Need A Home? Print One

Remember how you grew up watching shows like the Jetsons, where robots did all the housework and everyone flew around in spaceships – and you’ve always wondered ever since; ‘when is THAT future gonna turn up?’ Well, wonder no longer, that future is officially here! Okay, so there may be a slight wait on the spaceships yet, but robots CAN now make houses for us.

That’s right, in December a two-storey home in Beckum, Germany was constructed purely from 3D-printed concrete. What’s more, unlike the many prototype houses 3D-printed before, this one was actually certified to German building standards – some of the most rigorous in the world. 

This is big news because previously 3D-printing has been regarded by most of us as a bit of a novelty, you know, the sort of thing kids use to make their sculpture homework for art. Sure, 3D-printers have long been used in engineering to create lightweight complex parts from nylon and thermoplastics – it even revolutionised Emirates Team New Zealand development process. However, unless you need to recreate an oil drain plug for your never-ending Kawasaki EL-250 restoration project, there seemed little call for using one.

Not anymore. 

Now you can design your house on a computer; push <print>; and a house will be constructed exactly to your specifications. No architects, no builders, no masons, cranes, endless waiting for materials and no damn roof shouts! (Well, maybe one at the end, we don’t want to be too churlish.)

Of course; you will need a massive Cobod BOD2 gantry printer like the one German construction company PERI used to print theirs, with the BOD2 5-10-4 capable of printing anything you want within the dimensions of 24m x 12m x 8m. 

But just because you are printing within a box doesn’t mean you have to create one, as curved walls are just as easy as straight ones for the BOD2 as it moves along 2 X-axis, 10 Y-axis and 4 Z-axis to print whatever it’s been instructed to do. No head scratching, wincing or patronising comments about how difficult curves are to construct; if your design can get a tick from the local Council, your BOD2 can print it.

The printer itself follows the same structure as its smaller cousins, making pass after pass building up the walls from the ground up and as fast as a metre per second. Plus, if you’ve thought well enough ahead, you can leave apertures for plumbing, electricity and ducting from the start, rather than drill them later. PERI said it was time and labour cuttings like these that really helped them save money on the job – although the real savings will come on large or mass-produced housing projects rather than just on a single one-off home. The Beckum home was constructed from concrete specifically created by HeidelbergCement but, considering the many other materials the smaller engineering 3D-printers can use, maybe in future our homes could be made from nylon, wood composite or even recycled plastic.

Could this be a possible solution to our chronic housing shortage, lack of affordable dwellings for first home buyers and never-ending leaky homes issues? It may well be – but the biggest hurdle will be getting a very well-established industry to change – especially when it is currently worth $39 billion. That’s a lot of disincentive to change and PERI have already discovered that ‘education’ of not only the sector but the public as well, is the largest issue they face in making 3D-printing a viable construction option. But not every nation is so reluctant to change; Dubai have definitely seen the value of 3D-printing and want to have 25% of their new builds created in this way by 2030. Will we be anywhere near that? Hmm, maybe the spaceships will come first…