Originally published at: The world's largest 3D-printed neighborhood was just built in Texas - Boing Boing
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60 Minutes had a really good segment on this a few weeks back. 3D printed houses in Austin is just the beginning. They’re also seriously exploring doing similar construction on the moon. The CEO is also the rare visionary, environmentally conscious, socially minded, and just super nice person.
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I’ll check back in a few years to see how these buildings are holding up to Texas weather.
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Probably pretty well since they are made of concrete instead of wood. Like the Three Little Pigs found out…
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Floor plans and virtual tours available on the Lennar site: Wolf Ranch New Home Community - Georgetown - Austin / Central Texas, TX | Lennar
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In a related story, carpenters are trembling at the thought of a house filled with accurately angled corners and flat walls. “We aren’t prepared for houses to be built with correct geometry.”
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Except most of the corners are curves and the walls are all corduroy texture, even on the interior.
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Contrary to your optimism, come back when you can tell us we’re 3D printing ourselves out of rampant poverty and homelessness. A roof should be a right. We just don’t have the will.
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One of the company’s first projects was printing small houses for the homeless. That’s actually one of their stated missions.
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the company says that 3D printing homes is faster, less expensive, requires fewer workers, and minimizes construction material waste.
But apparently it doesn’t mean cheaper (for the buyer of the house, anyways…) I wonder if costs are higher than they potentially will be because the technology is new, or the cost of the equipment (and whatever middlemen are now required for it) will always eat up the cost savings of less material and fewer workers. (Or if the property developers are just pocketing the difference in what the market will bear and what it’s costing to build.)
I’ve read some mixed verdicts on whether the “printed” houses are a good idea or not (in terms of building quality, compared to conventionally built, but also the wisdom of the whole design philosophy, e.g. building single-story houses when higher-density housing is needed), and how much of this can be fixed for 3d printed houses.
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I’m just going to point out again that in home construction the cost of erecting the walls is just one relatively small proportion of the total cost, and using this construction technique really limits your options when it comes to running plumbing, electrical, and other vital features that are somewhat dismissively referred to as “finishing touches.”
A few more of these finishing touches include doors, windows, and a freaking roof.
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Floors are an optional extra, and a bit boojie, if you ask me.
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Not a given perhaps. Sometimes today’s miracle process is tomorrow’s “well, in hindsight, that was a bad idea”. The problems with aerated concrete in the UK come to mind. I might be inclined to wait for version 1.1.
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Hanging art/etc on the walls will be fun. I won’t be terribly surprised if some owners opt to skin the concrete walls with a framed (dry)wall. But I do think the idea is cool.
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very, very 
Every homeless person who receives shelter is a win, but tiny houses are still an extremely inefficient use of resources when it comes to building housing for a large number of people.
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Ok, concrete walls without reinforcement (e.g. rebar) isn’t going to last long with the increasing fracking-induced earthquakes. Welcome to Texas.
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Had a look at the floor plans, and… it’s all variations on a shotgun style house.
Indeed; Forgive me for playing devil’s advocate here.
Even if you have spaces in the walls for plumbing and electrical, at the end of the day you still have to contend with essentially a concrete block wall for purposes of dealing with the interior. That’s usually fixed with furring strips and drywall; If you are going for the whole smoothed | textured stone wall’ look, well then there’s plaster going over the raw wall surface.
Adding or moving outlets? you’ll need tools (and PPE!) for cutting concrete in order to get inside the walls and affixing outlet boxes. Have a plumbing leak from a burst joint / frozen pipes / etc? Have fun with that one, especially if mold gets a chance to take root in there (and it will.)
Yeah, this; that might be part of the “finishing touches”- adding structural reinforcement as part of the infill between the walls and including barriers to keep a burst pipe from flooding the entire infill space.
I do think it’s a somewhat viable building method, just not for this type of house. I could see it working for a townhouse or a collection of separate 1 bedroom/1 bath tiny homes, though. But we need to start somewhere, right?
There are a couple single floor ‘townhouse’ style apartments down the street from my house. I could absolutely see this method of construction used to make up single floor duplexes or multi-family dwellings (i.e. condos or townhomes, or just a small set of apartments) with such unheard of features like a common access service gallery for plumbing and electrical for each set of units, but I’m not an architect, nor have I slept in a Holiday Inn. 
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I am an architect and you and otherbrother are very correct. For single family houses the load bearing walls is not the most expensive and time consuming part. Neither the most labour intensive. This is cool technology, and there will be uses for it. But it is not a silver bullet. Affordable and qualitative housing is not a problem of technology. It is solved by policy.
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Watch the 60 Minutes segment - there’s rebar reinforcement every 10 layers.
