Ever since the mid-1990s, the 3D printing hype machine has promised to revolutionize housing. Why waste time and money with inefficient, manually-constructed building techniques? With the push of a button, concrete-extruding 3D printers could do it automatically for a fraction of the time and cost. Yet real-world examples of 3D printed architecture are thin on the ground. New developments in 3D-printed housing, however, could mean things are about to change.
Printing Suburbia for Early Adopters
In early March, real estate developer Palari Group and structural 3D printing company Mighty Building announced plans to print a California subdivision. Mighty Building’s concrete extrusion technology will let them build houses twice as fast, and with 95% fewer labor hours, as with traditional construction techniques.
“This will be the first on-the-ground actualization of our vision for the future of housing,” Mighty Buildings co-founder Alexey Dubov said in the announcement.
Located in the wealthy community of Rancho Mirage, these homes will not be archetypes of affordability. The nearly $600,000 base price quickly rises towards $1 million with upgrades.
Prioritizing Housing Affordability
Printed homes for wealthy Californians is one thing, but the promise of 3D printing has always been the rapid construction of quality, affordable housing.
“We need a radical rethinking in the way that we approach solving vexing issues in our society like homelessness,” said Jason Ballard in early 2020. The co-founder of home printing startup ICON. The company had just finished construction of housing for formerly homeless families in Austin.
ICON has used its 3D-printing technology to develop affordable housing in Mexico. But American companies are not the only ones working in this space.
Researchers at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture hope that combining China’s experience in rapid urbanization with new concrete-printing technology will help meet the critical demand for affordable housing in other rapidly-urbanizing countries.
The Indian government, for example, has plans to build 50 million homes by 2022. “3D printing will certainly be a technology well-suited to meet the speed and scale demanded by India’s mass housing industry,” Larsen & Toubro Construction executive M.V. Satish told IEEE Spectrum. His company had just finished printing a proof-of-concept residential design that can be adapted for India’s varied environments.
But Housing is More Than Technology
A pioneer in 3D-printed construction is Behrokh Khoshnevis, a University of Southern California professor, who developed one of the first concrete extrusion printing systems. His company, Contour Crafting, has spent more than a decade navigating the construction industry’s conservative standards-setting processes.
Job loss is another concern raised in media coverage. What happens to the construction workers in this 3D-printed future? Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently studied the prospects for automation in construction. Their analysts concluded that, while automation ”could have a significant impact on the construction workforce”, it would take decades for the effects to appear.
So is 3D-printed housing the Next Big Thing in real estate or is it still a solution in search of a problem? The future is not here yet, but startup companies and researchers such as these are making steady progress towards making the technology viable.
