World's First 3D Printed Estate Coming To New York 108
New submitter Randy-tanner (3791853) writes A well known New York architect & contractor has begun construction on what is possibly the largest 3D printing related project ever undertaken. He is 3D printing an entire estate, which includes an in-ground swimming pool, a pool house, and a huge 2400 square foot home. The project is expected to take two years to complete, and if all goes as planned the printer will automatically insert rebar into the concrete.
Let us redefine "progress" (Score:2, Interesting)
Just because you can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that you should do that thing.
Re:Let us redefine "progress" (Score:4, Interesting)
Progress happens when you take something that has potential but isn't yet viable and make it viable.
If you could 3D print a foundation and increase the quality and durability of it then it makes sense since I know for a fact that concrete is a complicated process that has potential for major failure if not done properly.
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While true there is "progress" that serves no purpose. This is one of those cases. Sure, it is interesting that it is possible. But where is the progress? It will not be more stable than concrete, it will not be more durable than concrete and for sure it won't be faster than pouring concrete. The huge advantages of 3D printing (like the ability to seamlessly put something into something else or create durably connected locked joints) simply don't come into play when it comes to building a house.
Re:Let us redefine "progress" (Score:4, Insightful)
About half the cost of building a house is labor. They say in the article that aside from the guy running the printer, there are no labor costs here. I don't believe that's necessarily true, because there's still got to be somebody wiring the electrical and installing windows, but regardless, it could dramatically decrease the cost of building a home. It could also be a lot faster. Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the printer, another with all the crushed rock, setting it up and letting it go. A week later, a finished home ready for a family to move into at half the cost. That brings the dream of home ownership within the reach of a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to afford it before. We live in exciting times.
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That brings the dream of home ownership within the reach of a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to afford it before. We live in exciting times.
Unless said people derived their income from building homes, which a lot of the skilled trades still do.
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But in general, yes, I fully agree.
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I feel for those switch board operators.
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But then you're arguing for inefficiency to make-work.
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Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the left half of the home, and one carrying the right half. A bit of maneuvering to align them on the foundation pad, a little work connecting things up, and the family can start moving in that a
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Economics of automation and 3d printing (Score:2)
They say in the article that aside from the guy running the printer, there are no labor costs here.
Care to wager on that? Exactly how do you think they are going to get the fabricated parts in place? Magical levitation? How do you think the fabricated parts are going to be secured and connected? The labor in building a modern structure is less in fabrication than in assembly. It' common for entire walls and roofs to be delivered as preassembled framing. The expense of a foundation isn't in the fabrication but in the prep work for the site - making sure things are level and plumb and the drainage is
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While true there is "progress" that serves no purpose. This is one of those cases. Sure, it is interesting that it is possible. But where is the progress? It will not be more stable than concrete, it will not be more durable than concrete and for sure it won't be faster than pouring concrete. The huge advantages of 3D printing (like the ability to seamlessly put something into something else or create durably connected locked joints) simply don't come into play when it comes to building a house.
This is just a precursor towards a future where construction is handled by machines controlled from home office. For example, if you have a large enough 3D printer, you could print whole walls, foundations, etc. and machines could put them together similar to the way cars are built today. This is more of a small scale example of what can be done.
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I can see printed aercitecture leadng to standardized components of construction. Architects will be just as creative as they are today, but the ability to include standardized design elements, such as a leakproof and stress-qualified roof of a given type at a given size, into buildings will revolutionize the art.
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I don't think you can anticipate how far 3D printing can go. Although 3D printing has existed for a long time it is just starting to be a field of interest. As more research is poured into it will become better and more affordable.
The progress will be in the ability to make concrete consistently reliable versus the hit and miss you get from hiring one company versus another.
As for faster you also can't tell. It may be tones faster 10 years from now.
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There is no way an automobile will outperform a stagecoach.
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Um...you can ride a horse drunk?
Depends on how drunk is the horse.
I can have no problem what so ever riding in a car drunk.
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The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.
- Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford's lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scien
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To the people that think 3D printing will revolutionize the work. I remind people said similar things about nuclear energy [wikipedia.org].
Re:Let us redefine "progress" (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that there's no global consortium of oil companies conspiring to eliminate 3-D printing.
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Horses have their advantages (Score:5, Informative)
There was no advantage of a horse over a car. None what so ever.
Horses can go places cars cannot. Horses are cheaper than most cars, especially if they have access to pasture. Horses last longer than most cars since a horse typically lives for 20-25 years. Horses make less noise and pollute less (even considering the fecal matter). A well trained horse can get you home in some cases with little input from the rider - no car can do that. You can eat a horse should the need arise - no so much with a car. I don't have to insure a horse. I can herd livestock much easier with a horse than with a car. Horses do not require specially built roads to be useful whereas most cars are fairly useless without roads unless they are specially designed. I can jump a fence with a horse.
Not to say cars don't have huge advantages but there are actually quite a few very real advantages to horses.
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Clearly you have never driven a BMW.
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Advantages that aren't practical in modern society especially if living in the city.
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Advantages that aren't practical in modern society especially if living in the city.
That depends very much on your lifestyle and what you do for a living. There are very good reasons police often still use horses in cities to this day. I was just in a national park where they use horses for trail maintenance. Horses are widely used in agriculture which I assure you remains an important part of modern society. A car would be utterly useless for that task. No one is claiming horses are generally superior for all tasks and needs but to claim that horses have "no advantage" over cars is p
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Yes a tool that have specific applications don't have.
So from the point of view of masses there are no advantage of having a horse over a car.
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There was no advantage of a horse over a car. None what so ever.
Sure there was. Lots of existing narrow or steep trails (early roads) couldn't be navigated by car.
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Just because you can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that you should do that thing.
Really?
That's going to be kind of a hard thing to convince the YOLO generation to do, especially when they're too busy making six figures recording fart noises over their video game channel on YouTube while watching Jackass sequels for inspiration.
Seems we pay a LOT to be entertained by the the stupid shit people can do. Go figure why they feel they should continue to do them.
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I'd pay a lot to be entertained. Too bad nobody is offering...
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Everybody who said it died.
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And there was much rejoicing.
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Your cynicism sir ... (Score:2)
... would have ended the computer revolution before it even began. Keep in mind that computers, automobiles, air planes, etc. were all incredibly primitive in their days. At best they provided an incremental step forwards in some applications while being a huge step backwards in most other applications. Yet people plugged away at the technology and created something that was truly amazing in the long run.
Remember those first computers. They were unreliable number crunchers that could barely be programme
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My house is 1300sqft plus a 680sqft basement. 2400 is a normal-sized house; I have a dinky town house. The town house is inefficient, too: the first floor is kitchen and a giant sprawl room; it was kitchen, dining, sitting, but I altered the kitchen to improve space utilization and decrease cramping, resulting in no need for a dedicated dining table.
If it were just 16 inches wider, I could fit a chamber-REST and floatation-REST isolation chamber inside (both!), instead of just floatation-REST. On the
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I've got a 2800 square foot house. It's pretty massive compared to any other houses I've visited (and certainly any apartments).
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A 2500sqft-ish house is staggeringly large to live in by yourself. On the other hand, it's distinctly not the Roivas mansion.
If I had a 2500 sqft house, I would make extreme use of it.
My bathroom squeezes a 5 foot bathtub against one wall, with the opposite housing a towel rack less than 3 feet away. In the back corner, there's a sink, and there's a toilet behind the bathtub. I'm going to convert to a corner vessel sink with a custom-cut counter top, which will give me a massive amount of counter sp
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for many people a 2400 sq ft house is still a large house. especially if it is a one floor ranch.
I would be willing to wager it is larger than the average home.
which a quick google search shows the average home size in the US in 2010 is at 2392 sq ft, with a median at 2169 sq ft.
source - http://www.census.gov/const/C2... [census.gov]
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Huge: very large in size, quantity, or extent.
Synonyms: vast, immense, gigantic, very big, great, giant, massive, colossal
You could be correct by saying it's "...larger than the average home." However, the article uses the word "huge". I don't believe that adding a walk-in closet to an average sized home constitutes a "huge" home.
You may also want to look closer at the document you referenced. The average sized home for the NORTH EAST (where this supposedly huge house i
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I found another source that put the average at 2700 in 2009 [infoplease.com]. So saying a 2400 sq ft home is huge is like saying, "My six-inch penis is huge".
It is, if you are measuring the radius.
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My house is just over 1400 square feet. To me a 2400 square foot house would be huge. If you're thinking that 2400 square feet is small, how big is your house?
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I moved from a very small 1250sqft house to a very large (at least by the standards of this discussion) 4400sqft house (at about 1/7 the cost per sqft). I got more than three times the house (in purely sqft terms) at less than half the cost, so I tend to think of a 2400sqft house as not particularly big, but it depends very much on where you are. I paid in other ways, though, since I had to move from the CA coast to TX to do accomplish this.
In any case, I think the reaction comes from the description of a
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That was my first thought. 2400 square feet is hardly a "huge" "estate". I grew up in a 2,250 square foot house. 3 bedrooms, bonus room, and large living room. It didn't have a parlor, music room, den, study, library, conservatory, servant's quarters, etc.
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That was my first thought. 2400 square feet is hardly a "huge" "estate". I grew up in a 2,250 square foot house. 3 bedrooms, bonus room, and large living room. It didn't have a parlor, music room, den, study, library, conservatory, servant's quarters, etc.
How perfectly horrible. How did you manage?
Did you camp the servants out back in the garden?
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/hangs head in shame. We didn't even have servants.
Heh, My 3D printer (Score:1)
My 3D printer is 30 Mexicans with 5 gallon buckets. You can pour a house pretty quick. Well, you still gotta build the mold
Call anything 3D printing (Score:2)
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Funny, too, because it looks like it's a major pre-fab job building the printer on-site.
In pre-fab construction, housing modules (rooms, etc.) are built off-site, brought in, and assembled. This can range from full room- or floor-sized housing modules down to prefabricated walls and framing assembled into rooms. The most recent prefabricated construction element is the Insulated Concrete Form, a rigid foam form assembled as a concrete pour channel for a basement, producing an insulated foundation.
The
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This 3D-printing works without mold, and it's a continuous process.
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I don't see why bricklaying couldn't be automated.
http://construction-robotics.c... [constructi...botics.com]
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Yeap, but the big difference appears to be automation here. You may be "pouring concrete", but you are doing so without the manual labour of building the mould and without the manual labour of pouring the concrete. Yes, you may have to assemble the printer on site and it may not be able to accomplish as much at the moment. Yet give it a decade and you may be transporting the equipment to the site and may have more fine-grained capabilities to ensure quality and develop new designs.
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We used to just call it "pouring cement" and "laying bricks" but now that additive manufacturing is such a big hit we have to call it 3D Printing.
Right... this isn't even the first time this has been done either. It's just a machine that mixes cement with filler and pours it into a shape. They then move the shapes into place and kind of prop them up against each other. It's slower, wasteful, not as strong and more expensive than the old fashion way. But he got his name in the paper, and that's all that really matters.
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Tilt up wall construction is one of the most common construction methods in the US. The concrete walls are poured on the ground in forms adjacent to their final location, once cured they are tilted up and connected, once the walls are in place the roof is added. Almost every warehouse or industrial building built these days is built with tilt up wall construction.
It's fast, it's cheap and its low labor. Don't speak of what you dont' know.
Restrictive (Score:2)
Take a look at the plans [3dprint.com]. Notice that everything is "printed" in strips. That does not look very flexible to me. It looks like it is constructed with cargo containers. Then there is the installation of things such as electrical, hvac, and plumbing. That may be difficult.
3D Printing and Construction (Score:2)
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"3D room painter "
That's called explosives...
If ... (Score:3)
Famous last words.
The rebar thing is important because the material being printed is great in compression but not so great in tension.
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And then he still has to hope that the bond strength works out.
Someone got this a bit wrong (Score:1)
Not sure if it's the first (Score:3)
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Use Roman Concrete -- no rebar necessary. (Score:1)
imho, whoever figures out how to 3D print structures using Roman Concrete will win.
"A most unusual Roman structure depicting their technical advancement is the Pantheon, a brick faced building that has withstood the ravages of weathering in near perfect condition, sitting magnificently in the business district of Rome. Perhaps its longevity is told by its purpose . . . to honor all gods. Above all, this building humbles the modern engineer not only in its artistic splendor, but also because there are no ste
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There is nothing special about the concrete at the pantheon. The walls are just really thick.
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And in't the oculus itself part of the structural gimmick, eliminating a not insignificant load from the top?
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It spreads out the load the peak - we call it a thrust ring in modern building practice.
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The article is likely wrong. There are no high tensile forces in the pantheon, including the dome, at least not what we would consider "high" today. The structure is a (mostly) compression-only building. The oculus is a compression ring and the dome shape is close enough to a parabaloid that any tension forces are negated and the thrust at the base minimized.
Concrete has tensile strength all by itself. If I gave you a rod of concrete just an inch thick you wouldn't be able to pull it apart. Even tension fro
Not an estate, and not huge. (Score:3)
And
Somebody's been watching too many "tiny home" hipster cult reality cable shows.
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Two years? (Score:2)
Good thing they're using a 3D printer then, otherwise it would have taken at least twenty to forty years!
Umm (Score:2)