of printed housing for the homeless in Austin. The first of its 400-square-foot homes finished in March 2020.
This home in Houston is for an unnamed homeowner, who’s purchasing the home for an undisclosed amount and has been involved in its creation as a homeowner normally would. It will be much bigger than others already built in the U.S., with 4,000 square feet in its two stories.
3D printing isn’t new; in their earliest stages, the printers seemed like expensive novelties that could replicate just about anything. Now, you can buy desktop 3D printers on amazon.com for $200 to $400, and use them for making everything from toys and product prototypes to even guns and gun parts, such as the Glock “switches” that made headlines earlier this year for their ability convert a semi-automatic firearm into a machine gun.
The home’s back wall – part of the living room – went up earlier this week, with pockets that will eventually hold shelves. Since each layer is just ¾-inch high and it takes the machine at least seven minutes to create a layer, this 22-foot wall will take more than 40 hours of printing to finish. Both Zivkovic and Lok said that 3D printing with concrete is the future of home construction. The massive printers are neither plentiful nor inexpensive, but in time they’ll multiply and get less expensive – as all high-tech products do.
HANNAH Office Design, the firm that Lok and Zivkovic co-founded, also created the much-written about Ashen Cabin, a small, one-story cabin in New York that used concrete 3D printing for its base and was finished with slabs of wood from Ash trees infested with Emerald ash borer beetles – finding a productive use for trees that otherwise might have been cut down and burned – their destruction contributing to greenhouse gases.