3D-Printing, along with Bitcoin and crowd-funding have been three of the primary disruptive and positive innovations/technologies that have come to the fore in 2013, which have the potential to change human existence in extraordinarily positive ways.
Although much of my attention on 3D-printing this year has been focused on the decentralized production of firearms, the potential of this species changing technology is virtually limitless. In no way is this more apparent than with regard to the fact that many of our future homes will likely be 3D-printed into existence.
In what is a truly remarkable speech, Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering at USC, explains this promising new technology in 12 minutes. He claims that by using a process he calls “contour crafting,” a 2,500 square foot house can be built in 20 hours.
Truly remarkable.
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Thanks for putting this up… it is friggin’ fantastic. I wonder if this technique could be adapted to a dirt+straw (cob) material or some hybrid? I hope to see this sort of thing routinely happening in my lifetime–but of course crowdfunded and using decentralized cyrptocurrency like Bitcoin.
Check out Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project. Jacque is truly a renaissance man. Jacque’s ideas cover all of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. I suggest Behrokh Khoshnevis and his students invite Jacque to USC to explain his ideas and answer any and all of their questions that relate to making the world a better place. All of USC’s colleges should be invited and admission should not be limited to any one discipline.
They can certainly figure out how to make them work with cob/adobe mixtures of any % combination. Exciting stuff.
As a builder I find this very depressing, people need to work, people love to work and create things with their own hands, to occupy their time in meaningful ways, building a house in 20 hrs. by a machine instead of employing humans is the same type of logic that turned our agricultural system into the virtually human-less, nutrition-less waist land that it is today.
Phil, although I’m not a pro builder, I’ve done plenty of construction, regular framing, timber framing, etc and I LOVE the idea of this. There will still be tons of finish work. I see this as moving the work form dirty and wasteful brute work to creative and more enjoyable work that can be done by even a disabled person. The freedom of design this allows is insane. This world needs less wasteful and expensive processes, and I see this as a step forward.
That is a good point, i love to do trim work, build cabinets and furniture also but doing any one thing year in and year out would be hard for many people mentally to cope with, the great thing about building is you never stop learning new ways of doing things and mastering different parts of the building process, we are loosing a whole generation right now of would be craftsmen to technology, if we want to be surrounded with the great architecture like our grand parents made, i just dont see it coming from a machine like this, it could come from the hundreds of thousands of kids living in their parents basements playing video games right now though
It’s usually pointless to predict the future, but I imagine this 3D cement / mud machine as just the start. What if future versions are able to lay out new fangled carbon materials like grapheme or something? Then you you use it to make parts for our own skyscraper or cathedral! We’d have a renaissance of architecture like you’ve never seen! Also keep in mind we’re going to need an effective way to relocate away from coastal areas due to climate change and rising seas and mega storms. Fast & cheap concrete houses would be rather helpful because I don’t think there is enough global GDP to do that conventionally.
Check out Jacque Fresco Peter Joseph.
Phil, check out Jaque Fresco’s work. The idea is to rid humanity of constant repetetive job. You could keep building houses if you felt like doing so, but wouln’t “have” to, just to keep you and your family fed. The wong that is happening with the agricultural system is not because of the automation part, blame monsanto amongst others for that.
I’m gonna be troll like and say Jaques is a commie , lol