’s layered concrete, not plastic…
From the article…
We have centuries of home building and we know what materials work and are durable and long lasting. We know that plastics have high environmental harm. Why reinvent the wheel with regards to materials?
On the other hand, it’s hardly unusual for people to have to break out the jackhammer when a line bursts under the slab. This could be similar. You open up the access port and estimate how far down the wall the rupture is, then chip out that spot, cut the pipe and splice in the patch, and then mortar back in the repair. Not much fun but hardly impossible.
Is a masonry drill that much worse than a hollow wall anchor? I kind of like the idea that you don’t have to find studs or be annoyed when you find one you don’t expect. Every shelf you hang will be solidly affixed.
Remarkably little of a home’s cost is in the sticks and bricks. Land is the largest, but permits and profit for all of the players take pretty nice slice too.
Maybe, or it will allow them to put in higher quality interior finishes, keeping the prices high while making the product more marketable. Formica countertops switch to granite and the floor from some cheaper laminate to a nice hardwood. It may just allow a given developer to play in a higher margin market segment.
There have been trials using more exotic shapes, but people get nervous that they will have to live a different lifestyle if they buy the strange house.
To put it mildly, I am deeply suspicious of this claim. Cement and concrete production are major greenhouse gas and water use drivers. Comparatively the needs for growing soft pine and assembling it are tiny.
That’s one of the things that drove me nuts. It represents a great opportunity for freeze thaw damage and any number of other issues.
That was an issue with one of the earlier wave of the future concrete building designs. The Binishell homes offered faster construction than even this promises, and cut all of the same corners. A small percentage of people love them, and most hate them.
What utter bollocks. Let’s set aside the nonsense phrasing here (impacts are the opposite of friendly!).
Building residential homes out of concrete is an absolute disaster for the environment, especially given there are so many better choices available:
I hear ya. However, I’m a big ol’ mid-century modern fan (not so much a fan of domes and A-frames, but other unusual shapes intrigue me), and could see some cool forms being squirted out of a 3D printer. Seems like this might be a cheaper/easier method to get a bespoke house made, if one had the benjamins. Not that I personally do, dagnabbit.
I will express some of the same concerns as those up-thread who question whether cement is the best building material to be using if we’re serious about addressing climate change.
You have a point, I’ll concede. But thinking about the bare wall thing got me wondering about other stuff. Surely a cement wall needs some insulation on one side or the other? Then you’d need something – siding or drywall – to cover up the pink floof? Also, wiring and such. You’d need a layer of drywall or paneling to cover that up, unless you want wires or conduit running up and down the inside of your house.
Word; right now, it’s the equiv of a chassey.
Not keen on the attempt to use concrete to build the homes, simply because we can 3d print it.
Lots of footprint, potential heating/ cooling concerns, and they’re going to be difficult to disassemble. (And… frankly, we don’t want houses to be semi-immortal structures. They may need to be removed, updated, etc.)
It’s a gimmick and no real advantage over existing modularly manufactured homes.
Anyone skeptical of concrete interior walls might note that it’s common to use masonry for all walls in many many countries. The Germans often scoff at the stick-built North American homes.
It’s also common in California to build houses on a slab instead of a crawlspace. The plumbing and sewer are embedded in the concrete. If you need to replace or move a pipe, you wet-saw out that section, and patch it when you’re done.
All this to say, that part of this house is not new or unusual. Pipes-in-masonry is not some dealbreaker or alien concept in much of the world.
I would say carpentry is skilled not menial. Replacing lawyers with software that can evaluate legal contracts at a fraction of the cost is far different than replacing 19th century laborers with the cotton gin. The trend in tech innovation isn’t an extension of the industrial revolution. It’s something different, and I can’t imagine how it will result in improved conditions for workers.
You’ll do it the messy and agonizing way we get to any in-wall repairs in countries with brick. cement, and plaster construction. You will simply want to die, but be too tired from trying to vacuum and wipe up the dust to die.
First, you’ll have to chisel out the entire area you need to fix. In the case of a long pipe that needs replacing, this can be feet or yards. Your home is now a desert and woe be it when a breeze blows that dust all over every paper and item in the entire house. Even if you seal off the area, the people will track dust all over anyway and it will blow around.
It’s usually a few vacuum/duster/mop cycles to get it back to normal. But then …
-the repair
-filling in with more concrete and then plaster and then paint (repeat of dust soul killing)
BONUS TRACK - say it was a leak from the roof or a pipe. Well, the concrete and/or bricks and plaster have absorbed all that water, so you have to do this wretched repair, and then still wait up to a year to see if it truly worked and resolved the humidity problem - before that, it could just be residual humidity from before. But a lot of the time, you finally realize that the problem wasn’t resolved and you have to go back and do something else, for instance isolate hot water pipes if that might have caused it.
HIDDEN TRACK after many minutes of silence after last listed track: This is especially fun in bathrooms and kitchens where the final termination is some lovely tile which is now out of production, leaving you having to either redo everything, or have not-quite matching tiles in the patched area.
Here in South America, the most common type of toilet in my area has all the tank and words inside that plaster, brick and cement wall. Yep, even the little plastic bits that make the floater rise and fall and cannot be expected to ever last out a decade and usually much less. Hence the advent of the coat hanger fix where you just snatch the floater rod with a wire and have the end emerge from the small hole where the cover and button were on the wall.
The truly golden moment is when, after suffering through one of these repairs and the new ceramics and the whole deal, watching them put in the new plastic bits and call the masons to seal that bunk in there like the cask of amontillado, assuring you that ‘now you’ll be fine’.
Surely someone will ask why they don’t just put a whole door over areas that are most liable to need repairs like the backsplash of the kitchen and bath. This exists, but mainly in only the newest buildings for the richest people since it adds a lot of materials and labor costs to the build/repair.
It really shouldn’t be that much in materials. My house has an access panel like this and it’s just one of the tiles with some magnets glued on the back that line up with some screws in the wall. Once it is in place it’s not too noticeable, but you can pry it off with a butter knife to get at the plumbing. All in all the materials cost is almost nothing, and the labor was like 10 minutes.
That’s brilliant. Never seen the likes of it. Here, if you’re going to have an area open (we’re talking about service doors that allow for repairing leaking pipe connections and the like) you have to get a blacksmith to come over and do the frame and weld a hinge on to it and then the masons cement it into the space and seal and then you fit a piece of drywall into the frame and maybe put matching tiles on it.
I don’t know what a 1 - tile sized space would be good for, but you guys probably also have those large tiles that are in fashion nowadays as well, no? Like 20 x 30 or even larger?
Still think the idea could be modified to work with just the cement, the screws, and then the drywall plaque, leaving out the blacksmith entirely and thereby saving a ton of time and money.
Edit to pay tribute to the commenter who asked:
Touché
If using cinderblock instead of the big printer, would there be more structural issues if repairs were needed? It seems that cutting into the blocks would greatly reduce their integrity.
