Printing Buildings

We are living in the future. [Link]

Contour Crafting is an effort to scale up rapid prototyping/manufacturing (a billion dollar industry to make 3 dimensional parts) and inkjet printing techniques to the scale of building multi-story buildings and vehicles. The process could accelerate the trillion dollar (US only) construction industry by 200 times. Projections indicate costs will be around one fifth as much as conventional construction. (Land prices are unchanged, so the actual prices of homes would not change as much in say Hawaii, Tokyo, Manhattan or San Francisco). Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning. [H/T to a reader Bonesteel] Contour crafting could be one part of a new manufacturing revolution

The machine will cost between $500K to $700K for average size (2000 sq ft -- 200 m2) detached houses. This is not much given that a concrete pump truck is now $300k-$400K. Note that with one machine numerous homes can be built. The first commercial machines to be available this year, 2008. The machine will be collapsible to form into an easy truck load. The unloading and setup will take between 1-2 hours.

Behrokh Khoshnevis is the visionary who has been driving this concept. He is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) and Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at USC.

Initial plan is to use the technology for emergency shelters and low-income housing in underdeveloped countries (Mexico, with the demand for nearly 500,000 houses per year, seems to be a good starting choice for implementation), almost immediately after its development they will address local building codes for commercial deployment of CC in the US.