[P2P-F] Fwd: 3d printing houses in shanghai

Thu May 8 23:18:39 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 8, 2014 at 1:33 PM
Subject: Re: 3d printing houses in shanghai
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>

_______________________________________________________________

Recently, a number of articles and videos about 3D printing of houses in
China have gone viral, catalyzing a lot of attention for this very
promising subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObzNdyRTBs

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140401-10-completely-3d-
printed-houses-appears-in-shanghai-built-in-a-day.html

Additionally, another 3D printed building project in the Netherlands is
also starting to garner attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJ6TVJYSdM

3D printing has gained steadily increasing popular interest but the
limitation to the production of small artifacts has tended to see it
dismissed in significance. And controversial projects, such as the printing
of crude guns, have drawn negative attention from easily-spooked and
compulsively obstructive government authorities. But with this
demonstration of the technology's potential at a relatively large scale
people are finally seeing this as something more than a technology novelty.

But, to be sure, these projects are still in an experimental stage and the
printing techniques still relatively crude. Their most practical early
impact is likely to be in low cost and relief housing applications where,
confined to the one or two storey dwellings, their structural performance
isn't as critical.

Being long interested in construction automation and, over this year,
working toward establishing the workshop needed for WikiHouse
participation, I recently wrote an Open Manufacturing post speculating on
the future of WikiHouse and the eventual application of 3D printing. The
concept isn't exactly new. Space scientists suggested the sintering of
lunar regolith for print-like building construction in space back in the
1960s. This was followed, in the 80s and 90s, by architect Nader Khalili's
exploration of solar-thermal vitrification for building construction. The
first proposal of a house printing system based on what we currently
recognize as a '3D printer' and using masonry materials was the Contour
Crafting concept devised at the University of Southern California. Unable
to get support in the US, this concept sat on the shelf for some years, the
Italian company D-Shape beating them to the first practical demonstration.
It appears that the Chinese system is very much lifted from the Contour
Crafting concept, though truth be told, Contour Crafting itself was in some
ways derivative of mechanical rotary boom-based slip-forming systems
developed in the early '80s, if not much earlier, for the production of
circular and domed luxury homes.

I've long been puzzled by the focus on the notion of printing of houses
whole and in-situ by exceptionally large machines. This seems a bit
anachronistic to me--a throw-back to the sort of Big Machine futurism
illustrated by Metabolist design and the building concepts of Jacque
Fresco's Venus Project.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hayWrEZtjqs/TvRXpF_JF4I/AAAAAAAAv2U/LfSfDW2UN98/w800-h800/07.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gW-xn71WPPU/Tdgm-U2BGGI/AAAAAAAADZo/rSn6r3torKg/s1600/selferecthomes.jpg

The chief problem I see is that the scale of capital investment needed for
such elaborate hardware limits its implementation to the largest of
corporations and may make it economically unsustainable. Historically, the
only disruptive modern innovations in housing technology that have survived
to the present day are those which avoided a need for extreme capital
investment and a limitation to any specific aesthetic because
industrialists have always felt there was insufficient, if any, market for
innovative housing. Commercial architecture has often been flamboyantly
diverse in its design and technology but, because of the weirdly parasitic
interdependence between housing and personal finance and the way the real
estate market depends on the continuous ingression of labor into debt to
create virtual market value, housing innovation is dogmatically resisted.
The real estate market depends on housing being as utterly inefficient as
possible--and that's not a technological problem. Across the whole 20th
century, thousands of innovations in housing design and technology were
experimented with, Modernist designers in particular obsessed with the
notion of the industrialization of housing as a means to overcome the
modern blight of homelessness. Virtually all these innovations were
commercial failures. The things that proved commercially sustainable were
those innovations that, for the most part, could remain 'hidden' behind the
sheetrock, hence the steady yet largely unperceived evolution of the
typical American home toward a composition of high-tech papier mâché.

Thus I see the most critical factor for the viability of the 3D printed
house being the question of whether it scales to a level of individual,
small scale entrepreneurial, local community empowerment. Not a question of
innovating housing but rather how it impacts the personal logistics and
economics of acquiring shelter. To put it simply, whether we can reduce
this production hardware to a physical scale tenable for the small
entrepreneur and DIY enthusiast. To make it an owner/build option. Thus in
my post I suggested the possibility of employing newly emerged printable
and compostable wood/plastic composites with a very light form of large
format 3D printer based on the cable-based Stewart platform or Robocrane;

http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/robocrane2.cfm

With such a more modest machine and more easily handled material a modest
scale house can be printed in readily mobile sections in a space the size
of a garage or small warehouse. The focus would be on the modular and
simple, tapping into the same Tiny House trend that the WikiHouse project
and other CNC-based housing production schemes have. This seems to me a
much more practical approach and, of course, we have seen something similar
both these Chinese and Dutch projects. Though shipped as complete prefabs,
the Chinese printed houses seem to be assembled from short bay sections
much as I've imagined--though with much heavier and more brittle masonry
material. The Dutch canal house project is using a series of varied modular
components, printed with a very large derivative of the Ultimaker 3D
printer which is nonetheless at a far more practical scale of hardware than
earlier proposed house printers like the Contour Crafting system.

But what does the prospect of 3D printed housing mean for the way we regard
housing and the way that influences housing economics? The 3D printed house
is, effectively, the ultimate made-on-demand 'blobject'. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blobject ) As such it has the very disruptive
potential to decouple the value of housing from property--the essential
basis of the Ponzi scheme of real estate. It's disposable and adds no value
to the property it's placed on. It can be replaced as cheaply as it might
be repaired--potentially with low environmental impact based on the kinds
of materials speculated. This is why the scale of the 'buy in' for the
entrepreneur is so critical. This technology will be suppressed by the
established finance industry as long as its implementation is
capital-dependent--like every other radical housing innovation that came
before it.

The 3D printed house is in the peculiar situation that its most practical
near-term application--relief/low-cost housing--is the greatest threat to
its eventual mainstream acceptance because the real estate market is
extremely class and race biased. As soon as a particular style of
architecture becomes associated with a particular social class it becomes
damned from the presence of other class communities--just as happened with
the mobile home. Currently, Tiny House architecture is tolerated in
conventional communities because it remains well camouflaged, discreet, and
relatively rare. That quaint doll-house look is rather crucial. 3D printed
housing can potentially be as flamboyant in design as commercial
architecture. It can get as wild as anyone's imagination, especially when
one needs no mortgage. Ironically, the worst thing a housing innovation can
do is aesthetically draw attention to itself. Even as tolerant as the local
culture may be, the Dutch canal house design could only ever be a temporary
exhibition.

The 3D printed house is an artifact of another culture--a future culture
that our current culture has only barely begun to evolve toward. Regardless
of how it functionally performs, it's near-term prospect is very likely to
be exactly the same fate as befalls every other form of alternative
construction and architecture; embraced for commercial/industrial/'special'
use but, for housing, damned to the edge of wilderness. Its first adopters
will be those seeking such alternatives to empower their 'unplugging' from
the existing culture and its economic constraints. It faces a situation
similar to that the late Nader Khalili faced with vitrified earthen
construction. His goal for that technology was to radically change the
situation of housing in the whole developing world. But he sought to get
the technology accepted in the west first because, in his experience,
innovations were only embraced in the developing world culture when they
had apparent acceptance in rich western nations. The leaders in the
developing world keep thinking they have to 'catch up' to the west--as if
we know what the hell we're doing! He knew he could never break through to
the mainstream western real estate market, so took a very radical approach;
he went to NASA proposing buildings for the Moon...

On 4/14/14, 10:18 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:

dear Eric,

 I wonder if you could comment on this for the p2p blog ?

 i wonder if you address estethic issues ?

 --
 *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

 P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

-- 
Eric Huntingerichunting at gmail.com

-- 
*Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20140508/4b6a7347/attachment.htm 