Your Next Homebuilder Could Be a Printer
Technology is constantly coming up with ways to make things quicker, easier, and more accessible. From cell phones and the web to Bitcoins and DVR’s, it’s getting to the point where needing to leave the house may one day become a thing of the past. Speaking of houses, scientists in California are working on new technology that could build homes in under a day.
How is this possible you say? It takes weeks at the very least for homebuilders to build a home from scratch, right? Well thanks to 3D printers, homebuilders may have reason to hate technology in the very near future.
According to Russian Times, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California is deeply involved in a building printing technology called Contour Crafting. Khoshnevis says massive 3D printers have the capability of building a 2,500 square foot custom home in 20 hours.
“It’s basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of a building,” Khoshnevis recently told the Illinois Maker Lab, noting that nowadays the “only thing that is still built by hands are these buildings.
”So how exactly does this work? Of course that lonely printer sitting in the corner of your office is not going to be building your dream home this weekend. Brad Lemley of Discover Magazine recently told MSN:
“On a cleared and leveled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet further apart than the eventual building’s width and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in layers to create hollow walls, and then fill in the walls with additional concrete […] humans would hang doors and insert windows.
”At least the 3D printer won’t eat up all the human jobs. Here’s a video to help wrap your head around this new technology:
The Contour Crafting website explains that the initial use of this technology would focus on building low-income housing and emergency housing for when natural disasters hit. In addition, Contour Crafting would help eliminate construction worker injuries and reduce environmentally harmful emissions. We must add that Khoshnevis and his crew are serious about building space colonies on the Moon and beyond.