3D printed buildings are in the news again…
[New Story] was started in 2015, shortly after Mr. Hagler took a trip to Haiti and saw families still living in tents years after the 2010 earthquake there. Across the globe, 1.6 billion people live with inadequate housing, according to Habitat for Humanity.
Anything is better than a tent over that kind of time span, and those 1.6 billion people live in all kinds of sub-standard structures that could be replaced by something more durable and safe.
Single-family homes are a good testing ground for the durability of 3-D printed construction because they are small and offer a repetitive design process without much height, said Henry D’Esposito, who leads construction research at JLL, a commercial real estate firm. They can also be constructed to tolerate natural disasters: Nacajuca sits in a seismic zone, and the homes there have already withstood a magnitude 7.4 earthquake.
Apartments/flats also offer those advantages, with the added challenge of fitting them together, but the added reward of better land use through greater density.
“It really is a very effective and efficient way to build a small segment of properties, but it’s not something that applies across the broader commercial real estate ecosystem,” Mr. D’Esposito said. “We don’t know exactly how these buildings will perform over decades or what the long-term value retention will be for them. So if you’re talking to an investor or lender, that’s a big yellow flag.”
That’s a weak argument that assumes single family homes are the be all and end all. There is no reason, other a failure of imagination, why these couldn’t be built as part of a larger structure, either on their own as bricks within that structure or suspended on some kind of metal skeleton.
It would be informative to compare the costs of a regular apartment building vs one assembled from modules from a machine like this. As described that’s a 1,000 sq ft unit but one could easily have different modules or varying sizes — a 500 sq foot core with additional suites or other spaces, all designed to fit together and then be added to a larger community.