Building a house is quite the production. There’s the time, the expense, the dust, and the leftover building materials that hang around in the garden for years after the builders clear off.
Unless, that is, you print it. From its home in a Dutch shipping container, a giant 3D printer, the KamerMaker (“room builder”), is currently spurting out globs of molten bioplastic to form walls. The honeycomb-esque design leaves room for pipes and wiring to be installed later.
KamerMaker is the brainchild of Amsterdam-based DUS Architects, which is using it to build a 15m high, 6m wide house on the banks of a canal in the city. The house’s 13 rooms will be printed individually and slotted together to form each floor; the floors will then be stacked on top of each other to create the final building. The whole thing’s a bit like giant, inhabitable lego. Construction kicked off on 1 March, and the house should be finished in, er, three years’ time. You can see their rendering of the finished building above – just don’t ask us what the weird ghost buildings on either side are about.
So, if the process is still so slow, what exactly are the advantages of printing a house? For a start, there’s no waste, as the printer uses raw materials and only prints what’s needed; plastic waste from other industries can be recycled as “ink”. As long as a house can be printed near its final location, transport costs are low. And this prototype has no foundation, so that’ll cut down on costs, too. (Although a team is currently on the problem of how to stop it toppling into the canal once it’s constructed; the current plan is to fix it in place with long metal poles.) When it’s no longer needed, the building can be shredded and its materials reused.
Hans Vemeulen, the project’s co-founder, told UrbanLand magazine that he was inspired by our need for ever-faster building strategies: “We need a rapid building technique to keep pace with the growth of megacities.” This seems a little improbable given that this first project will take three years to complete, but Vemeulen claims rooms could be printed on the printer and installed in the space of 24 hours. The project’s website also claims that we’ll soon be downloading and personalising designs for our dream house, then sending them to a KarmerMaker contractor to print and construct.
DUS aren’t the first company to print out properties. Win Sun, a Chinese firm, claimed back in April to have printed 10 buildings in one day using concrete and waste materials, although local building regulations prohibit printing structures of more than one storey. Technologies like this could certainly be of use in constructing shelters after natural disasters, or during refugee crises. Whether the rest of us will ever be happy to live in a plastic house, however good the view of the canal, remains to be seen.
